Monkey Temple
Monkey Temple Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Overview
3-8 players, ages 8+, 30 minutes.
Monkey Temple is an enjoyable collaborative game with a story telling – voting mechanic for people aged from 8 to 100! In this game, all players are working together toward a winning end.
On each turn, one of the players will act as the monkey and will distribute objects amongst the tourist cards and/or the players themselves; assigning these objects due to some sort of association they think of between the object and the tourist/player. Then, the remaining players will try to guess those associations.
If they can guess well throughout the 5 rounds, the team will win! If not, they must try again to be better guardians of the temple!
Components
- 55 Object cards
- 55 Tourist cards
- 4 Monkey tokens
- 5 Thief tokens
- 1 Turn marker
- 1 Guardian token
- 1 Game board
Game Setup
- Place the game board in the middle of the table.
- Take the turn marker and place it in the first circle of the game board.
- Shuffle the Object cards and place the deck face down next to the game board.
- Shuffle the Tourist cards and place the deck face down next to the game board.
- Select the starting player (the Monkey Player) in any way you wish, perhaps the person who has the longest arms! The other players will be the Guardians of the temple.
- Give the 5 Thief tokens to the Monkey Player.
- Give the Guardian token to the player on the right of the Monkey Player.
- Place the Monkey tokens close to the game board.
How to Play
The game is played over 5 rounds. During each round, the Monkey Player will steal four objects and the Guardians will have to return them to their legitimate owners (which includes both the Tourist cards and the players themselves).
Each round consists of 3 phases: Selection, Theft, Return and Revealing.
Phase 1: Selection
The Monkey Player draws 4 cards from the object deck and places them face up in the top spaces of the game board.
The Monkey Player draws 4 cards from the tourist deck and places them face up in the lower spaces of the game board.
Phase 2: Theft
The Monkey Player takes the 5 Thief tokens and places them face down in front of him/her. Then the Monkey Player randomly takes one of the five Thief tokens, looks at it and decides to allocate it face down to one of the four Tourist cards or to one of the Guardians (the other players). Then the Monkey Player takes another Thief token and allocates it. Repeat this action until all the Thief tokens have been allocated.
Note: How to allocate the thief tokens?
- Each Thief token has a number from 1 to 4 except one which has no number. Each number corresponds to one of the Object cards. In the example, the Thief token with number 2 corresponds to the parrot.
- The Monkey Player must allocate one Thief token to each of the Tourist cards and one Thief token to the one of the Guardians (players).
- The Thief token without any number works like the others and it must be allocated to one of the Tourist cards or to one of the Guardians. This Thief token is intended to deceive Guardians and makes it more difficult to return objects to legitimate owners. (In the example, this Thief token is allocated to one of the Guardians, i.e. to one player.)
- The Monkey Player has to play all the Thief tokens and to try to allocate them in a way that the Guardians can guess correctly. The Monkey Player has to make the association he believes his teammates will understand!
Phase 3: Return and Revealing
Once the Monkey Player has played the five Theft tokens, the Guardians have to figure out how the Monkey Player allocated the Object cards and try to make the same associations.
The Guardians have to discuss their plans with each other and then they have to allocate all four Monkey tokens to four Thief tokens. So each Thief token, except one, will have a Monkey token.
Important: The Monkey Player can't help the Guardians during this phase. He or She has to stay silent. And, no making faces either!
If the Guardians can't agree on the allocation of one or more Monkey tokens, the player with the Guardian token will make the final decision.
Once the Guardians have allocated all the Monkey tokens, reveal the Thief tokens and check the corresponding associations.
The goal of the players is to find the correct match, so the Guardians of the temple can return the stolen object to the legitimate owner. If the match is wrong, the tourist gets angry: take the wrong Object card(s) and place them face down next to the game board. In the example above, the Guardians allocated two wrong Object cards: the slipper (object number 1) and the kitten (object number 4).
Before starting a new round:
- Discard the Tourist and Object cards used in this round to the game box (except for the wrong objects that stay face down next to the game board as an indicator of the number of incorrect guesses).
- Move the turn marker and place it on the next circle of the game board.
- The player on the left of the Monkey Player becomes the new Monkey Player.
- Give the Guardian token to the player on the right of the new Monkey Player.
- Now it is possible to start a new round.
End of the Game
The game ends when the 5th round is completed or when players have collected nine or more wrong Object cards. If at any time 9 or more objects are collected, the game ends and the Guardians of the temple will be fired!
Otherwise, if at the end of the fifth round the Guardians were able to collect less than nine Object cards, all players win and the Guardians keep their job!
Variants
It is possible to increase or decrease the difficulty of the game:
- Players may decide to increase the difficulty of the game by adding more rounds, up to a maximum of seven.
- Players may decide to decrease the difficulty of the game by taking out the Thief token that has no number. In this case, the Monkey Player has to allocate the 4 Thief tokens only to the Tourist cards (they do not allocate any tokens to the Guardians).