Well, Saturday evening apocalypse really. Well Saturday evening and Munchkin Apocalypse to be precise. My son and I started playing the Munchkin games about 5 years ago, to paraphrase their blurb, they give you all the fun of killing monsters and taking their treasures, without any of that boring role-playing stuff to get in the way. As a long time dyed-in-the-wool role-player it was great to stumble across these games, they’re fast-moving very well worked-out and often laugh-out-loud hilarious. Almost every single card is based around an awful pun / play on genre stereotypes and wonderfully illustrated by John Kovalic.
They took me straight back to the early 80’s when buying anything from Steve Jackson Games* was usually a sure-thing for a good time, Illuminati (still got that one), OGRE, Car Wars** and all the myriad expansion packs for it. What set these games aside was the flashes of humour they showed in what could be, quite a po-faced hobby – me more so than anyone, don’t get me started on the Great Wandering Monster Falling-Out of 1983!!
There are a number of Munchkin games, all themed differently as well as the basic fantasy-themed one, Munchkin Fu, Munchkin Cthulhu, Star Munchkin etc some of which we’ve tried, but Munchkin Apocalypse is our favourite – basically the world’s ending, we’re all going to die, so let’s kill the monsters and loot their treasure! It’s a conceptually complex thing.
So we fire up the Munchkin level-counter app on our ‘phones, I choose the sounds (I am a tyrant, there is no democracy here) and geek daddy and son get to play a very silly game together on the floor. Long may it roll.
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*usually in those little black plastic boxes.
**thousands of little cardboard pieces, great huge maps and game mechanics that taught me more about physics than any teacher ever managed since.