Game Review: "Killer Bunnies"

Kim and I have just finished playing our first ever hand of the card game Killer Bunnies.

We got the game because we are on our bi-annual board game kick and thought that any game called killer bunnies was probably worth a try.

I assume this is why most people buy the game because I am pretty damn sure almost no-body actually plays it.

I base that simple assumption on the fact that if people did actually try to play it then someone  would have noticed that the instructions are long, confusing and almost totally useless long before us.

In one manner the game was a total success, because after only a few short hours (that only felt like 30 years wandering the desert) I am now filled with the kind of quiet rage that can only be sated by killing small furry animals.

We started with the book helpfully labelled "Read this first" which was useful but lacked detail.

Next we went to the "Read this second" book and got a good dose of detail which was (unfortunately at this point in the learning process) totally useless.

Assuming (rightly as it turns out) that the secrets of this arcane game had been lost in translation from the original latin-martian-hyroglyphs from which it had obviously been translated (English does not need to be someones first language but it should be in the top 15 if they choose to write instructions booklets) we finally turned to the bastion of all quick fix knowledge… Youtube.

Our questions were many and varied:

"How do you resolve combat?"

"Does the vicious bunny with fangs and claws fight exactly the same as the timid bunny standing in a puddle of its own fear?"

"Why is the store named after an esoteric school of Judaic mysticism? - is that reason for the poor translation?"

Our answers were few:

"Um… maybe we can figure it out as we go along..."

The first 2 videos we found did not fill us with courage as they showed other couples like ourselves starting with bright eyes and cheerful optimism as they opened the game box for the first time - and then followed their rapid decent into frustration, madness, abuse, mutual recriminations and eventual divorce as they totally failed to make any sense of what we were learning was not a game but a form of "stealth relationship annulment".

One woman got so bored that after only a few minutes she was picking things off the carpet and eating then (in the obvious hope of contracting something horrible that would shorted the game) while her husband could seen furrowing his brow to the point that it looked like the Michelin mans ass and mentally planning the shorted route to the local gun store.

Finally the third video showed a (now) single man who had obviously determined to salvage something out of the wreckage of his home life explaining how the game is played - or would be if the game could be played by one person.

Kim and I left that lone madman to his tragic ramblings and turned our baleful eyes back at the instruction booklet. "Damn it! Our combined IQ reads like the national deficit! We MUST be able to figure out one stupid little game!!!!"

And so now I sit typing with the last ounces of strength left in my ravaged body.

I can report that Kim and I did indeed defeat the game, we deciphered the rules and played through a full hand and were finally able to report… "Meh"

The truth is that we'd been playing munchkins the previous night and it is a far superior game, the munchkin jokes are funnier, the munchkin play is faster and even the artwork on the cards is more interesting (seriously the bunnies looked ordinary and the carrots all looked gender confused for some reason).


(For details on Munchkins see here: http://www.worldofmunchkin.com/game/ Don't Google it as you'll get the site for "Melbourne's Premier Talent Agency" first - Really. A talent agency called Munchkins!) 

Kim described the cards as cartoon rejects from the village people and cited one image of a pink rabbit that looked like it was backing up towards a prison with nothing but a bar of soap and wide grin. But then again, she needs glasses to read.

Bunnies is not as bad as I make it out to be (but that's not for lack of trying) it aims at "camp and farce" but lands squarely in the land of "cheap and disturbing".

That said, we'll play it again. If for no other reason than to inflict our pain on others and give us an easy target to take out pent up frustrations on.

If you're feeling like testing (or ending) your relationship give it a go, but just remember that the best way to actually learn the game is to play it 2 or 3 times figuring out what you did wrong each time rather than expecting the rules to give you any meaningful clue before hand.

Best of luck.