I am Boss Monster’s prey. It’s adorable, it’s cruel, it has frickin’ 8-bit art! What’s not to love? I adore being the bad guy, and as you may have guessed by the title, you are exactly that. So yes, thank you! I’ll gladly play a few rounds.

This is a relatively quick game, so even when you lose it’s not the worst thing ever. As you play, you’ll build a dangerous and enticing dungeon with your cards – representing rooms – trying to find a delicate balance between making it appealing to the nearby town’s heroes and nasty enough to kill them in horrible, horrible ways. A few “good guys” will survive and take you down a notch, but you’re a Boss Monster, so it takes a handful of them to kill you. Likewise, you need a handful of their corpses mounted in your trophy room to win.

Magic spells come in handy periodically, but not as often as perhaps they could. They feel less of a tactic and more a matter of luck, but that’s fine. The fun is seeing each dungeon grow more vicious and its traps and monsters more deadly as the bodies of unfortunate do-gooders pile up. Most rooms have unique traits or actions that feel pretty magical, so I have a weak gripe at best.

Design-wise, Boss Monster is aces, summoning all the delightful cleverness of early video game RPGs (like Chrono Trigger) peppered with an absurd amount of pop culture references that are more enjoyable than pop culture references have any right to be. The gameplay feels reasonably balanced but, being a card game, there’s only so much you can rely on skill. The rest is the luck of the draw, so do your best to appreciate the content. You know, in case you get clobbered the first few times.

In short – if you were a child of the 80s or 90s, you should probably just get this game. If you’ve got a spare $25, grab the “sequel”, too. It’s worth it. Boss Monster will playfully tickle your nostalgia bone, then tear it from your body, toss it to your friends and let them beat you to death with it.

4 out of 5.

It’s like coming home.

You can find it at http://www.brotherwisegames.com/