Monkey Palace

Monkey Palace is a competitive family strategy board game released in 2024 through a collaboration between the LEGO Group and Asmodee. It was designed by David Gordon and TAM. The game supports two to four players, recommends an age of ten and above, and typically takes about forty-five minutes to play. Its central attraction is physical construction: instead of moving pieces around a conventional flat map, players use LEGO elements to build a shared three-dimensional palace. The setting is deliberately simple but specific. A monkey has entered a palace, and the players compete to help construct a route through the building while earning the most bananas. The palace is represented by a developing LEGO structure, and each turn changes its shape. Players place bricks to extend stairways and other connected sections, attempting to create a useful route while also positioning their construction to gain rewards. Monkey Palace combines spatial planning with an economic system. Building higher or extending a route can produce banana points, and players use their gains to acquire cards. These cards provide additional resources or advantages that affect later construction. The most valuable decisions therefore involve more than making the tallest structure: a player must consider how a new section satisfies the current building requirements, how many bananas it generates, and whether the resulting position helps future turns. The game’s LEGO components are not merely decorative. They make the board state tangible and ensure that every session develops a different architectural shape. Players must read the structure from several angles, preserve legal connections, and anticipate how the shared palace will be altered by subsequent turns. Because everyone contributes to the same building, one player’s construction can create opportunities for another, producing interaction without requiring direct attacks or complicated combat rules. Monkey Palace is notable as one of LEGO’s modern tabletop games aimed at combining recognizable brick construction with a conventional strategy-game framework. It is not a licensed adventure based on an existing LEGO theme; its identity comes from the original monkey-and-palace setting and from the construction mechanism itself. The result is a game in which the physical act of assembling bricks is part of the competition, not an accessory to it. Victory goes to the player who manages the building opportunities and banana economy most effectively by the end of the game.