Munchkin

This is less of a review and more of a public service announcement: Munchkin is a bad game. One scowling King Philip, This is the actual score this time, none of that switch and bait that I did for the Arkham Horror review. I do mean it, check the score at the end if you don't believe me. This IS the Cliff's Notes version of the review. How much more can I say about it? Oh, okay, I guess I actually need to put some kind of argument behind my thinking and why I consider this one of the possible worst, casual, light games out there. Now, you might think that I might be spitting out words like 'casual' and 'light' like I was invoking the name of the killer of my father in one of those classic spaghetti western's, but in fact I don't actual hold negative connotations with those words, objectively. Subjectively, I usually don't play light games but that's more of a personal choice rather than a dictum, and even then I break my own rules when something light, fun, quick and amazing comes out to the table, of which foremost in recent memory Love Letter comes to the fore. I will actually use Love Letter as an example of a 'fun' (yeah yeah yeah, sue me) game done right and will use it throughout the review as a means of comparison, although I will dot the forthcoming paragraphs with other examples of stuff that I play that I consider light.

I don't usually have a problem with length. As you might have spotted before, I tend to write review that stray to the other side of long. I have played games that have spanned entire days and I did not get bored, with the monster 18C2C coming to mind, due to its 11 hour span involving a game about fucking trains. So yeah, length of game is never an issue for me and it's very rare that I get bored. About the only moderately complex game that I ever got bored of was Ora & Labora and I still, to this day, can't quite put down why I got so bored. In light games, though, length infuriates the hell out of me. Cosmic Encounter turns me kind of angry due the unnecessary length that it had and Munchkin is pretty much one of the worst offenders of the lot. I have had situations in which I was able to complete a game of Twilight Struggle before the table next to me finished playing their game of Munchkin, and this was a TS game that went to turn 10. It is that bad and it is an issue. Length can be an issue in relatively light games because if there is little depth to a game, the game can and will drag on if it continues going after a certain amount of time: this is especially true in games in which there is a high element of luck, because people that get screwed at the start will still have to play until the end even if they have little chance of winning. This is even MORE true in games in which luck at the start enables you to become better and better, amplifying the issue and making the people that fall behind even less likely to win. Unfortunately, it is this latter category that Munchkin falls squarely into. Shorter games don't fall into this trap, even if they are highly random: if the game is quick, the board resets and everyone is on even footing again. Spending 5 minutes with no chance of winning is immeasurably better than spending half an hour or even a whole hour with little chance of winning.

As an extreme example, Lover Letter is a game in which (in the original printing of the rules), you can lose a round in your very first turn, and there's nothing you can do about it. You would think that this would make the game entirely shit, but the fact is that you'll laugh about your misfortune and then just wait the 2 to 5 minutes or so until the next round starts. Imagine having this occur, but instead of being out of the round, you have to keep playing and a round can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour: this is Munchkin, this is why Munchkin is bad and it's why length is such an important factor when attempting to analyse highly random games or even light games as a whole.

Munchkin creates even more problems with its 'fuck-the-leader' endgame coupled with massive games of chicken every single round. Since players can play cards to prevent others from outright winning, but since you want other people to use their cards and not use yours, you end up with a single combat taking far too long. Creating a mechanism in which one player HAS to play something to stop someone from winning but playing the card that does this puts you at a disadvantage does not lead to a time-friendly game. This is, unless, you take the asshole route where you flip over the door, shout '1-2-3-I WIN' and take loot/levels before your stunned opponents can do anything. This certainly speeds up the game but labels you instantly as an asshole, probably one of the few actual decisions with impact that you will have in the game.This length problem segues neatly with another issue with the game: the winner of the game is usually the one that manages to gain level 10 before everyone has used their 'fuck you over' cards, which you usually want to hoard since they are so crucial to the end game. This leads to a situation in which the mid-game doesn't even really matter and you could be the most spruced out character that ever existed but because you tried to gain level 10 when everyone still had their cards, the wimpy guy after you with just a crappy sword wins instead. I find it weird that the winner is not usually decided by who has the most stuff (which, in some ways, is the definition of a Munchkin), but instead by random luck of being the player after the best one.

Munchkin, for a light game, is also prone to a lot of rule misinterpretation and having to go back and check the rules can kill social interaction while someone has to check how power X interacts with power Y. As well as that, the game rules earnestly encourage cheating, something that can never end well. Due to the aforementioned length, the way that the end-game is setup and the rules-lawyering that can occur, the social interaction that occurs while the game is being played edges towards 'almost starting a fist-fight' more often than not. Take the social interaction within Love Letter: it's targeted to specific people and essentially can knock a person out of a round entirely, but due to the aforementioned shortness of the game the game is almost designed for casual banter and the jokey insults that you want to create while playing a light game. Kings of Tokyo is another good example, with situations in which people go 'Come on you coward, keep some of those claws instead of healing!'. Munchkin is too reliant on this banter in order to work and due to the way that the game is structured and the length of the game (and therefore the level of emotional involvement within the game, since there's more emotional strain at becoming second in hour-long games as compared to short games) leads to interaction which stops being friendly and can start being actively adversarial.

Munchkin, as touched on earlier, shares many of the issues that are also present within Talisman, in that due to random luck of the draw you could win pretty much at the start and if you don't, it's going to be a difficult road ahead. Since whatever you are facing is entirely random, you are just as likely to fight a level 2 monsters as some unbeatable high level monsters when you are level 1. The only realistic way to prevent this would have been to have tiered decks with the player either being able to choose or being forced to use a particular tier when they kick down a door: this of course, would have meant that the design of the game would have at least a little bit of thought behind it.

Another point against Munchkin is that it is a fundamentally exclusionary game. In order to get the humour you have to be immersed and understand the entire background and the tropes associated with fantasy dungeoneering. For someone that started in RPGs and progressed to board games this wasn't an issue with me: I understood all the jokes and found some of them even funny, but imagine that you introduce the game to someone that has no experience of RPGs: they either won't understand the joke or they might just see most of them as weak puns (which most of them are). The game is targeted almost exclusively for nerds and thanks to the fact that board gaming is becoming more and more mainstream, games like Munchkin are just going to make people unable to fit and can even potentially drive them away.

So, are there any positives about Munchkin at all? First of all, I'm going to cut the 'beer and pretzel' argument before it can even be formed: yes, games, even bad ones, can be played just to have fun while drinking with friends, no, this doesn't make the game good, no, I'm not saying that you absolutely can't have fun with Munchkin, yes, we can rank games by listing them using objective criteria and no, I don't usually accept those sorts of propositions but I might think about it if you send me a picture. With all of those questions over and done with, there is one element of Munchkin that I do find compelling, which also ties in with one of the problems listed before: some of the cards that you can play to make a monster harder are kind of funny and can lead to funny situation in which you say stuff like 'I'm facing a dragon! But now he's a big dragon! Now he's an elderly big dragon! Now he's an elderly big dragon with spikes!". I don't know how, but Munchkin might be a better game if it had focused on that, although 'fixing Munchkin' must rank high up there in terms of difficult, probably comparable to 'proving unified field theory'.

Overall, Munchkin does so much stuff wrong that I almost wonder how I ended up where I am today, considering that when I originally started playing board games I had loads of Munchkin boxes and I remember having fun with the game. That's why, within the SA board game thread, we often tell people that while fun can be had with Munchkin, there's so much better stuff out there. Some people do take offense, but more often than not we do get people that say 'Wow you guys were right'. It's not even about being elitist, it's more about broadening the horizons of people and even if someone tries better game and then comes back and says 'well I still find Munchkin enjoyable', more power to them, it's no one's job to say that other people's tastes in games are somehow 'wrong'. Still, Munchkin gets ZERO (nah, I'm joking, the scale only goes 1 to 5), ONE angry scowling King Philip out of five.

Talisman

This particular review is going to be more of an attempt to show how the development of games has positively affected the views of people that actually play games and how nostalgia can be a powerful force when it comes to trying to determine what is good and what is not. I think there are powerful memories associated with this particular game and it actually becomes quite a contentious issue in terms of trying to talk with people about how we can objectively assess the worth of a game. It becomes difficult to fight the perceptions of people when, after telling them that you think the game is bad/has bad rules, they simply respond with "well I had fun, doesn't that invalidate your argument?". Well, in a way, it does, because of the aforementioned cemented perspective, but that still doesn't stand to scrutiny. Still, there shouldn't be a reason to comment negatively on the choices someone makes in order to have fun: we aren't trying to be the Fun Police and shaming people into playing games that we think are somehow, in our mind's eye, objectively better. The argument almost always comes down to this crux: if you find something fun and repeating that activity is fun to you, then there's no reason why people should suggest that you play something else just because in the wider community that game is not considered to be good.

On the other hand, I think there is an element of trying to inform people about the alternatives: if they are aware of what are so-termed 'superior' alternatives and still choose to play the so-termed 'inferior' game, more power to them. But if being informed makes them at least try what was suggested and they like it better, I think this can be a positive force within the community. There's almost nothing lost by following this route and much to gain, although it can occur that the sensibilities of some people that are overly attached to their games (or even to the definition of good/bad) can be hurt by aggressively campaigning for better games.

Quite frankly, fuck those people, especially if they come to a discussion forum and mysteriously find that people disagree with them and thus are subsequently  outraged by this. There's a saying about heat and kitchens and it fits equally well in regards to forums and discussion: if you can't stand discussions, why are you in a forum in the first place?

Anyway, going back to Talisman itself, in a sentence, the game is bad. Really bad. It manages to incorporate some of the very worst elements of 80s boardgaming design and the game really shows its age. For those not familiar with the game, the basis of it is that you are an adventurer walking around a realm divided into different concentric zones and you move up and down it fighting monsters, getting items and growing in power. Eventually, you are powerful enough to defeat the bigger, stronger creatures nearer the center of the board and thus you travel to that zone (after completing a random quest) in order to gain the crown of command and use it to kill the other players. In actuality, very few players will be able to experience even a fraction of accomplishments listed above. 

The problems start at the character selection/randomization stage. Each character within the game has different special abilities, power and crafting. Unfortunately, it becomes readily apparent that some are widely overpowered while others are distinctively underpowered, which gives a distinct advantage to the player that picks/is lucky enough to get the good characters.

Movement across the board is done by rolling a dice, destroying all possible attempts at a cohesive strategy by forcing you to make one of two choices when running around the board. There might be a magic item that some other hero decided not to take but unless you roll the correct number, you aren't going to get it. Combat is a simple matter of dice roll + stat, with an all or nothing result, which more often than not leads to situation in which you just can't improve your character since you keep facing the stronger enemies rather than falling over items like other heroes seem to be doing.The end game is, as you might have guessed, another dice-fest, with the holder of the crown just rolling dice until the other players die. This is a game in which the game gets more boring once you get in the lead, surely a piece of genius design intended to keep the fun level constant both among people losing and winning.

One argument that you'll often hear in favour of Talisman is that you are meant to view it as a progression, a storyline of the increasing power of your hero. Unfortunately, the game actively prevents certain people from achieving this goal and acts more like an adversarial DM that, not wanting you to have even a modicum of choice, decides where your character moves for you. The location are also fairly boring: some of the regions have extra rules but it feels almost too mechanical: A better storyline is created even in relatively terrible games of Arkham Horror, because at least the locations within the game feel distinct and each had different challenges and in the end, at least gives you some choice on how to perform your turn, something that is completely lacking with Talisman.

To wrap it up, since I think I have expended more words that I would ever want to while talking about Talisman, the game is bad. It is, although I almost not dare say it, objectively bad. There are so many mechanisms within the game which seem almost destined to make the game reach an state in which a large proportion of the people playing it will not have as good a time as others, but selective memory always seem to center around remembering the good times, when you fought a dragon rather than not being able to beat anything at all. The only reason to play this would be just to bring back the old nostalgia from those times, but if you want to be a hero in a fantasy setting there is so much out there nowadays that it seems weird that people still fall back on this particular game.

Unfortunately, I can only give 1 angry scowling Philip since this game should have remained in whatever weird board-gaming museum it came from.