Welcome to the Theater!

🐒 ‘The Shadow Theater: The Legend of the Monkey King’ is a small box 2p duel game (with a lengthy title 😄), with simple abstract worker placement, where you win rounds by earning more points from the limited resource pool. Each full game is a best-of-3, so losing a single round doesn’t mean the end yet!

The table presence is amazing, thanks to the colorful illustrations, nice wooden components and the game box that opens up to serve as the theater’s backdrop. I think it looks awesome! 🤩

As for the gameplay: The board is split up into 3 areas. Each turn you can either send a monkey to an area to do the action there, or collect all the monkeys from an area. You can:
🐉Draw 1 Weapon card in the Dragon’s Lair.
🏯Take 1 Jadestone and 2 Monkeys in the Emperor’s Palace.
🍑Take 1 Peach in the Celestial Garden and move the Monkey King meeple.

You basically just place or take monkey meeples until one of the resource types runs out, then you check who got more points. ⚖️
🧐 Peaches are worth nothing, but are needed to feed Monkeys. Each fed Monkey is worth a point, and a Peach feeds three of them. Jadestones are only worth points in sets of 3, but there is another bonus for having more Jades than your opponent. Finally, leftover Weapon Cards are also worth points. 

It’s all about keeping an eye on the resource pools and timing. Weapon cards have several effects that could turn the tides, and you can tactically block spaces with the Monkey King. Additionally there are also Scrolls 📜 that break the rules in interesting ways: Both players can draft a Scroll each round that gives a special ability only to them. These are cool, though we did find at least one that seemed hugely imbalanced.

💬While all these sound good, ultimately we didn’t feel the decisions to be overly exciting, or the turn-to-turn action engaging enough, even though I was very intrigued when reading the rulebook. We had the impression of it being too tic-tac-toe-like, but not in a good way. So it ultimately fell flat for us, but I am curious: if you’ve tried it, what did you think?