Yes, Munchkin has been out for a while, and has won a number of awards, but it’s certainly worth a repeated mention, given the reprint this summer. At the same time that it pays tribute to the RPG that got this whole ball rolling, it satirizes it too, making this game fun to play and a hoot to read and look at.
If you haven’t seen it before, Munchkin is a boxed card game from Steve Jackson Games that comes with the tagline: Kill the Monsters. Steal the Treasure. Stab your Buddy. What it sets out to do is distill First Edition Dungeons and Dragons (or any other fantasy rpg of that time and ilk) into a fast-playing card game, and it succeeds admirably. Further, it takes the stereotypes that were established by good ol’ 1E and magnifies them to the extreme of gamers everywhere: The Munchkin.
Style: 3
The style is very simple and no-frills. Everything in the box is in shades of brown, except for the 6-sided die.
First, this is frustrating. The two types of cards, Dungeon and Treasure, employ the exact same color scheme, save for a smallish yellow icon on the back of the Treasure card. Given that you have to keep the two types of cards in separate stacks, it’s very easy during a fast round to toss a few cards of each kind into the wrong pile. Which, if you don’t spend the time whilst shuffling to diligently re-sort the cards, can lead to some irksome delays in the next round of play. Also, I imagine that if the brown-on-brown scheme helped keep printing costs down, it would’ve been nice to see some reduction in cost passed on to the consumer, even if only a few dollars.
Second, this brown-on-brown scheme is useful. Many are the cards that allow you to snatch cards from another player’s hand, or that force you to dispose of cards by offering them blindly to your opponents. The savvy player will cover the lower half of the backs of the cards, thus preventing the other players from going ‘Ah, there’s a Treasure card, I want THAT one.’
What saves this game in style are the illustrations from John Kovalic of Dork Tower fame (as well as Chez Geek and Apples to Apples), and the succession of truly awful puns in card titles. Yes, you get to encounter the Dread Gazebo, utilize the Cotion of Ponfusion, and marvel that the Net Troll looks a lot cuter on this card than they ever do in real life. Indeed, the art is good enough that we’ve had trades in mid-round to go “Oooh, can I have THAT cleric card, it’s my fave!” even though the game text is exactly the same…
Substance: 5
Although the size of the rulesheet is somewhat daunting at first, the learning curve is fairly easy. Plus, usually the pertinent information you really need is on the card at hand, which is a nice touch. And, the final goal of the game is very clearly laid out early in the rules: get to Level 10 by combat or Divine Intervention (a card) before anyone else does. You don’t even have to kill anyone else to do it, and sometimes if you do, it might help your opponent more than hinder them.
Gameplay itself is rather straightforward. You start the game with two cards of each type, Treasure or Dungeon. Of the Treasure cards, there can be items that you can use constantly (playable immediately), one-shot potion cards, and special level-booster cards (though you cannot use these to win the game). Dungeon cards include monsters, monster-modifiers, curses, your classes and races (also playable immediately), and a few one-offs, like the aforementioned Divine Intervention, and the highly valued Half-Breed, Super Munchkin, and Cheat! cards.
The first card of any player’s turn is always a face-up card from the top of the Dungeon deck. If the player faces a monster, they may fight it, or they may simply Run Away. Right off the bat, the game gets interesting. When a player is in combat, the other players can add any monster-modifier cards they have in hand to strengthen or weaken the beast, throw a few extra potions into the fray, on either side of the combat, or even swap out the monster completely for another one. All of these, and more, happen far more frequently as the game progresses and the players try to slow each other down. If the player defeats the monster, then they take a number of Treasure cards, and gain a level.
What is very, very nice about this game, is that there are many possible skill levels at which you can play. We started with mild ‘what-do-we-have-here?’ games and moved onto vicious tit-for-tat games of throwing everything we had at each other. Both essentially let random chance dictate the victor. Later games saw much more clever strategies, such as optimizing the class and race combinations, and clever whole-hand discards (whether by special class powers or suicide-by-monster) to garner better deals. As it stands, the group I’ve played with so far still hasn’t explored all the possibilities, leaving us with much more to look forward to.
An interesting quirk: with a few players (3-4), the game often leaves one player hanging in the dust while one is far, far ahead. With more players (5-7), the games were so well balanced that it really was anyone’s game. For the small group, as we all became more intimate with the rules, the play leveled out, and there was much less frustration on the part of any one player.
In the end though, well worth the money, and a heck of a lot of fun. Use it to kill some time at your next gaming session, and everyone will thank you.
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