My kids and I are big Munchkin fans. I doubt we're the target demographic -- 48-year-old stay-at-home Mom and three boys aged 9, 14, and 17 -- but I'm sure we're not the only outliers with five or six versions of the card game.

Today, my kids and I just played Munchkin Quest for the first time. While we couldn't finish because we ran out of time, we enjoyed the four turns we managed. Four complicated, byzantine turns with more choices than a Sushi bar. In each of those four turns we forgot at least one important step; for example, twice we forgot to roll the dice for combat, and once or twice we forgot to move the monsters.

The turns took for-creeping-ever, mostly because we were processing all the steps over and over again trying to be sure we were covering everything and still trying to make intelligent choices -- intelligent being a relative, debatable, absurdly ill-fitting word for what I mean. In any case, in the time it took to get through everyone's turn, I could knit the better part of a mitten. We've learned to be patient when we're learning a new game, and, after all, you can never have too many mittens.

Nice thing about the Munchkin Quest was that we were already so comfortable with the basic idea of Munchkin that we could afford to be adventurous. We looked forward to the monsters, even before we were beefy enough to beat them; and we took our chances on some of the other possibilities besides combat. Even with our familiarity with the game concept, it still took a long time to get through our first turns, and I thought I would have a seizure when my son finally completed a battle and proceeded to explore yet another new room so that he could fight another monster. As someone suggested in another thread, a house rule that limits players to one move on the first turn would probably appeal to the Munchkins in my house. We'd probably work our way up to three moves over the course of two or three turns: one move for the first turn, two for the next two turns, and three from then on.

While I would argue that the game bits are the new stars of the game, the best part for me was adding dice rolls to combat so that you no longer just pile weapon upon weapon and end up winning. Rolling dice to resolve combat, weighting the outcome based on relative strength, offers some uncertainty and suspense that was missing from the card game.

Though I'm not sure I would have had the patience to learn Munchkin Quest without our previous Munchkin experience, as Munckin fans, we can't wait to start another game tomorrow; and we look forward to the gloomy weather looming up ahead so we can really hunker down with some Wight Brothers, a Psycho Squirrel, and the Unspeakably Awful Incredible Horror lurking in the Dungeon.