For the uninitiated, Lunch Money is a non-collectible card game of school yard violence. Its premise is that the players are all little girls at a Catholic school, beating the crap outta each other on the playground. When it's your turn, you select another player to pick on and play an attack card like Uppercut, Kick, Big Combo, or Pimp Slap. Unless they can defend themselves with a card like Block, Dodge, or Humiliation, they lose a number of points equal to the number on your attack card. When you're out of points, you're done. It's fast, it's simple, but you won't see its true beauty until you actually play a game. Players are encouraged to embellish their actions with trash talk, florid prose, and gratuitously bloody depictions of violence. The game works best when you stop worrying about winning and just ham it up!
Sticks & Stones increases the size of your Lunch Money deck by half again (55 cards) and includes such gems as Beat Down, Wedgy, Tantrum, and Evil Eye. I brought Sticks & Stones to my campus gaming club, where Lunch Money has been a staple of our social gatherings since time immemorable. We had a great time with the new cards and haven't even entertained the notion of going back to the regular deck alone. Some of our stand out favorites were...
- Cooties (does one point of damage per turn and can be passed to another player via Grab or Block).
- Imaginary Friend (who gets to make an extra attack after your first one has been resolved).
- Backlash (if only because an amusing typo caused the cards to read "Backlask").
- Hippie (declare someone the "hippie" and everyone gets to pound on them at once!).
The only two cards we typically found sitting in our hands, waiting to be discarded, were Spank and Faster. Spank is a regular attack that _must_ be played after a Grab, which makes it harder to use without being any more powerful. Faster must be played with a defensive card, which are always in short supply.
My one point of discontent is that the new artwork abandoned the highly stylized look of the original cards, instead adding bizarre references to cities and years that hold no meaning for me at all. This makes them much less creepy than their predecessors. We all love innovation, but I would have rather seen more of the same.
Sticks & Stones is a welcome, and long over-due, addition to one of my all-time favorite games. Some of the new cards are inspired, and none appear to cause any problems with the existing deck. I'm eagerly looking forward to the sequel game, Beer Money, due out this summer!
P.S. I feel compelled to share a couple of house rules my group has come up with...
1) Play Faster when someone attacks you. You can then make a basic attack against them, which must be resolved first ('cuz you're faster). If they chose to defend themselves, their attack is negated.
2) Monkey Dodge: You can use a Power Play card as a Monkey Dodge any time someone attacks you. Choose another player to become the new target of the attack. The new victim can only defend themselves with a Humiliation or another Monkey Dodge.
