2 Wacky Dice Games: Guns and Monkeys and Bears, Oh My!

Do you like wacky dice games like Pass the Pigs and Zombie Dice? Here are two new dice games that are sure to make you chuckle. Bears! from Fireside Games and Monkeys With Knives and Guns from Blackball Games are portable games, light on strategy but loaded with lots of dice. Read on for full reviews of each game.

Note: Bears! is set to be released September 28, and Monkeys is available now.

Disclosure: GeekDad received review copies of both games reviewed here.

Overview: You’re out enjoying a lovely camping weekend, when bears show up at the campground. What do you do? Shoot at the bears, run from your tent, or just ignore the fuss and keep on sleeping? Bears! is a new game from Fireside Games that’ll keep you hopping.

Players: 2 to 4

Ages: 7 and up (though even younger kids may enjoy it — my four year old loves it)

Playing Time: 20 minutes

Retail: $19.95

Rating: Simple but fun, good for a quick filler (between rounds of Castle Panic, perhaps?) or while you’re actually out camping.

Who Will Like It? Because of the simplicity and short length of the game, I’d recommend this one mostly as a quick grab-and-go type game. It’s one you can play with younger kids, and if you get more than one set you can have a big pile of dice for lots of players. But for more serious gamers, Bears! is more of a light snack.

Theme:

Camping! For a simple game, Bears! sticks to its theme pretty well. You can shoot bears, run away from the tent, or sleep in the tent. That’s about it. Of course, as a dice game it also doesn’t necessarily feel like you’re really at a campsite, but you do get a good amount of frenzied action since it’s not a turn-based game.

Components:

The game includes 20 white camp dice, 20 black player dice, 4 scoring reminder cards, and instructions. The dice are slightly smaller than your average d6, and you’ll notice from the top photo that the box is actually quite large compared to the contents. This bothered me at first (particularly when packing games for PAX) but then while playing I realized that it makes a pretty handy cup for rolling all the camp dice. The dice are nice quality, with the icons engraved and painted on the faces. The reminder cards are handy when you’re first teaching the game, but after the first round you probably won’t need them anymore.

Gameplay:

One player rolls all of the camp dice (5 per player) in the center of the table. Then, all players roll five black player dice simultaneously, and start to look for matches — there are no turns. If you find a camp die that matches one of your player dice, you grab it from the center and pair it next to one of your player dice. At any time you can re-roll any of your player dice that haven’t already been paired. If you take the last bear or the last tent from the campsite, you shout “Bears!” and the round is over, and everyone has to stop.

Here are the valid combinations: Gun + Bear, Runner + Tent, and Sleeper + Tent.

At the end of the round, pairs are scored as follows:

• Gun + Bear: 1 point
• Runner + Tent: 2 points
• Sleeper + Tent: 5 points if there are no bears left in the camp, -2 points if there are still bears left

Unpaired dice do not score anything, and incorrect pairs lose a point. You play until somebody reaches 100 points (or set your own goal, or play a set number of rounds).

There’s also a variant with player elimination: “I Don’t Have to Be Faster Than the Bear, I Just Have to Be Faster Than You.” In this one, there are no Guns or Sleepers — you only match Runners to Tents. (Re-roll anything else.) Everyone rolls and tries to get as many Runners and Tents paired up as possible. At the end of a round, whoever has the fewest Runner+Tent pairs is eliminated. You remove 5 camp dice for that player and continue until only one player remains.

Conclusion:

Bears! is a very simple game that manages to be a lot of fun. Both my daughters really enjoyed playing it, though I must add that they had an attack of the sillies and started purposely making incorrect pairs: “Now I’m sleeping on the bear!” Neither of them had any trouble picking up the rules, though the four-year-old was at a disadvantage trying to keep up with the speed of the older players.

There is a bit of strategy even though each round goes so quickly that you won’t have a ton of time to ponder it: since sleepers only get points if there are no bears left in the campsite, you don’t want to use them if there are too many bears. But if everyone is going for sleepers in tents and nobody shoots the bears, then all the sleepers lose points. You can decide how much to press your luck — go for the guaranteed (but lower) score, or take a risk for higher points.

It’s a quick game to teach, and I even took it on a camping trip. Since it’s just dice in a box, there’s not really much that can get ruined at a campsite (aside from the box, I suppose) and it’s pretty portable. The retail price does seem a bit high for such a simple game, but compared to Zombie Dice (another favorite) it’s more than three times as many dice for a few bucks more.

If you like the camping theme (and you don’t mind the image of shooting at bears), Bears! is a fun filler game. I wouldn’t put it at the top of my all-time favorites, but it’ll probably hit the table pretty often since it’s so quick to pick up and play.

Bears! isn’t quite available yet, but will be released at the end of this month, so watch for it at your local game stores and online.

Wired: Nice quality dice, easy to teach, quick to play, fast-paced with a hint of strategy.

Tired: Might seem a little pricey for its size.

Overview: Everyone knows monkeys love bananas. What you may not know is that in order to get bananas some monkeys resort to violence. Monkeys With Knives and Guns is exactly what it sounds like: a crazy dice game about getting the most bananas through the use of force.

Players: 2 to 4

Ages: 7 and up (assuming you’re okay with the idea of violent monkeys)

Playing Time: 20 minutes

Retail: $20

Rating: It pretty much is a barrel of monkeys … with knives and guns. (You saw that coming, right?) Not my favorite type of game, but funny and good for a quick filler game.

Who Will Like It? Monkeys is a screw-your-neighbor game, and obviously involves a lot of luck. There’s some strategy involved in deciding which monkeys to fight and which bananas to steal, but it’s not very deep. If you’re okay with that, then you can pretty much decide if you like the game based on your reaction to the title.

Theme:

There’s not a lot to explain, really: the monkeys want to collect bananas, and they’re armed and dangerous (sometimes to themselves).

Components:

The game includes 16 dice and 30 cardboard banana tokens in a cardboard tube. What really caught my eye at PAX was the dice themselves: they’re banana yellow and are huge, oversized dice. If you play a two-player game each person gets eight dice, and you’ll need two hands for that. The artwork on the dice is fun: these are very exuberant monkeys. However, since the images are just printed on the dice (and not engraved), I did notice a range of print quality on the dice — there are some where the image is very light or has missing bits.

The banana tokens are a little cheap. They’re just printed and stuck to thin cardboard squares, single-sided. While they’re simply counters for the score and you could use pretty much anything, it would have been nice to see something a little nicer—maybe thicker cardboard or double-sided pieces.

I should mention that at PAX, where they were demoing the game, they had a tub of what looked like yellow plastic bananas. Upon closer inspection, I realized that they were, in fact, banana Runts. They told me we were welcome to eat them, but as they’d been handled by a lot of people that weekend we probably shouldn’t. Still, they did look the part.

Gameplay:

Each player gets the same number of dice (8 in a two-player game, 5 in a three-player game, 3 in a four player game). I’m not sure why that’s not 4 in a four player game, but I suppose you could do whatever you want.

Everyone rolls the dice together. You line up your dice, and then you take turns doing a Fight phase, and then a Take phase. During the line-up, you remove any Stupid Monkeys: these are the ones looking down the wrong end of the gun, and they eliminate themselves. Next, you separate your fighting monkeys (Stabbers and Shooters) from the taking monkeys (Hungry, Smart, and Robber).

During the Fight phase, each player can use their Stabbers and Shooters to kill off other players’ monkeys. Shooters can kill anyone, and Stabbers can kill everyone but the Shooters.

After everyone has used up their fighting monkeys, everyone takes a turn in the Take phase, grabbing bananas with whatever monkeys they have left. Hungry Monkeys get one banana from the pile, Smart Monkeys get two, and Robber Monkeys get to steal one (either from the pile or from another player).

Then everyone gets their dice back, and starts over. The starting player rotates each turn.

When somebody reaches the goal, the game ends: 15 in a two-player game, 10 in a three-player game, or 8 in a four-player game.

Conclusion:

Monkeys With Knives and Guns isn’t a deep game, nor is it intended to be. It’s really about bashing your opponents and getting bananas, so there’s no point in being civil about it. If you don’t steal from or shoot somebody else, eventually they’ll probably have to do it to you anyway.

There is some strategy involved in which monkeys to kill: do you take out the robbers so they can’t steal from you? Or take out the Smart Monkeys to reduce the number of bananas they get? Or perhaps you kill off the fighters so they can’t kill your own Hungry Monkeys? It’s a pretty quick game, though, and probably doesn’t require too much analysis when you play. After all, these are monkeys, not master strategists.

It’s a cute game and I’ll probably break it out from time to time, but for me it doesn’t beat Zombie Dice and I prefer press-your-luck games to screw-your-neighbor games. For the right crowd, though, I’m sure Monkeys With Knives and Guns would be a riot.

Wired: Oversized dice are really fun, and the theme is ridiculous.

Tired: Gameplay isn’t very deep, and heavily luck-based.