MonkeyWrench - Harlekin-Maus June-July game

[Zak Arntson]

I'm moving to bimonthly games so I can concentrate on Chthonian. Up for June-July:

MonkeyWrench!

It's a game about crazy, hungry and grumpy monkeys. Basically you are monkeys who've escaped from captivity on a space station and are trying to get off the thing. That's it.

Interesting design notes: It uses a modified version of the Dying Earth mechanic. Basically, when you do something, you roll one die. 50% success, 50% failure. And you have a resource that you spend to reroll that die.

Here's the monkey part (aside from the goal of the game: Monkey escapees trying to get off the station): There are three cards involved during play. Grumpy, Crazy and Hungry. If you own a card and your monkey doesn't act like the card, you roll two dice and pick the lowest. Boom! Incentive to act like a nut. Also, as per Shadows, you can use tokens to force _other_ people to reroll.

The last neat design note is this: If you roll well you not only succeed, but can give one or more cards to the other Players. Take that!

So we have built-in insanity with Crazy/Grumpy/Hungry cards + Wildly variable success/failure combined with the social aspect of being able to stomp the other Players (with both your tokens and giving away cards). Should be fun. Especially if they try to cooperate to win.

[xiombarg]

Sketchy, but amusing. Have you playtested this? I particularly like the cards, tho I'd like to see more elaboration on them.

[Zak Arntson]

I haven't playtested it yet. I also like the cards. I may playtest it next Indie Monday ...

I might add that a good variant rule would be that you can only spend tokens on OTHER people's rolls. And you CANNOT reroll a 1 or a 6.