The Good, The Bad, and the Munchkin

Oh, give me a home where the Jackalopes roam
And the Dudes and the Buckaroos play,
I'll slay and I'll loot, give the monsters the boot,
And the dice are not loaded, no way.

As discussed in an earlier post, my gaming group took a brief respite from chasing zombies camels and extra-dimensional pirates and turned instead to whiskey and cards.  Western card games, that is.  After a very satisfying turn at the Spaghetti Western card game BANG!, we turned to the wild west version of the Munchkin series, The Good, The Bad, and the Munchkin.

Munchkin is a long series of card games that take the basic premise of Dungeons and Dragons and boiled it down to its basest components- kick in doors, kill monsters, steal loot.  Newer versions of the game take players through different genres, including spy movies, sci-fi, Cthulhu, and now the Western. 

In this game players take turns kicking in saloon doors, and either picking up stray gear, sidekicks, and mounts (like a seven-gun, old prospector, and giant riding cat) or shooting it out with a variety of crazy monsters and gunhands (such as the vampiric “Bat Masterson”).  The first time that I played The Good, The Bad, and the Munchkin my wife kicked my ass with a half Dude / half Indian carrying her grandpappy's bow, wearing a ten gallon hat, a twenty gallon hat on top of that, and moccasins of silence. 

Examples of the fun artwork in the game

I hope you liked the “Bat” Masterson joke, because that level of humor is laced throughout the game.  There is barely enough time to laugh at the joke, because the complex rules around backstabbing and double dealing your fellow players take up a lot of your attention.  Games can drag out, particularly if you have a group accustomed to treachery, as you constantly betray one another to end up on top.  Kind of like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, now that I think of it.

A typical hand- this is why the game gets so complex

Fortunately, no guns were drawn at our game

The Good, The Bad, and the Munchkin was fun, just not nearly as fun as I thought it would be.  When we talk about going back to card games occasionally, we always talk about BANG!, and rarely talk about this one.