Munchkin Cthulu - A Crazy Dungeonesque Card Game

Blog post number two finds us yet again in CS 108 for a round of game sharing. I attempted to bring in the game of LIMBO to share with everyone to find out that the teacher had told us NOT to bring in digital video games to show to the class members. Unfortunately I missed that memo. LIMBO piques my curiosity because it's such a highly rated indie game that I am absolutely terrible at. And I'm terrible at it for a couple of good reasons which I will have to get into in another blog post at a later time.

For now I'd like to talk about the game that I was forced to partake in which goes by the name of Munchkin. It's a multiplayer game which attempts to emulate a randomized dungeon crawler via cards with the ability to ruin other people's prospects of winning while attempting to win yourself.

The goal is to reach level 10 as fast as possible by defeating monsters which earn you experience. Each monster felled gives 1 level. Additionally, you can draw cards that give you levels as well.

But now it gets more confusing. On my first play through we played a special edition of Munchkin called Cthulu Munchkin which I'm not entirely sure in which ways it's different from the original as I'd never played either before but oh well.

There are classes and races as well which are given to you via cards but which barely seem to have any affect on the outcome of the game. Occasionally your powers are weakened or boosted because of your class or race but like the majority of Munchkin, it's all random.

Every player takes a turn by drawing a card and can draw treasure or a monster and then attempt to "loot the room" or "battle a monster". Unfortunately my avatar was so weak that I never got the chance to battle a single monster the entire game.

In the end there are so many different mechanics that I still hadn't figured out a viable strategy by the end of a 45 minute play session. Between an inventory, multiple types of cards (curses, monsters, items), multiple players all playing in an independent sense of trying to outlevel each other but also helping or hurting others to partake in group looting or to bring them down a level before they reach level 10, the game doesn't seem possible to pick up on your first or even second playthrough. Below are a sample of Munchkin cards which should help me convey the complexity of the game:

My one favorite part of the game is that it's obvious from the cards that the game doesn't take itself too seriously. A good bit of the cards are actually pretty funny however some seem to be feeble attempts at non-standard humor.

Overall I'd say my experience with the game was pretty poor and I'm definitely not going to try to play it ever again. For one it's far too hard to jump into as a newbie which is always bad for a game.