Famous tabletop game Munchkin is going digital

Love it or hate it, Munchkin has been a fixture of the tabletop gaming scene for 20 years, a take-that backstabbing card game where players seek to be the first, richest, most horrible little person to get level 10. It's finally coming to digital, as Dire Wolf has announced an adaptation in partnership with Munchkin publisher Steve Jackson Games.

In Munchkin, players compete with each other in a series of rounds to explore the dungeon, get loot, and take treasure. Along the way they find magical weapons, like the chainsaw of bloody dismemberment, get races and classes, and fight monsters like Internet Trolls and the Plutonium Dragon.

If you hadn't figured it out, Munchkin was at the time of its 2001 release a parody of tabletop roleplaying's least-liked type of players: The ones who weren't there to roleplay at all.

Dire Wolf plans to release its digital edition of Munchkin in the fall of 2022. It'll include cross-platform multiplayer for what looks like up to six players. There'll be a tutorial segment that promises to teach the "tricks of the adventuring trade" which I can only assume means how to make your friends mad. There'll also be "Solo Challenges with special rules!"

Dire Wolf's previous work runs the gamut of digital tabletop games. Their releases include games like Root, A Game of Thrones, and the recent adaptation of top board game Everdell. Dire Wolf has been pretty reliable in the past for—at the very least—nice, functional ports.

Depending on who you ask, Munchkin is either a legendary classic of tabletop gaming past or infamously miserable and overrated, with few opinions in between. It's one of those games that people either refuse to play, play to kill time, play while drunk, or take far too seriously and get real mad when they lose.

It's one of the most expanded-upon games I can think of, with reworks and expansions running the gamut 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 dead serious.

So I guess you can see why some people might be sick of Munchkin. I guess the real question is this: How many of those expansions do you think we'll see on digital, and will it let us throw them in one 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 releases this fall.

You can find Munchkin Digital on Steam.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.