Devil Bunny Needs a Ham

Okay, here's the story that introduces this demented game from the folks over at Cheapass Games: "You are a cadre of wily sous-chefs, trying to scale a very tall building. Devil Bunny is enthusiastically preventing you from reaching the top because he needs a ham, and because he erroneously believes that this will help him." With a backstory so delightfully inane, I was certain that the game would need special help for testing, so my fiancee and I with some friends drank Jagermeister shots for about an hour, to see what would happen to our game comprehension and playing ability.

Luckily, this is a Cheapass Game: $2 to buy, 10 minutes to learn and (presumably) a lifetime to master. The board is composed of two cardboard pieces that form the building which you and your fellow players are attempting to climb. You get a really bitchin' Devil Bunny counter, and then you just need some dice and you're ready to go. I can also report that if you spill hard liquor on the game surface, it recovers a lot better than the old TSR Monster Manual ever did, which is a big plus in my book.

Game play is fiendishly simple: people roll dice and move diagonally up and down, jockeying their way up the building. Devil Bunny moves in a semi-random fashion, with some rules for how he reacts when he gets closer to the meat...and if he encounters you, odds are you're going for a fall down the building. If another player is beneath you as you fall, he automatically saves you, which leads to the weird situation that players try not to be underneath one another so that players WILL fall far enough and die a miserable death...which ,if you're drunk, we celebrated by dancing around the table.

I don't remember a lot about the game's conclusion, and I'm not certain what happened to my sample copy...I think someone used it to help mop up spills.

The Verdict

I can tell you this: Cheapass makes great games that are light, inexpensive and go great with wine, women and singing. Buy a few before your next gaming night and take a break from the angst--you won't regret it.

You may not remember it, but you'll be happy.