Every round starts with a Prompt, the opening of a sentence the whole table has to finish: “Grandma’s secret to a long life:” or “Scientists have finally proven that”. On your turn you flip three words off a shared deck and type one onto the end of your line. Nothing gets rearranged, ever. When your line reads right, ding the bell. Then everybody reads their line out loud and hands a banana to their favorite.
How it plays
- Flip three words from the Dictionary, keep one, trash the others
- Slip a little glue word in front (the, a, with, and) when the sentence needs it
- Spend a correction to throw back a word you regret
- Type one of your bananas as the word “banana” when you need a sure thing, at the cost of a point
- Three gibberish words in one line and your monkey collapses
- Most bananas after four rounds wins
Why it works
The deck is blind, so nobody gets to be good at this. Somebody still finishes “Scientists have finally proven that” with grandma invented the poodle, and the table falls apart. You don’t need a big vocabulary or quick wit. The whole skill is knowing when to stop, one word before the next card wrecks a perfectly good sentence.
It plays with two to five people, or up to eight in pairs, kids included, in twenty to thirty minutes.
The online version seats you at a table of bot monkeys. They type with a crude sense of grammar, the way monkeys should, and they vote on the lines with a real language model.
Format: Card game, with an online version
Status: In development