The “Infinite Monkey Theorem” states that a million monkeys working at a million typewriters will, in time, replicate the complete works of William Shakespeare – but probably not before they jam up their keyboards with their own you-know-what. One Million Monkeys for iOS is governed by the aforementioned theorem. You probably won’t be able to produce a coherent sentence, let alone the works of Shakespeare—but you’ll definitely come up with some gut-splitting nonsense stories.
The “Infinite Monkey Theorem” states that a million monkeys working at a million typewriters will, in time, replicate the complete works of William Shakespeare – but probably not before they jam up their keyboards with their own you-know-what. One Million Monkeys for iOS is governed by the aforementioned theorem. You probably won’t be able to produce a coherent sentence, let alone the works of Shakespeare—but you’ll definitely come up with some gut-splitting nonsense stories.
One Million Monkeys is a unique word game that might remind you of those ten-second stories you probably cobbled together as a kid with your pals (where you begin with an opening sentence, and your friend adds another sentence, then you add one, and the whole thing inevitably becomes filthy). You’re issued an opening statement like, “It was a dark and stormy night,” or, “It was the best of times.” You add on a few words, and then the story is passed around to other players (up to four), and they add their own touches. Here’s the catch: You’re limited by sets of rules. You might be forbidden from utilizing certain letters, or you may need to use a letter that starts with “T”, or so on.
The restrictions are adjusted according to whether you choose an Easy, Medium, or Hard difficulty setting at the start of each turn. The harder you try, the more bananas you earn for each successful turn. Bananas buy new themes, icons, and stickers that you can use to decorate your story. Once you’ve cycled through a predetermined number of turns, the game is over and you’re given the option to publish your masterpiece. May Monkey God have mercy on your soul.
Not surprisingly, playing through a round or two of One Million Monkeys yields hilarious results. Even reading through the library of published works is a hoot. There are a few quirks that keep the game from achieving its true potential, however. The biggest problem is that the player-matching process needs a lot of work, or else the game simply needs more players. It’s not uncommon to start a story and then have it languish because you can’t find enough random participants to help you write your Great American Novel. For that reason, One Million Monkeys is best experienced with friends.
That segues into another problem with the game: Its rules leave too much wiggle room for monkeyshines since they’re all based around letter usage instead of noun verb counts. Even if you decide to take One Million Monkeys as seriously as possible, there’s a good chance that some smart-aleck will ruin the story with random nonsense words that are still counted because they use (or don’t use) the highlighted letters.
But if you can scratch up the right players and brew the right chemistry, One Million Monkeys is potentially one of the App Store’s most entertaining word games. You might even say it’s as much fun as a barrel full of (NOTE: The letters “M, O, N, K, E, Y, and S” are hereby off limits).
