Who’s that voice in Rules? And what’s next from Coding Monkeys?

Don’t judge me, robot.

If your sinister mountaintop redoubt looks anything like ours, everyone there is utterly absorbed in The Coding Monkeys’ Rules, which Kelsey reviewed in these pages last week. What seems like a casual memory game is actually one of the year’s most insidiously replayable puzzle games.

Rules has also brought us my single favourite sound effect of 2014. In your frenzy to clear the board before time runs out, tapping an incorrect tile causes a voice to murmur a soul-crushing “mmm-hmm”. Its tone is cooly nonchalant and yet it’s utterly devastating to hear.

I needed to know whose voice that was behind the “mmm-hmm” — so I asked. “The voice is Marcel’s,” chief Monkey Martin Pittenauer told me, referring to frequent Coding Monkeys collaborator Marcel-André Casasola Merkle, who designed Rules.

While I was at it, I figured I’d ask the makers of Carcassonne and Lost Cities what they were up to next. Another original game? Or a new board game adaptation? It’s another expansion for Carcassonne, as it happens, due out hopefully this year. Pittenauer hinted at which one of the game’s panoply of expansions it would be, but I couldn’t catch it.

Watch Rules in motion after the jump.