Mad Munchkins

No actual D&D this week, as our thief is out of town and we kinda need him to finish opening the chest, so we got together and played other games instead. Two of them I had never played before. The other, Othello, was a way to pass the time until the rest of the players arrived. Despite not having played against anything other than a computer for a very long time, I managed to win at Othello. It was a near thing, as I was nearly boxed in, and decided now might be the time to give up a corner in order to salvage something from the situation ... and wound up taking all the corners instead, as I was able to take the opposite penultimate corner slot and stop Fibonacci from getting the corner I had intended to give up.

Anyway, on to the games I hadn't played before. First, the Mad Magazine Game*, which is a Monopoly spoof where the object is to lose all your money. The spaces on the board have instructions like "everyone move one chair to your (left|right)", "switch money with a player", "roll the dice three times and go that many spaces backwards around the board", etc. It's a hoot. John/Allonar (since there's another John who comments here, I figure I ought to specify) wound up winning, due to fortuitous money shifting and landing on a space where he got to lose more money than he currently had.

Then John/Allonar also brought Munchkin**, and we played that. I'd never played it before, though I'd read some descriptions. It's basically a D&D parody. You start out as a classless human. If you draw a class or race card, you can choose to become that, at least until you get cursed out of it. Every time you defeat a monster, you go up a level. If you can't defeat the monster, you can get help from a fellow player ... but watch out, as they will only do so if it benefits them. The first person to reach Level 10 wins. John/Allonar won the first game, despite us valiantly trying to sabotage his last fight with as many curses as we could muster (cooperating to stop someone else from winning seems to be a given), and I squeaked in as winner on the second game. Amusingly, Andrew agreed to help with what seemed like it should be my last fight, expecting to sabotage me at the last minute with a "Drop 2 levels" curse card...except I had the wishing ring and made the curse go away. Something else had happened so I didn't win on that fight, but on my next turn, I was up against a Level 1 something-or-other, and everyone had used up nearly all their curse cards trying to sink other last efforts. Someone had a +3 to play on the monster, making it Level 4, and Abe had a "mate" card, so that put it to Level 8 total ... and I was sitting comfortably at 15 (17 -2 from another curse), including all the item modifiers I had.

Thus a fun time was had by all, but I suspect Allonar and I will be ganged up on the next time we have a non-D&D gaming night. ^!^

*The Mad game is out of print, but there are "collectible" versions for sale for $84 on up at the Amazon link if you really want a copy.

**There are over a dozen varieties of this at Amazon, but, afaik, we were playing the original card game version.