Don’t take these words lightly: Munchkin is a game that will win friends and make enemies.

And these enemies will later decide to befriend you just so they can play this game and kick your puny attack score repeatedly out of revenge or retribution.

Players: 3-10, depending on how many expansion/theme decks are in your possession, and whether or not you have enough recreational leave available from your employer.
Ages: 12+
Genre: Strategy/RPG
Playing Time: 30 minutes minimum.
Manufacturer: Steve Jackson Games

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While it has been available since 2001, Munchkin has long been considered a required staple in any game library, simply because there aren’t that many games that will have such a profound effect on players without a console and television acting as a conduit. Munchkin manages to inspire the best and worst out of all of us with a very simple premise: “kill the monsters, steal the treasure, stab your buddy.”

This card game is an ingenious spinoff of the RPG genre, recreating the elements of dungeon-crawling that are synonymous with Dungeons and Dragons. For those who have been brought up on D&D or even any RPG game developed by Bioware or Blizzard, you will recognise a lot of those elements in here (picking a class, a race, and levelling up after killing monsters). However, many of these role playing elements are left to chance, with the cards deciding if you will be an orcish bard or a half-elf thief. Leaving this up to chance may be detrimental to the player’s ability to successfully apply traditional strategy techniques, but it also contributes to this game running for an hour on average, although some people have claimed to have had a game that has continued for eight hours.

It is far too easy to make your friends fight your battles for you...

When you have your turn, you’ll kick down a door (draw a Door card) in order to explore a “room”. Most times, you will find a monster that you have to choose to fight or run away from. However, this door card might be a character class, a race card, or even a curse that makes you lose your armour or allows another player to take an item. If you have the good fortune to pick a monster, the fighting mechanics are simple: add up your level with your bonuses (armour, class, etc.), and see if this total outranks the level of your monster. If it does, you win, the monster dies, and you get to “loot the body”, which allows you to draw a number of Treasure cards. You also get to go up a level, which is the primary goal of the game – the first to reach level 10 wins the game.

Of course, if you lose, you die, and your fellow players can loot your body.

This is where the ability to stab your friends right royally in the behind comes into play, and it is no secret that your fellow players will be happy to help you in order to further hinder your efforts to reach level 10. They can help you to defeat any monster or curse (after negotiating for a share of the treasure, of course) or they can play whatever curses are in their hand to make the monster more difficult for you to beat.

Munchkin can be considered quite an illogical, random game where the inability to plan for the long term can be a turn-off. However, the jokes make up for it, and a fast-paced game where you have a limitless potential to cause your friends misery far outweighs the lack of careful game play.

And, of course, the primary reason I can think of is that this game gains its audience by its own self-deprecating humour, which somehow makes it accessible to a wide demographic. With many alternate themes of the original card game now available (including Munckin Fu, Space Munckin and Munchkin Booty) as well as a plethora of expansions for the original Munchkin deck, it is hard to foresee anyone being genuinely bored with this game.