TheBanyanTree: Super Munchkin!

[trebro at att.net]

Last night, while at a friend's birthday party, I had the extreme pleasure of being one of the first in my gaming circle to take a crack at Super Munchkin, a card game that riffs off of role playing games in the most devilishly clever way, while also being a great game to play in and of itself.

The basic idea is that you have levels, classes, races, items, and abilities, just like a role playing game, but they're on cards instead of gaming sheets, and there's no DM to control what happens.  You "kick open a door" and encounter things--and oh the things you'll find!--then hopefully kick the snot out of them to win fabulous prizes.

While this would be fun regardless, the key is that it's all done with a devilish wit and an eye towards the source material--for this one, Super Heroes.  For example, a low-level baddie is a 'gang of thugs'.  There are several of them, and so, you can add them together to have a really large gang of thugs to defeat.  Other villains in this set include "really big guy who eats planets" (and if there are any FOOMs here, they'd better know who that was supposed to be!), disk man (a parody of the Heroclix series), Treemendous (a big tree), and so on.  The characters could have secret hideouts (like a bat-cave ripoff or a space station), origins (I got 'touched an ancient idol twice'--others were government experiement gone wrong, drank radioactive material, and the like), and really funny items, like a bat mobile (no, I *am* spelling it right), suction cup boots, and so on.

On top of all this is a great set of artwork, by the guy who illustrates Dork Tower, a series of comics about, well, people a lot like us. ;)

Highly recommended, and well worth the $25.00 or so it costs.

-Rob