Munchkin, baby!

So this past weekend I was forcibly removed from my computer and relocated to California and all its 60 degree glory. During this merry jaunt, I went with my wife and brothers in law to a great comic book shop in Sacramento that we usually visit every time I come out.

This time, I decided to take the Great PoolMan's advice and pick up Munchkin, made by Steve Jackson (the GURPS guy) and illustrated by the guy who does Dork Tower.

Munchkin is basically a self-contained card game that you can play with 2-6 people. Regular Munchkin is like a mix of Dungeons & Dragons, UNO and Magic: The Gathering. Each player is an explorer who look in rooms, battle monsters, get loot, and simultaneously help each other and stab each other in the back until one person hits level 10 and wins. It helps that the cards are tremendously amusing, the game is fairly easy to pick up, and it's downright addicting.

I got it on a whim, and by the next day all three of us guys had roped our respective others into playing as well (surprise surprise, the girls loved it too). I'm always a sucker for a good card game (especially since they're portable), and Munchkin has the bonus of adding onto it with three expansion packs (Munchkin 2-4). On top of this, there are different versions of Munchkin, each with a theme -- Space Munchkin (scifi), Super Munchkin (superheroes), and so on. As wacky as it sounds, there's even a way to combine all of the different Munchkin decks into one really weird game: super spies battling elf clerics for control of a laser bazooka.

So, it comes highly recommended from Pooly and from me: Munchkin!

Munchkin at Wikipedia