In the midst of getting all excited over the latest digital wonders taking up both shelf and pocket space last post, I completely forgot to mention all the card and board games I’ve played lately. Card games in particular have completely taken over work, as all three of our in-house projects are more or less done at the moment and we’re all looking for something to do that doesn’t involve staring at a screen. So from memory, some of the latest and greatest installments in our analog renissance are:

Unspeakable Words – From James Ernest, he of more Cheapass Games than you can throw a decent-sized table at, comes a word game as simple and fun and skidding down the slippery slope that leads to the gaping jaws of madness. Unspeakable Words is no mere spelling game, see – it’s a spelling game with Elder Gods, sanity checks, and little Cthuhlu tokens representing how few of your marbles are left. Each player has a hand full of letter cards, and each letter card is worth a number of points depending on how many angles it has. On their turn, players use the letters in their hand to spell words that are at least three letters long and haven’t been used by another player. Once the word is on the table, the point value of each card is added up to determine their score for the turn. The first player to a hundred points wins.

The catch is that after a word is put down and the points totalled up, the player has to roll a twenty-sided die for a sanity check. If the die roll is higher than the point value of their word, they’re fine. If it’s lower, they lose a sanity point and stray ever closer to that which man was not meant to know. Simple and addictive, it’s a fun little game that both rewards a well-rounded vocabulary while punishing those trying to show it off. It’s twenty dollars new, but between the great card illustrations (each letter is accompanied by an Elder God) and thirty little Cthuhlu figures, the game’s practically paid for before you even get to play it.

Kung Fu Fighting – Many card and board games encourage a bit of roleplaying to help enrich the play experience, but few reach into each player and coax it out themselves. During a round of Kung Fu Fighting it’s all but impossible to avoid adopting the overblowing speaking style of the vocal dubbing greats or insult your opponents in the most round about ways (“Foolish is the monkey who tells the tiger he cannot have his meat” is quickly becoming a personal favorite put down). In Kung Fu Fighting, each player takes on the role of a Kung Fu master equipped with all the requisite punches, kicks, stances, and weapons needed to avenge any fallen masters dead classmates you might have handy. Each turn you can assume a stance, select a weapon, and launch one attack against another fighter. While stances and weapons bring their own strengths and weaknesses to the party (the rock-paper-scissors balance to the stances is very nice indeed), the real power comes from the modifiers. Why throw a punch when you could run up a wall to throw a Flying Invicible Magnificent Punch? Just like in the movies, each modifier has to be called out loud before you actually say what you’re doing, and just like in the movies the entire thing can be undone with a single well-played block card. If there’s any issues with the game it’s that it can drag on a bit once down to the final two players, as you can all but guarantee your opponent has a few block cards put aside for that Flipping Flying Spinning Sword attack you’re counting on to finish things. But really, when playing a game that lets you pit your Drunken stance against your friend’s Dragon while shouting about the lack of honor he brings to this dojo, who cares?

Munchkin – I thought very long and hard about skipping the description here and going with “Look, just play it already”, but that would be doing the game a disservice. For any and all either too perplexed or too put off by Dungeons and Dragons to ever try a game, here is Munchkin, a card game that sends up that most tried and true of roleplaying games without falling into the same traps as its subject matter. Play is fiendishly simple – there are two types of cards, Doors and Treasures. Players take turns kicking down Doors and facing what’s behind them – either a monster, a curse, or something else – and then either loot the room in the form of drawing Door cards into their hand or collecting Treasure for killing monsters. Each time you kill a monster, you get to go up a level or two, and the first player to level 10 wins.

Were it that easy. Along the way, you have to deal with your friends stabbing you in the back, cursing you, stealing your weapons or other loot, teaming up against you, throwing more monsters at you for you to fight, and generally being the most malicious bastards imaginable in the name of winning or at least making damn sure you don’t. It’s a game where it’s never over when you think it is, where decisions made early on can come back to haunt you in unspeakable ways, and where there’s always something more ridiculous than whatever just happened waiting right around the corner. On one hand, it cuts games like D&D to the quick by boiling things down to their core elements (fighting monsters, getting loot, leveling up) and making their worst elements commonplace (killer GMs, inexplicably hard encounters, greedy players only interested in winning). On the other, it makes you see why these games are so damn popular, emphasizing the group and discussion over all. Hail Munchkin in all its brain-breaking backwards nonsense.

Filed under: Game Reviews, Games