First Impressions of Killer Bunnies

A game with the title Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot is not a game to be taken too seriously. It is also not a game for the easily upset, or those with an appreciation for good graphic design, as the psychedelic explosion of coloured cards in your hand attests to. Yet, this is a game with an eye-watering 10 expansions out there. Someone clearly loves this game!

So what do you do? Well, after getting over the artwork induced headache, you’ll see you have a mixture of rabbit cards, that you’ll want to have out in front of you, and an array of attack and defence cards. To use these, you’ll typically need some rabbits out first, but even then things aren’t so simple because you need to “plan” your turns in advance through an action-programming mechanism. You play cards face down in front of you, revealing one each turn so that your cards always appear two turns after you played them. This often leads to the humorous situation whereby the card you played can no longer do anything once it arrives because all your bunnies have been killed. Oh yes, the violence.

I mentioned you’d have a vast pile of attack cards waiting to be unleashed upon your hapless opponents, most of which exist to kill their bunnies. This is not a game for the squeamish as bunnies are splatted in various humorous ways, from kitchen whisks to a nuclear warhead. Or really play with fire and unleash the ebola virus that relentlessly spreads throughout the game’s rabbit population until EVERYTHING IS DEAD. If you love silly take-that card games you might well love the ridiculousness, the nastiness, the ludicrous vengeful battles. But I couldn’t get on with it.

Perhaps I wasn’t in the mood, but frankly there’s not really a game here. You put down cards and see what happens. Maybe you’ll scrounge together enough money or some lucky cards that will let you buy one of the carrots that might win you the game. And you’ll keep doing that, round after round until, an hour and a half later you come to the end phase. An end phase so ridiculous it invalidates the entire evening you just spent playing it.

Each carrot has a number, and one random carrot is determined (by revealing the last card of a separate deck) to be the magic carrot and whoever holds that is the winner. You could have all but one carrot and still lose. Now, I understand it adds tension, especially if you reveal one card at a time, and it ensures no one gives up entirely earlier in the game, but honestly I’d almost prefer you just dealt out the carrots at random and skipped the 90 minutes of exploding rabbits that precedes it. I just cannot stand spending that much time for a crap-shoot! Not recommended.