Kick down the door! Grab the loot!
Thus speaketh the game of destiny. Or the Munchkin dungeon crawling card game. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s Dungeons & Dragons without all the character development and funyuns. (Okay, there can be funyuns, but wipe your hands before you touch the cards, huh?) Every time you kick down a door, you fight a monster, and you get its loot. If you’re not strong enough, you can ask your totally trustworthy fellow players to fight it with you. I’m sure they care only about your survival.
So, where does that bring us with a book? How can you write a story about a game that has no story? It seems you make three. This collection features two stories by Tom Siddell and one by Jim Zub. All three seemed to be aimed at explaining the ideals of the game, and they’re hilarious. The first story, “What Is a Munchkin?” had me giggling my head off. Siddell uses great devices to establish his tone from the very first panel and doesn’t let up. It’s an entire story bent on telling you what Munchkin really isn’t first, letting you luxuriate when he gets down to showing you what it is.
Siddell lays in the greatest part of the basic premise of the game in his two stories, and the fun that can be had from it. Zub comes in for the master class, highlighting the dark side of joining in a game and exactly how much fun that side can be . . . mwahahaha. Haha. Anyhow, the artwork is very reminiscent of the game’s style and packaging, and the places where the teams diverge from it are fun and memorable.
From what I’ve espoused so far, it seems like this issue is a long-form advert that you get to buy! Kind of, but if you’re a fan of the series, you’ve gotten a valuable tool for getting new players into the ideas of the series, and if you’ve never played but have always wondered about the basic mechanics, then this is your intro into this meme-creating and most ridiculously fun world, and it’s worth checking out.
I look forward to the next entries into this series, to see where these whackadoo writers take us next, writing stories for the game that did away with stories.
Share the stories that move you.
