Sounds cool – what is the motivation for the variant? Making the game faster and more accessible? I must admit I was quite turned off when playing amazons first because of the insane number of possibilities so this could be a nice variant for beginners as you mention.

I didn’t want to mention the quite unusual motivation and the one-minute design process, but since you asked, it’s in the last chapter of How I invented games and why not Trap was ‘designed’ on Dec. 5th, 2010, when one of two posters at a Google groups forum, who didn’t particularly like me, asserted that it was “easy to design a pile of shit”, thereby referring to Mark Steere’s Oust.

So I designed "Turd" on the spot, with ‘Bills’ and ‘Coreys’ dropping ‘turds’, eventually getting stuck in their own shit, and I posted it.

I replaced the turds by something more acceptable in Monkey Trap, because though designed as ridicule it’s a nice little game all the same.

the coconut , its dropped in the same way that in amazons?

This looks really neat. I’ll get started on an AI posthaste :)

I believe I have seen the same game, only with one piece each instead of two, on the TV show Survivor (probably Norwegian or American version) a few years ago.

@ kp4to: "the coconut , its dropped in the same way that in amazons?"

No, in Amaxons you move first, then shoot (8 directions, so lots of choice in the opening stages). In Monkey Trap you either leave a coconut on the square the piece starts from on his turn, or you drop one ‘along the way’, on any intermediate square between the start- and targetsquare.
This of course allows for far less choices than Amazons offers.

@ Tasmanian Devil:

Quite possible, it came to me as an instant vision of two players on a huge chessboard, dropping turds till they got stuck in shit, inspired by Bill Taylor calling a perfectly sound game “a pile of shit” (because he has no clue in the first place, and dislikes the inventor).
Corey more or less got into the joke because I needed an opponent for Bill, but he’s actually not such a bad guy, he just has an agenda that keeps him from discussing games and I’m sure his sense of humor will help him survive :)

In the game I saw, you had to leave a piece (“coconut”) in the square you moved from.

@Tasmanian Devil: That would make it too limited I think. Here there’s more choice, yet not so abundantly that it becomes baffling to a novice. And it employs simple material that every lover of abstract games would have readily available.

I am a chess and thinking games teacher to hundreds of young kids. I like to teach games that can be played on a standard chess board. Besides chess and bughouse, the most popular games are give away chess and breakthrough. After that, the kids seem to like Lines of Action and Amazons (I teach the same game to the kids on an 8x8 board). I like the concept of Mokeys and Coconuts, I will try the game with my students and see how they like it.

Great, I got a friend in Australia who does the same with his classes. I’ll appreciate the feedback :)

@Ray Garrison: You might find Cage interesting: http://www.marksteeregames.com/Cage_rules.html

Lovely game site but there seems to be something missing. Can’t quite put my finger on it....

I have seen the game Tasmanian Devil describes (played on 8x8 or 10x10 grids on paper) at least 30 years ago. We called it Blockade. On paper, you more or less need to leave the “coconut” at the starting point — otherwise, you’d have to mess with erasing.

@dushoff
Do you have a link to any written account of the game?

I don’t understand why it would not be possible to draw a ‘coconut’ on an intermediate square, and I don’t understand the ‘erasing’ - coconuts stay where they are, and as a pencil and paper game one only would need 2x2 coins to play, nice and simple.

Anyway the game is so simple that I would be surprised if it hadn’t occured to someone before. In fact we played a similar game with knight leaving blocks on their squares of departure, at ‘Fanaat’ in the early eighties.

@Christian Freeling: Depositing the coconuts at the starting point is necessary for Pencil and Paper because the monkeys move. You would have to erase and redraw the monkeys at every step. If the coconuts are dropped at the last occupied space then there is no need to erase. You can simply use the previous monkey drawing as a coconut.

@tuerda
If you use coins for monkeys, you can draw a coconut, at a particular turn, at any legal square, be it the starting square of a piece, or an intermediate square. You only need a pencil, no eraser :)

I agree with both Tuerda and Christian; if you use coins, it would be easy to draw coconuts at intermediate squares. If you use only pencil and paper, it would not be easy to get rid of the monkeys. We typically played on the subway, or furtively in classrooms, passing a notebook back and forth. We did not use coins. I do not know of any written account of the game.

Nice game. Fortunately a monkey just leaves a coconut on the square it starts.

@bauer17
"... and must leave a coconut on the square it starts from or any intermediate square."

Fortunately a monkey just leaves a coconut on the square it starts from or any intermediate square.