TPK: Total Party Kill
- Board's Eye View
- 24 hours ago
- 2 min read
TPK (Total Party Kill) is a fully cooperative card game for 2-5 players. It's designed by Roberto Alhambra, with art by Benji Santiago, and it's published by GDM.
Your party of characters is adventuring in a dungeon, revealing dungeon cards that'll mean battling monsters and hoping to nab treasure. Just as you'd expect. However, this is a limited communication game; you can see exactly what specific weapons or equipment are needed to defeat each of the monsters that appear, and you have a good idea about what proportion of each type of card the other players have in their individual decks. However, you don't know what cards they've drawn or which cards they've reserved face down to play.
The game is played over seven rounds, representing the seven levels of the dungeon. At each level the number of dungeon cards revealed is the number of players multiplied by the level; so in the first round in, for example, a four-player game, you'll only draw four dungeon cards but in the seventh round you'll draw and have to deal with 28 dungeon cards! Each round therefore escalates in difficulty.
You obviously get to play more cards each round but as the number of dungeon cards increases so too does the chance of players making a mistake; leaving it to another player to play a specific card and finding they don't have it in their hand... When that happens, you all lose.
Some of the dungeon cards are treasures rather than monsters. These you just take and add to your draw deck. They become your collective score when you succeed at the end of Level 7 but only if they are still in players' decks. Treasures also function as wild cards so when you draw them into your hand you may need to spend them to ensure you aren't defeated.
Tho' players need to be able to put themselves on each other's wavelength over what cards they are likely to decide to play, the game itself is easy to learn and play. It scales very well for different player counts, and it works as a children's and family game as well as a fun 20-minute filler for more hardened grown-up gamers: one to play as a warm-up or cool-down on your next D&D night?