Love him or hate him, Munchkin has been a fixture of the board game scene for 20 years, a treacherous card game in which players seek to be the first richest, most hideous little person to reach level 10. Finally is coming to digital, as Dire Wolf has announced an adaptation in partnership with Munchkin publisher Steve Jackson Games.
In Munchkin, players compete against each other in a series of rounds to explore the dungeon for loot and treasure. Along the way they find magical weapons, like the bloody dismemberment chainsaw, gain careers and classes, and battle monsters like the Internet Trolls and Plutonium Dragon.
If you hadn’t noticed, at the time of its release in 2001, Munchkin was a parody of the least-loved kind of players in tabletop RPGs: the ones who weren’t there to play at all.
Dire Wolf plans to release its digital edition of Munchkin in the fall of 2022. It will include cross-platform multiplayer for what appears to be up to six players. There will be a tutorial segment that promises to teach the “adventurer tricks of the trade”, which I can only assume means how to piss off your friends. There will also be “Solo Challenges with special rules!”
Dire Wolf’s previous work runs the gamut of digital tabletop games. His releases include games like Root, A Game of Thrones, and the recent board game adaptation Everdell. Dire Wolf has been pretty reliable in the past for at least nice and functional ports.
Depending on who you ask, Munchkin is either a legendary classic from board gaming’s past or infamously miserable and overrated, with few opinions in between. It’s one of those games that people refuse to play, play to kill time, play while drunk, or take it too seriously and go crazy. very angry when they lose
It’s one of the most expanded games I can think of, with reworks and expansions ranging from Cthulhu and Sci-Fi Star Munchkin to Zombies, Westerns, Super-Munchkin, Shakespeare, Adventure Time, Post-Apocalypse, Pathfinder, Mythology. , The Wizard of Oz, Marvel, Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer Age of Sigmar and The Walking Dead. None of those are made up, I’m serious.
So I guess you can see why some people might be tired of the Munchkin. I guess the real question is this: How many of those expansions do you think we’ll see digitally? Will it allow us to throw them into a giant pile and mix them up like people do in real life? I doubt we’ll see that kind of wild success, but we’ll certainly find out when it launches this fall.
You can find Munchkin Digital on Steam. (opens in a new tab)
