Munchkins is a game of battling monsters, helping your friends, and then stabbing them in the back to claim victory!

The game starts out where each player chooses a character and collects four door cards and four treasure cards. Treasure cards are generally how you get equipment to gain weapons and armor for your character similar to Dungeons and Dragons. The door cards are where you find monsters to battle and potentially traps.

Early on, you are limited to battling low level monsters which are easy to fight but give very few treasure cards when defeated. You can see a brief summary of how each round goes.

For each round you kick down the door (draw a door card) and if there is a monster, you fight it. If you draw a trap card, you have to do whatever the card says. If you draw a trap card when not "kicking down the door" (for example, when drawing your initial cards) you can save the card to attack another player.

If you defeat the monster, you collect amount of treasure cards listed by the monster's card. You also gain as many levels as specified on the card. A level is the place on the map 1 - 10 (victory). To determine if you win a fight is based on the sum of your level and the level of all the equipment you have equipped.

You can put any equipment cards in your inventory on your character if you they do not have limitations for your race and class. You start out as a human but as you draw door cards you can collect class and race cards which allow you to customize your character. You can change your class or race any time you draw one from the door pile, but you may lose the ability to use weapons and armor if you don't meet the requirements.

When a monster is too high level to fight, you group together to fight it. When you group together, you make a deal with the other player(s) on how much treasure you will share with them. If a monster drops four treasure cards you can give them first and last and you keep two, or even give them all of them if you just need the levels and don't want to die.

At the start of the game you tend to help each other out, near the end of the game you tend not be as willing to help and will even sabotage another player. The first player to reach the 10th room on the board by slaying a monster wins the game. If you die, you lose your equipment but retain your position on the board. Next turn you draw new cards as if you started the game and continue where you were.

Munchkins is a very popular game, and includes a ton of additional versions you can play or merge with your existing game. We own the original Deluxe edition which includes the cards and board, but also have the Space edition.

When buying additional versions, you can choose to merge the card packs or play them alone. As I only own the basic edition of the Space version, we use the Deluxe edition board, but only have the space cards. We usually play with just the space cards but will sometimes merge them together to have a combination of Dungeons and Dragons type of cards and SciFi Space themed cards.

The deluxe edition is only $19.99 on Amazon and is a steal for the amount of entertainment you will have. Especially if you have kids or nieces and nephews, it will fast become their favorite game.

_{All images are from Amazon product pages}