Ruining Friendships Since 2001

This week’s game is another of the board genre and this one’s far from boring. If you’ve ever wanted to play a game that is both fun and hair wrenchingly frustrating, you’ve come to the right place cause I brought Munchkins! Munchkins is a table top card game made by Steve Jackson Games and is the one of the most fun and infuriating game’s I have ever played. It’s a mix of shaky alliance, backstabbers, lies and treachery — friendships have been formed and destroyed by things as simple as a die roll or a card that just really fucks you over.

The rules of the game are simple: you play an adventurer and run around a dungeon busting-in doors and the first person to level ten wins, it’s just that simple. Every turn, you flip a card off the top of the door deck and check the room. Each room can contain anything from booby traps, monsters and curses to free treasure or bonus modifiers. The majority of the time though you’ll run into a monster which you have to fight using the games combat system, which is relatively simple. You tally the combined score of your bonuses and level, if that score is higher than the monsters level, you kill it, and then collect the number of treasure cards marked on the monster card from the treasure deck and gain one to two levels depending on the level of the monster.

The treasure deck is chock-full of goodies including weapons and armor — which you can use to boost your level modifier — and other fun little things to make the game interesting. The game itself is steeped in tons of Dungeons and Dragons' lore along with other table top RPG references and the fact that it doesn’t take itself seriously is one of the reasons the game is so fun. The game also uses race and class abilities based on card’s you may draw from the door deck. Each race and class has pros and cons as well as some monsters being stronger or weaker against specific ones.

The reason I consider this game to be so frustrating is because the moment you hit level nine, you obtain this giant target right on your back. Every time you try to fight something to obtain that game winning level, every single card you could possibly imagine to stop you comes flying out of the woodwork, so victory becomes a game of luck and just being the baddest, strongest man on the table. The major problem with this is that occasionally everyone will do everything in their power to stop one person from winning, then the next guy up just wins purely because no one has any cards left to stop him — so the game actually has a bit of strategy in this regard.

One of the best part’s about Munchkins is the sheer number of expansions. I’d list them all here but the website does a much better job of that. Not only are there a ton of expansions there are also tons of other games all themed after other franchises including two of my favorites: Munchkin Impossible, which has tons of James Bond and other spy action movie references and my personal favorites, Munchkin Cthulhu, with all the lovecraftian lore you can shake an insanity inducing tentacle at.

Another amazing part is that every single Munchkins game is compatible with every other one, meaning if you had game and expansion you could shuffle all the doors and all the treasures together into the nerdiest, clusterfuck of card gaming ever witnessed by man. And if that wasn't enough, they even made an expansion for that specific purpose! Calling it Munchkin blender, it mixes some really over powered cards together but it actually balances out the game pretty well.

All in all, the Munchkins series is a ton of fun; Its simple design and format make it super easy to play and teaching people is ridiculously easy. If you’re looking for a good party game, ice breaker or just a good night with some friends, I couldn’t think of a better game.