--- title: "Lego Monkey Palace" subtitle: "Board game review" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-06-20 01:00 date: 2025-06-20 01:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: lego-pile-1600x800.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: blog tag: [ gaming ] --- **Monkey Palace** is a board game by Lego about building stairs to the monkey palace, and it combines the innate fun of building Lego with clever board game mechanics that include resource management and board strategy. It's not just a Lego set, it's a legitimately well-designed board game that exercises parts of the brain that aren't often stimulated by tabletop games. This is my review of the game. The first time I encountered the phenomenon of a Lego board game was a loaner called **Shave a sheep**. It was simple but fun, and the novelty of using Lego bricks to form and play a tabletop game never wore off. I made a few attempts to design my own, but frankly I didn't have the design literacy to come up with something exciting. I enjoy building with Lego, and I enjoy designing games, but designing a Lego board game takes more than just using Lego bricks as the materials for a game. I couldn't see it at the time, but I was just trying to use Lego bricks in my design, basically the same as I would use cardboard. No matter what I did, my experiments never felt like they were a game about Lego, or else they felt like a Lego challenge but not a board game. **Monkey Palace** is, in addition to being a fun board game, is also a design lesson on how to incorporate your medium into your game. ## Playing the game The premise of the game is that you're building stairs up to the monkey palace. My personal theory is that this is a lie, but it's a good one. I believe you're actually building the monkey palace itself. The palace is made of stairs. This is a minor detail that has no effect on the game, and probably isn't something I'm meant to ponder. But I bring it up here because it's a hint at how immersive the game is. When the _game_ part of the game is to collaboratively build an elaborate structure, then that structure gains a personality. Players start to care about the structure, because it's art. I don't know that everyone will theorise that the structure they've built is a palace, but that's the story that formed in my head, and it's always a good sign when your players are developing their own lore about the game. Me and my opponent build _some structure_, and we probably each had our own interpretations of what it was, but in the end we both felt proud of what we'd built. Even though we were competing for Banana Points, the end result was the product of mutual iteration and the subject of much imagination. Ignoring that side effect (which doesn't deserve to be ignored), the board game's goal is to build staircases using [1x4 arches](https://library.ldraw.org/parts/6680), [1x1 bricks](https://library.ldraw.org/parts/6179), and [1x1x3 bricks](https://library.ldraw.org/parts/682). For each step you create, you earn 1 Monkey Credit, and at the end of each turn you spend your Monkey Credit to buy cards. Each card has a benefit on it. Some grant you one-time access to more arches and bricks from the game box, others grant you access _every_ turn. Some grant you a few Banana Points, and others grant you lots of Banana Points. Of course, there's always a trade-off. Cards that earn lots of Banana Points generally only grant you building materials once, while recurring materials are light on Banana Points. The rules also rewards you for building high. When you use lots of 1x1 or 1x3 bricks you use in a turn's build, you get bonus Banana Points. There are also mechanics that reward you for capping staircases with decorator bricks, and in advanced variants of the game there are special tokens (a monkey, a frog, and a butterfly) that can prevent your opponent from building in certain places. It's a fun and challenging game, but most importantly it understands how to use Lego not just as the material component of the game. It gamifies the process of building in such a way that encourages simultaneous competition and collaboration. It's easy to lose sight of the goal of the game because you've become so absorbed in the build itself. And the build itself is hard not because of the complexity of what you're being asked to create, but because few of us have ever had to strategise a Lego build before. This isn't a Jenga-alike. There's rarely any threat of your structure toppling or imploding, unless you intentionally build unstable structures (and there's no incentive to do that). The build is theoretically very simple, but once you get an understanding of the game mechanics you probably are going to try to build stairs for maximum points. I'm not usually tallying points while also figuring out how to use Lego bricks in a model. Those aren't parts of my brain that normally interact. This game introduces those neurons to one another, though, and it's a weird feeling. ## Game components In the box, there's a large base plate, some corner bricks, and some cardboard templates that you place over the base plate to restrict where you can start building. I felt like the cardboard template was "cheating" because technically the same effect could be produced using flat tiles. After some consideration, though, I've come to concede that a cardboard template was the correct choice. In fact, there's a simple and an advanced cardboard template in the box, so after you master the base game you can play with a template with different restrictions and bonus opportunities. Besides the template, there are cardboard cards and player boards to help you organise and manage your card benefits. Aside from those components, the game is Lego.

Photo by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash