I don’t know what’s changed about me lately, but I often found myself preferring the shorter card games instead of the big, heavy, rules-dense board games that used to dominate my life. Maybe it’s just the phase of life I’m in, the fatigue that comes with raising young children, or maybe I’ve finally accepted that not every game needs to be prefaced by an hour of studying the rulebook to feel like time well spend. So when Hungry Monkey, designed by Erik Andersson Sundén and published by HeidelBÄR Games in 2022, came out during a pub night with friends, I was intrigued. Another small-box card game? Can’t wait to find out more!

The core of Hungry Monkey is simple enough. To start the game, each player gets a hand of 3 cards, and a row of 4 cards face down in front of them. On your turn you play any number of identical cards from your hand or play the top card from the draw pile onto the animal pile. The card you play must be valid, that is to say, the value of the card played must be equal or higher than the top card on the animal pile. If the card played is invalid for any reason, you then must pick up the whole animal pile and add it to your hand. If after playing a valid card, there are 4 or more identical cards on top of the animal pile, then the whole animal pile is removed from the game. In addition, several of the animals you can play have some special effects. The ant, for instance, is always valid, but playing it makes you pick up the whole animal deck under the ant. The snake lets you look at a face down card of any player, while the buffalo forces the next player to play a card lower than the buffalo. The King Tiger discards the entire animal pile. At the end of your turn you need to draw your hand back up to 3, unless the draw pile is empty.

Once the draw pile is empty, and you manage to play all the cards from your hand, you can start playing the cards from your face down row. Once both your hand and your face down row have been exhausted, you win the game!

What I like about Hungry Monkey is the presentation. The art by Sushrita Bhattacharjee is genuinely charming. Each animal has a distinct personality, and the style has a charming, playful quality that helps it to stand out.

Image taken from the publisher’s website

But the gameplay of Hungry Monkey itself feels very random. Your options on your turn are limited. With only three cards in hand, you’re often stuck between a rock and a hard place if you have the wrong numbers in your hand. That restriction doesn’t translate into meaningful decisions so much as it creates a sense that you’re just along for the ride. Playing an invalid card will make you pick up the whole pile and make your hand swell. Sure, that will give you more options in the future, but because at the end of every turn, you need to draw back up to 3 until the deck runs out anyway, it makes the majority of the game feel somewhat irrelevant. You’re spending your time just kind of posturing your card row until that draw deck runs out and then hoping for some advantageous situations in the final few turns.

There are moments of excitement, to be fair. Little bursts of chaos when someone flips the perfect card off the deck, or frustration when another player jumps half the numbers and plays a card exactly one higher than the highest card in your hand. It creates that light, social friction that works really well in a pub setting. There are some laughs, some mock betrayal, the occasional groan. In that environment, Hungry Monkey makes sense. It’s easy, it’s quick, and it doesn’t demand much from any of the players.

There is also a bean-scoring system that carries points across multiple games, encouraging you to play several games in a row to see who the ultimate winner is. In theory, that adds some longevity to this simple and quick card game. But in reality, I don’t really want to play multiple Hungry Monkey multiple times in a row. The interactions and strategies just aren’t interesting enough to sustain that kind of repetition, and the randomness makes it hard for me to feel invested in any one game, let alone a series of them.

I keep coming back to the same thought when thinking about Hungry Monkey. What’s the point of most of the game? If the early and mid-game decisions don’t meaningfully shape the outcome, and everything hinges on a handful of late-game turns, why not just skip ahead? Why not just top-deck until your choices start to matter? And that’s really not a great question to be asking about a game.

I don’t hate Hungry Monkey. If it comes out, I’ll play it. It’s harmless, quick, and occasionally amusing. But I’m also probably not going to request it, and it’s certainly not a game I’d request to play. There are a lot of games that fit into this space, the ones that play well in a pub like No Thanks or 6 Nimmt, or Don’t L.L.A.M.A. Small, portable, easy-to-teach card games, and all of them offer more interesting decisions, with fewer rules. Which can really matter when you’re trying to explain how a game works while speaking over a crowd of people and wrestling their attention away from the Habs game on the pub’s TVs.

For me, Hungry Monkey didn’t quite stick. It seems like the perfect game to play at the pub, but even having a great setting couldn’t make this game shine.