World At Play Games Blog: Friday Night Fights

World At Play Games Blog Post

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

This week's Fight brought to you by our newest Blogger, Patrick.

Steve Jackson's Munchkin is a light-hearted, satirical, funny, sacrilegious game aimed at Role Playing Games (RPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, or Castles & Crusades. However, unlike your normal - or even the not so normal - RPGs, Munchkin is a card game. If you have never played an RPG, that's ok. This game makes fun of just about everything there is to poke fun at, so you'll get at least 85% of the humor involved.

For instance, The Wife, has never played an RPG - and most likely never will. She is more into games like Monopoly: your basic, old school, so-called "Classic" board game. Yet she has played Munchkin with me several times and beaten me every time (but only because there are dice rolls involved). On top of that, she actually likes the game... not just the beating me part, although I'm willing to bet she enjoys that a great deal. So, basing my opinion on that, I feel fairly confident saying that even if you have never played an RPG or a dungeon crawl board game you will still have fun playing Munchkin.

Sorry for the rambling intro... now on to the meat of the matter. Well... actually meat is made up of matter so I guess technically it should be on to the matter of the meat... of the matter.

After a quick and rough rundown of the rules to Mr. Noah, I handed the actual rule page to him (mostly to show that I wasn't lying about them) and dealt out the cards. Munchkin has 2 types of cards, Door Cards and Treasure Cards. In a typical dungeon crawl and even most RPGs, there are lots of doors to go though and a lot of monsters on the other side of those doors needing to be fought and killed - Munchkin is no different in that respect.

So you kick down the door (Flip over a door card) and find something like the one I just turned over for the sake of this article: A level 4 Leperchaun. No, not a Leprechaun, the card quite literally says Level 4 Leperchaun - "He's Gross!" - "+5 against Elves"

Munchkin works on a level system. All items have a bonus. For example, the Dagger of Treachery has a +3 bonus, but it is only usable by a Thief (there are classes and races that your character can be also... hold your horses and I'll get to that in a minute).

So if you were a level 2 thief and you had this dagger, then when you drew the level 4 leperchaun, you would win the fight: your level of 2, plus 3 for the dagger and tada, that makes your bonus level 5, which beats a level 4 monster. Winning fights is how you win the game, and for winning a fight against ol' leppey here you go up a level and you also get 2 treasures, which brings us to the other stack of cards you're able to draw from: Treasure cards.
As in any good RPG or dungeon crawl, at the end of a long hard fight there is Treasure to be had and that's what the Treasure cards are for. In traditional RPGs it is usually gold or magic items that you find on the bodies of slain enemies; in Munchkin it's things like Itching Powder and the Buckler of Swashing.

The Buckler of Swashing is a shield that provides a +2 bonus, so if you had drawn this card, then you would add your current level plus the +2 for the shield, when fighting monsters to see who won.

The Itching Powder is a different type of Treasure card. It's the type you would use against another player. It says, "Play during any combat. The victim must discard any one item of clothing or armor, which YOU specify. Usable only once."

In a game where the winner is the first person to reach level 10, you want to do whatever is in your power to prevent the other players (your so called friends) from getting to level 10 first, so the Itching Powder is a pretty good card. You could play it just as someone thought they were killing a monster and getting ready to loot the treasure and BAM ... you play Itching Powder and suddenly, they can't kill that poor little Leperchaun without help because, (unless you're a warrior class) if your level equals or is less than the level of the monster, you HAVE to attempt to run away.

Now is where the die roll comes into play: when attempting to run away you roll a die; if it is a 4 or greater, you are able to run away, but if it is less than 4 then you have to do what is called "Bad Stuff". Bad Stuff is written at the bottom of monster cards and it lives up to its name. It can be anything from losing a piece of armor or a weapon, to losing a level or even dying.

This is the result I usually end up with because as we all know, dice stay up late at night telling each other funny stories about this time and that, when I was only 1 die roll away from winning a game and ... 6 turns later, I was still trying to make that one roll I needed.

Ok. Back to the show.

So say you played itching powder on another player and made them take off their armor. Now that they don't have the levels needed to kill the monster, they would have to ask for help from another player. Yes, asking for help is legal and often your only chance of winning a fight. For elves, that is all well and good because players who have the Elven race card always go up a level when they help someone else win a fight. On the other hand, people who are something other than an Elf will be doing all they can to stop you from getting the help you need, to the point of bribes and open threats. They want to win too... not just watch you win.

Besides race cards, there are also class cards. When you first start the game you have no class (Get it? You have no class!). Class cards consist of Warrior, Cleric, Wizard and Thief. As I stated before, being a warrior allows you to win the fight when your level plus bonuses is equal to the level of the monster being fought. All other classes would have to attempt to run away if their level equals the level of the monster.

At this point I also want to add that the rules specifically state that cheating is allowed, not only allowed, but encouraged... as long as you can get away with it. I spent most of the game we played cheating. Unless you're a dwarf, you're only allowed 1 big item to be on your character at a time. I had 2 big items throughout most of the game because I was sneaky and hid the part of the card that said big item underneath another card.

The game between Mr. Noah, The Wife, and myself, was what I believe Steve Jackson had in mind when he created the game. We were all neck and neck up to about level 8 when The Wife pulled ahead of us and went on to ruin ... err ... Win the game.

Every review I've read about Munchkin goes on and on about how great it is and I can understand why they rave about it. It's fun, fast paced, funny, you get to do mean things to your friends and you're allowed to cheat as much as you can get away with (which I did, but due to my lack of success with Dice, I lost anyways).

All in all we had a very good time. I believe next time we are going to give Munchkin Bites a try and see if the game play is the same when you are a Vampire instead of a Halfling. Who knows where we might go after that? Total I believe there are something like 9 different stand-alone Munchkin games and untold hordes of expansions you can add to them, and that's not even going into the fact that you can put all of them together, or mix and match.

Who knows, maybe one day I'll be writing about having a Half Dwarf, Half Vampire, Gunslinger/Cultist that can fly like Superman yet is charming and sophisticated like 007. "I'll have a gallon Bloody Mary, on the rocks, shaken, not stirred, hold the kryptonite and hurry because Cthulhu is calling."

-Patrick

by: World At Play Games

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