DDO Players – Battle Monkeys Review

It’s time to find out which monkey will reign supreme, it’s time to Battle! Monkey style!

Gameplay

Players build their “Army” of 4 soldiers that are used to both attack enemies and defend their general. Soldiers are placed face up in front of each player and have varying power levels.

On your turn, you draw a card, have the option to place a soldier in your army, attack an enemy player. Attacking/Defending is similar if you have played other cards games of this type. Players also have spell cards that allow them to perform a variety of task such as stealing soldiers from another army, drawing more cards, destroying everyone’s hand or army, and more. Each of the “generals” have special abilities they can do, which can add to the strategy.

Each player starts with 20 total life and the game continues until there is only one player left alive.

The game is very simply to learn and play, but has some strategy to it. You have to decide who to attack and when, or what special card to play. There is a good as I always call it “Screw Over” factor in the game.. there are some cards where you can just totally mess with your opponents, and I love that type of game play. The game will play fast 15-45 minutes, depending on how much “Screw Over” you want to do to each other.

Final Thoughts

I LOVE the artwork.. it’s cute and whimsical, Very well done.

That being said, there are a few things that I dislike about the game.

The biggest thing is the rule book, you can’t read it. They use a black background with some brown colored fonts, and I could not read parts of it because of this. It was easy to figure what symbols they were and what they meant, and it helped to watch the how to play video. But I’m not say why they chose to use that font/color combo.

The second thing is a few of the cards are overpowered. The Clerical General has an ability where they can heal themselves 2 points. So this quickly can turn into a battle of attrition. I hit you, you heal, I hit you, heal. Rinse and repeat. And the SpiderMonkey solider card is just nutso cray cray, as they get to attack first ALWAYS.. so if you build out your army with Spider Monkeys, unless your opponent can quickly do something (steal a card, etc) you will quickly be dead.

The designers of the game told me :

Regarding the op cards, that had been probably the biggest complaint so far. We plan on addressing some of those concerns in expansions we will be adding

These two things aside, I enjoyed the game a lot, it was a fast play and I think is a good game for those “Non Gamer” friends, or someone that just wants to dip there toe in the proverbial waters of strategy card games.

This would make a great starter game for those game nights, when your waiting for all your friends to show up, or a fast way to knock out a game as your eating and getting settled in for a game night.