Board Game: Munchkin

Forget I played this a while back with the kiddos.

The Game: Munchkin
The Publisher: Steve Jackson Games
Time: 20 minutes to an hour, depending on how many people are playing
Players: Me, Kai, Cael

Kick in the door!

Munchkin has been out for a long time and has approximately eleventy billion expansions, which, to my knowledge, are pretty much just revisions/rewordings/reskins of the core game. Said core game has players building a hand of characters around a character; you start as a level 1 human nothing (no class), and you can pull race cards (that sounds wrong) and class cards to make yourself more interesting and badass in combat.

Game play consists of kicking in a door (drawing a card from the "door" deck) and, if it's a monster, either fighting it or running away. Fighting said monster involves totaling up all the bonuses your get from your various cards and weapons and so on, and seeing if you can beat the monster's level. If you can, kudos, you gain a level and can draw treasure from the treasure deck. If not, you get whatever Bad Stuff comes from losing to the monster (which can range from "nothing" to "you're dead and all your stuff falls into a volcano," probably).

Here's my character. I had a really big club, I know that.

Getting to level 10 first means you win, but other players can play cards to screw with you. They can play buffs on monsters to make them too big to handle, they can play cards on you to steal your stuff or weaken bonuses. You can ask for helping beating a monster, but the terms of the negotiation are up to you (I usually say, "sure, I get all the treasure," because a) a level is a sure thing and gets you closer to the win and b) there's a non-zero chance of getting a You Go Up a Level treasure, so it kinda evens out).

Cael ponders his move.

Opinions: Munchkin is entertaining enough, but it can become interminable if people take the "screw the other players" philosophy too seriously. It also tests your ability to keep multiple things in your head at once, which I'm pretty good at but other people are better. The kids liked it and I think they'll like Super Munchkin (which is the same game just reskinned for superheroes), too, and I'll play it if it's what's on the table, but there are games I like better.

Keep? Sure.