Unfortunately, they can't all be winners. SPANC is neither a good parody nor a good game.
Game Play
Each player gets a crew of four catgirls, each of which has a score in Space Pirate, in Amazon, in Ninja, and in Catgirl. Toy cards are used as buffs to those skills or have other "special play" abilities.
A "caper" is dealt consisting of four sequential "challenge" cards, each specifying a roll against a particular skill that must be made, as well as any rewards earned from overcoming it (toy cards or loot; accumulating loot is the means of winning). Everyone works against the same caper trying to be the first to finish, by playing one catgirl each turn, who tries to pass as many obstacles as possible before losing one and being knocked out.
Style
As a comedic parody, this game is working on some rich material, having the chance to lampoon two topics that are rich for lampooning.
First, adventure cheesecake: the endless drawings of hot elf chicks in chainmail bikinis, overendowed tough-girl cyberpunk catgirls, etc. However, there's nothing in the game beside the unspoken wink that suggests it's really a lampoon. The art by Phil Foglio is competently done, but most of it, out of context, would look not like a parody of adventure cheesecake but simply like more adventure cheesecake itself, wanting to be parodied. I don't think it's a matter of excessive subtlety, and I don't even think it's a matter of succumbing to the temptation to play with sex as a means of selling even while lampooning doing so. I think they just didn't really decide what they were lampooning and didn't follow through. Someone thought the title was all the joke you needed, so that's all the parody you get.
Second, the title screams out the opportunity to ridicule the "in a blender" school of game design which so many people in the roleplaying community embrace with a "ha ha, only serious" attitude. Isn't it ludicrous to imagine a game made of amazons who are also catgirls who are also Ninjas who are also space travellers who are also pirates? But again, the title is the whole parody. Apart from a few minor sexually-charged references here and there, the game is largely devoid of the joke it purports to be about. It sets itself up to be a ludicrous parody and then takes itself almost entirely seriously, leaving you to step back and say, hmm, are they joking or aren't they? Again, I don't think it's excessive subtlety; I don't think this is a reach for Andy Kaufman. I think the design team just never got together to explore the joke, and were content to rest on the title.
A few of the cards are mildly amusing in themselves, but most of them are mostly straight. There's more humor in an average single card of Munchkin than in an entire tableau of SPANC.
If it weren't for getting a competent artist, this would rank a 1 in style. But for as much as Foglio did a good job with what he had, I wonder if Kovalis might have done better. I feel sure if he'd done the art, it might not have been as sexy, but it should would have been spoofy and funny.
Substance
Game play is exceedingly weak, due to minimal impact of skill or strategy, an excessive amount of randomness, and a strong "death spiral" (albeit inverted, more of a "success spiral").
The only decisions you really make that matter are choosing which of your four catgirls to play at any given time. However, ultimately this doesn't matter nearly enough. Average skill scores are 5, which you roll against on 2d6, so failures are so common that you will almost certainly go through most if not all of your catgirls on any given caper. You can't even see what kinds of challenges are ahead at first, but even when you can, it doesn't really help since once you send one catgirl she has to go until she fails; she can't switch to another catgirl better at the skill needed for a different challenge. So in the end, one gets the sense that it matters which catgirl you send when, but only just barely.
Once you earn a few toys, though, that high chance of failure can turn around fast. Early successes build very quickly into later successes which earn even more buffs. Worse yet, the early leader doesn't just improve her chances of continuing to win, she also reduces the chances of anyone else getting anywhere, since the next caper will be over that much quicker. It seems likely that whoever wins the first caper will win the game most of the time.
If they don't, though, it'll be only because of luck, which plays a very large part. The game is swimming in randomness. You have to randomly choose from a randomly dealt set of catgirls to play against a randomly chosen challenge using randomly chosen buffs. Naturally, you do this by rolling dice. The toys deck includes a few "pool boy" cards which are way more powerful than the other toys, far out of proportion, which even farther exaggerates both the effects of luck and the "death spiral" effect.
The rules are not complicated, but they're far more complicated than they need to be for as few strategic options as the game offers. The sequence of play is more complicated than Munchkin or Chez Geek, but less so than Illuminati, and this would be fine, except the actual richness of the game is less than even the simplest-ruled of these games. I wouldn't mind rules this complicated if I got gameplay that justified the cost; and I wouldn't mind simpler gameplay if it came with easier rules. But I'm paying the price of complexity without getting its benefit.
Conclusion
One comes away from the game with a sense of wanting to get someone else to go through the tedium of actually playing it. Maybe write a little program in VBScript that'll do the playing so you don't have to bother. Better yet, just sit down with the decks and look at the pictures. Though if you really want to look at pictures of sexy but ludicrous catgirls, go check all your other game materials, I bet you have enough already. If not, I suspect the Internet will yield up the rest you need. Meanwhile, you can spend your money and time on a better card game, of which there are many, so why bother with this one?
