Killer Bunnies: Quest – Blue Starter Deck
2-8
12+
90
Killer Bunnies is a fast paced, action filled card game, in which you must try to keep as many Bunnies alive as possible, while eliminating your opponents’ Bunnies.
The problem: Your opponents are armed with weapons and will stop at nothing to keep you from winning the game, which can be dreadfully vengeful, horribly nasty, hilariously messy, and just plain fun!
Can you keep from being attacked by the whimsical Whisk or the torching Flame Thrower? Defend your Bunnies with the Magic Spatula or use the Feed the Bunny card to starve our an opponent! It’s off-the-wall strategic fun where the goal is to survive and claim the Magic Carrot to win the game!
This Blue Starter Set includes the Yellow Booster Deck
User Reviews (11)
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If you enjoy strategic games where every turn you have complete control over the mathematical possibilities for victory based solely on tactical advantage and advanced planning and calculated stratagem… RUN THE OTHER WAY!
Killer Bunnies is a humorous, fast-paced anything can happen card game. With one Starter Set (Blue and Yellow) and ten expansions …(ready? Ahem… Red, Violet, Orange, Green, Twilight White, Stainless Steel, Perfectly Pink, Wacky Khaki, Ominous Onyx and Chocolate) and so many pop culture references you will think you died and gone to TV Land.
The object of the game is deceptive… ok … no its not, it’s called the “Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot” for a reason. Let’s get a bit more specific…
Style/Components: (Goofy, Spoofy and Satirical)
All the artwork and even the instruction book are a special style of cartoon-like characters – ones that should be pretty recognizable to most anyone who has been around gaming for the last 10 years. Most are quite ingenious and fun, and that is just what the design adds to the game: and extra layer of fun.
Game-play: (Fast and “Furry”-us)
In a nutshell, you win the game by capturing the “Magic Carrot,” which is secretly chosen at the beginning of the game out of 12 possible Carrots. Each Carrot card has a “personality” and a name. (There is one that looks like Spock, and another that’s a Terminator look-a-like). Throughout the game you kill bunnies and capture carrots until the last one is captured. If you have a bunny in play and have the Magic Carrot you win. Piece o’ cake. (Carrot cake of course.)
The most effective way to kill a Bunny in this game is through the use of Weapons (of course!) and there are some doosies: from an Ice Pick to a Nuclear Warhead. Each weapon has a probability to hit rolled on the d20 – usually the larger the weapon, the easier to hit.
The card play of KB Quest is unique and can be summed up in 4 words: “Flip – Slide – Draw – Replace.” With a hand of cards, players play two from their hand in line in front of them – one on top of the other. On a turn players FLIP the top card (Playing it), They SLIDE the bottom card up to the top of the line, DRAW a card from the draw pile, then REPLACE the bottom card with one from their hand. So effectively you have to prepare your next turn’s card on your current turn, even if when your turn comes around, you will be unable to play it because your bunny is now a burnt cinder. Que sera sera.
There a few other card types, “Dollas” (the game currency) with which to purchase things (like Carrots) and more powerful effects (“Special” and “Very Special” Cards) that you can save and use to protect you bunnies or kill others – but beyond that, most of the game is reading the cards, applying affects and rolling dice to kill bunnies in many horrific ways.
Value: (Good fun for the price)
One purchase can give you many games of fun, even without the other 10 expansions. But even these are only $10 a pop. The cards are high quality and don’t give out after many plays. Great replay value at a reasonable price.
Overall Review: (This game makes road-kill fun)
KB Quest is a game for casual gamers and families, (especially kids or kids at heart) and even avid gamers who love unpredictable outcomes. Power gamers and strategy gamers steer clear. (I love seeing serious Magic: the Gathering players’ faces after one game!) But seriously it’s about as unserious as a game can get. Random elements abound especially with 6-8 players. But it’s a game you can really get into; so much so I once saw a grown woman leap onto the table and do a screaming victory dance after her first win in 5 games. Really? Yes really.
One gripe with the game, (pet peeve alert) are the extremely poorly written rules. In an attempt to be humorous and fun-loving throughout the rulebook, the designer put so many funny personal comments throughout that it actually makes learning the game from the instructions difficult. Unfocused and wordy. So, have someone teach you, or visit http://www.killerbunnies.com for FAQ and a better understanding of the game.
Other than that, load your flamethrower, grab your magic spatula and get ready to wreak some hare havoc!
Say you are playing a game that you have dominated from round one. There are, say, 25 points available, and you have scored 18 of them in a 5 player game. That means you won, right? Not so in Killer Bunnies…
Does that bother you? Does the very idea set your teeth on edge? If so, I strongly recommend that you give this game a pass at your local game store.
This is a card game. As a card game, there is a certain amount of randomness that one can expect. You shuffle and deal, getting a random hand, and then get random cards to play with. Killer Bunnies adds another layer to that randomness.
I will get this out of the way. During the course of play, you will be awarded Magic Carrots. This makes sense, since you are after all questing for them as the title suggests. Depending on how many expansions your are playing with, you have 12 to 20 or so. Play ends when all Magic Carrots have been claimed. Then, a random carrot is chosen from another stack which declares which carrot is the winning carrot. It is very possible that a guy with only one carrot at the end is therefore the winner.
One other hangup I want to get out of the way before tackling the gameplay; everything a card does is not in every case printed on the card. There comes with the base game, and each expansion as well, an errata booklet covering what certain cards to, because not everything fits on the card. I am not talking about looking up what vigilance does in Magic the Gathering, and then you always know that vigilance means that the card does not tap when attacking, I mean that without the information in the card compendium, you will not know how to use the card fully. Let me give an example…
Fingercuffs states that it shares the fate of two bunnies. It gives examples of what buffs can be shared between the two bunnies. What it doesn’t say, however, is that the bunnies cannot be separated by a barrier and a new bunny cannot be physically placed between the fingercuffed bunnies. This is not an effect that shows up with other cards, so the restrictions do not exist on other cards. The card compendiums or a really good memory, therefore, are necessary to take along with the cards.
One more thing. Certain cards mention effects they have on things that are not included in the base set. That is because the folks who made the game had a good idea of what they would later include in expansions, but you will sometimes see reference to things you have never heard of and are not introduced until 4 or 5 expansions down the road. The game is designed so you purchase the expansions in order, although you can pick and choose if you really want to.
So, if you cannot get past that, feel free to move along. If you want to hear more, I will tell you what goes on during a game.
Once you open the box of the base game, you will find 6 12-sided dice of various colors, 12 small carrot cards, 24 water and cabbage cards, 12 larger pink backed carrot cards, the Kaballa’s Market card, which shows the prices of the purchasable cards, the blue deck with 101 cards and the yellow deck consisting of 51 cards. Card art is Loony Toons type of cartoony art. The cards are pretty thick and should stand up over time.
You shuffle up the blue and yellow backed cards together, shuffle both sets of carrot cards and the water cards and cabbage cards and out out the market card. If playing with expansions, those will be in the pile too. Shuffling can take a bit of work when you have several expansions and you have several hundred cards in the deck. Deal 7 cards from the blue and yellow stack. Players put aside money cards or zodiac cards they get and draw back up to 7 cards, and discard any play immediately cards and draw back up to 7 cards until you have 7 cards you get to keep.
You will now have cards labeled Run, Special and Very Special cards. The player puts two cards down horizontally one above the other. This is the player’s top run and bottom run cards. On their turn, they will show their top run card and play it, or if it is a Special or Very Special card, they can bank it to play as an instant later. Otherwise, a Special or Very Special can be played out of your hand, but only once per turn. Banked ones can be piled on. Certain cards cannot be played if the player does not have a bunny card out. Bunnies get played as run cards, but if something unfortunate happens to the bunny before the player’s next turn and the next card in the run is a Run card that requires a bunny to be in play (say, a weapon) then that card is discarded. Bunnies can basically be thought of as your troops, sent out to die for the glory of the Magic Carrot. When your turn is over, you move the bottom run card up and replace it from your hand and draw a card. You will use the money you get during the game to buy carrots, as well as water and cabbage cards. If someone plays a Feed the Bunny card, you will need these to meet the requirements or the bunny starves to death. Bunnies are going to die in this game. A lot. People will also be changing the prices at the market with certain cards, or closing it entirely.
There are cards that when drawn must be played immediately. With the base set, these are all Terrible Misfortune cards, and will result in one of your bunnies dying in a humorous way. During the course of the game you will play cards that will attempt to kill your opponents bunnies and amass carrot cards. Once the carrot cards are gone, you will use the smaller stack of carrot cards to find out who the winner is. You can either just pick one at random, or, as I usually do, drag it out in dramatic fashion, turning over cards one at a time to show who didn’t win, watching as people take another carrot from their stock that didn’t make the cut. One last caveat, you had to have a living bunny when the last carrot it chosen, or you are not even considered as a possible winner. All of your carrot cards get distributed to other players and you sit out the end.
One unique feature to this game as card games go is that where the bunnies are physically located matters. There is a mechanic called the Bunny Circle. Some weapons and effects have splash damage that affect the targeted bunny, and, say, the one to the right and left as well. This means that such a weapon may affect two different players, or even the person who played it if their bunnies are in close proximity to the target. There are also some roaming effects that slowly work their way through the bunny circle wreaking havoc and increasing the body count.
There are a lot of puns and even more TV and movie references in the titles and pictures of the cards. For instance, in the Red Booster there is a Holographic Bunny, and he has an “H” plastered on his forehead, which is a reference to Rimmer in Red Dwarf. The Minilith shows a bunch of bunnies dancing around it, like the apes in Space Oddssey. Nothing is taken seriously in this game.
That is basically the crux here. I don’t play Killer Bunnies when I care about winning. I play this when I want to have a good time with friends and family and laugh a lot. It is as random as random gets. For all practical purposes you could have rolled the dice at the beginning to determine the winner and not dealt a card.
To me, Killer Bunnies is like that old cliche about life. It isn’t about the destination, but it is the journey that matters. Killer Bunnies is all about having a great time with your friends and family. If you are looking for a less random way to do that, that is great. Just don’t expect more from this game than that.
But this one won that honor.
The simplest way to put it is that it was so infuriating on every level that by the time we got to the completely random ending, none of us ever wanted to see it again. I literally put it in the garbage and never looked back.
You might think the game had the wrong audience. It’s possible, but we had a wide range of player types playing, and not one of us enjoyed it.
The group I played with is pretty diverse. My father-in-law is a competitive gamer with a great sense of humor. My mother-in-law tends to skew more casual, but nearly always plays a strategic long-game. My wife is someone who tends to enjoy the ride with less importance weighed on the win. Her grandmother isn’t much of a gamer, but in this case served as a great “control”; she didn’t have any pretenses or expectations. And I’m typically open for any kind of game at least once. I design games professionally, so it behooves me to keep an open mind, try a wide range of game types, and play from different mindsets.
We opened the box, eager for the fun, rollicking experience I’d heard about from so many other gamers. I took a quick look through the cards, and was left a bit underwhelmed by the production values. The illustrations are okay but not great, but the choice of typeface is horrendous and difficult to read from across a table.
We took a read through the rules and found them confusing and often vague. Eventually we decided to jump in and begin playing with the rules at the ready for clarifications as needed — which turned out to be nearly once every time around the table. In most cases, even consulting the rules didn’t resolve our questions, so we’d make up a patch on the spot and keep playing.
Along the way we found that many turns were wasted with bad draws of conditional cards. Most of the time we’d have hands full of weapons and no bunnies to use them with (balance issues). In several cases, we found cards that were only relevant to such specific subsets of cards that they were completely unusable in 99% of game situations.
Our game lasted a little over two infuriating hours, at which point we reached the glorious and much-hyped (sarcasm font) revealing of the magic carrot (which sounds a lot like something that happens in a creepy guy’s basement, and was about as welcome). After so many agonizing turns of trying to build any semblance of cohesive strategy or flow, the winner is determined…completely at random.
None of your questions about the rules matter.
None of your efforts to understand them matter.
None of those dozens of brutally frustrating turns of “I draw, I do nothing” matter. Your winner is determined by whichever magical carrot gets drawn from a deck at random. You’d have done better to leave the cards sealed in the box and just roll for highest number. Thank you for playing, that’s thirty bucks and two hours of you life utterly wasted.
Since then, I’ve actually been assured by multiple people that the game is “kind of lame unless you’re stoned”, and I suppose that might have been the problem with our group; not enough drugs.
I’m baffled. Easily one of the worst games I’ve ever played.
Killer Bunnies is not a game I am supposed to like. There aren’t any cubes to push around, dice rolls can sink your turn, the person who plays the best game can easily lose, and the cabbage/water/carrot market isn’t located in the Mediterranean. How am I supposed to take a game seriously when clearly the game doesn’t even do that for itself? I’m not supposed to like Killer Bunnies. Yet it has led to some of my favorite gaming memories.
Killer Bunnies isn’t for everyone, but for those looking for a light-hearted social experience, I highly recommend giving it a try.
Game Play
You’re using your army of bunnies to collect carrots. Well, in truth, you’re trying to collect a specific carrot. One carrot (secretly selected of eight in the base (Blue) game, twelve including the Yellow booster, and ultimately expanded to twenty through other expansions) will be the winner. If you have it at the end (and at least one bunny) you win. It doesn’t matter how many carrots you have, as long as you have the winning carrot.
The main mechanic for getting cards into play I feel deserves more credit for game design than this game is often given. You in essence need to set your cards two turns in advance, and ‘run’ them through to play them. You’ll have two cards in front of you, one above the other. The top card was set two turns before and is now ready to be played. Most of your permanent cards (mainly bunnies) attacks, and enhancements will be run through. You can also instead play some one time effects (Special and Very Special) from your hand.
The game is cartoony, the items depicted on the cards ridiculous, filled with pop culture jokes and puns. Also of note, the cards are clearly not balanced. You draw a card each turn, and you may pull a nearly useless weapon while an opponent may have the ability to choose two carrots, or enough bunnies to play two cards each round.
Once all of the carrots are taken, the winning carrot is revealed, and the player holding it will win, assuming they have a bunny. If the game ended with any player(s) lacking a surviving bunny, their carrots are lost to opponents. Apparently you need ‘somebunny’ to celebrate your victory.
The Cards
Many cards, especially offensive and carrot acquisition cards will require you to have a bunny. There can be an issue with not having a bunny; rendering many cards you could have played useless. Trading, or beginning of play house rules can alleviate this a bit, but I will readily grant it is an issue with the game.
Attacks include goofy weapons (from kitchen whisks, to ebola and nuclear warheads – your bunnies have a wide variety they may draw) and requirements for others to feed their bunnies cabbage and/or water. Alien abductions and rolling dice for poker all make an appearance. Dice are twelve sided in multiple colors, with cards showing at the right of the picture which dice you need to roll.
I have not had any issues with the cardstock used, the cards have held up to heavy play without sleeves for our group. The backs of the cards are the color of the deck (booster expansion) they are from making cleanup and post game sorting easy. Having different colored backs means you know which set the card you are drawing comes from. If anything, I’ve seen this lead to excitement as new boosters are added and people get new cards.
Final Thoughts
The random nature of the winning carrot is one of the most often cited problems with the game. You can have all but one carrot and still lose (I know, I’ve done it twice). If winning a game is the biggest factor for whether you had a good time, Killer Bunnies probably isn’t for you.
Killer Bunnies is a game one should play for the experience, not to win. Not everyone will enjoy the game, but with the right group, much fun and many great memories can be made. As with games like Pit, Telestrations, or even to an extent Bunny Bunny Moose Moose, if you’re not willing to throw yourself into the experience, you’ll likely hate the game. If you’re ready to take your aggression out on some unsuspecting Sinister bunnies with some Green Gelatin (with the requisite evil pineapple chunks) and collect some carrots knowing most likely they’re useless, Killer Bunnies could see your evening ending with the group pulling out their calendars to determine when they can do it again.
Killer Bunnies is geared for social and casual gamers. Families may like it, though there is a strong theme of killing the bunnies of others with weird weapons, which may turn off some parents. As an avid gamer, I enjoy it with the right group, but find it to be a terrible slog with the wrong group who only care about strategy and winning. Power and strategy gamers should probably steer clear as they would with Munchkin.
Killer Bunnies is many things I don’t like, but manages, in the right setting, to be a fantastic experience. I hope everyone manages to find a game that brings them as much enjoyment as Killer Bunnies has brought me, regardless of what that game may be.
Every game store I go into has the Killer Bunny games in every hue imaginable, but you have to start somewhere, right?
This starter deck/booster is the perfect place to begin. If you want to have a good time, but don’t give a hoot who wins in the end, then this is the game for you.
REPLAY VALUE
This game has a TON of cards, around 150. This gives way to massive replay-ability. No two games are the same because strategies may come and go and the heart of the cards might be less caring than usual. But there are so many things going on at once it is just fun to see what will happen next.
One gripe that I do have is if you don’t have a bunny at any point. I must emphasize how boring this game is if you don’t have any bunnies. Trade with people, bargain, or even rig the system so that you always start the game with a bunny. Do everything in your power to get a bunny, especially near the end of the game.
COMPONENTS
I have never seen these kind of cards before, but I sure do like them. The seem durable, perfect for children. The 10-sided dice (die? I never know…) are really pretty and are a cool diversion from your standard 6-sided variety.
The art and descriptions are fun, but sometimes can be vague. Make sure everyone agrees and is aware of the rules.
EASY TO LEARN
That brings me to actually playing the game. There are rules and a lot of them. There’s a lot of generalities and variables that can differ in interpretation. Be careful. If you have questions, check the FAQ on the official website.
But if you aren’t too worried about following all of the rules, you are still going to have a really good time. There are betrayals and alliances and plain ol’ grudge matches. Bunnies will die. Carrots will be bought, but only one will end up being magic.
So just have fun with it. Don’t take yourself too seriously. I do know that you are going to have a serious amount of fun.
Who knew you could make a game out of an unending list of bizarre and ridiculous ways to kill off bunnies? But here it is.
The object (simplified): collect bunnies, and keep them alive against the myriad cards your opponents will play against you to kill them off (things as unusual as feral meatballs and meteor showers), because you must have at least one to win. At the same time, collect carrots and try to amass as many as possible because in the end, only one is the winning carrot. It’s completely chance that determines which one, but the more you have, the better your chances.
My kids took to this game and for some reason they keep going back to it, even though it sometimes causes tears and arguments. I think the biggest appeal is the slap-stick gruesomeness of the various bunny deaths. It’s a crazy kind of humor, which takes a certain taste to appreciate. There are so many cards (and expansion packs to make it even more so) that the game doesn’t get boring too quickly. My kids are always finding cards they hadn’t seen before that throw new twists into the game play. My issue with it is the feeling that no matter what happens, the winner is pretty random. But this game seems to be more about the journey than the destination.
The cards are a little stiff, which makes them hard to shuffle. That’s especially frustrating with such a huge deck, but at least they seem durable.
I spotted this game a few years ago and was immediately intrigued. Fast forward a couple years and a best friend who bought me a lot of the boosters and I am a Killer Bunnies addict!
What I like about this game is how social and random it can be. Whether you play with the starter decks or the everything, the game leaves a lot to chance. Yes, you can develop certain strategies, but all you need is one bunny alive and one carrot card to win. No matter how well you play, everyone at the table has a chance to win and for a social game like this with a lot of silly cards and pop culture references, that keeps the evening fun.
Game play is pretty simple, all the cards explain themselves well and there are “Bunny Bit” instructions to explain in more detail some of the cards. Occasionally, we have a hard time figuring out how something should work, but just don’t be afraid to amend the rules to group consensus.
Overall, I’ve played probably 50 to 60 games in the last 4 years and it is always fun. Fun is what killer bunnies is all about. If you want something more intense, more strategic, I’d try a different card game, but still highly suggest this one for anyone.
Killer Bunnies is a tough game to review. On one hand, it does everything wrong. It’s extremely random, has unintuitive rules, and takes a long time to complete. (It can clock in at over 5 hours with every expansion.) These are the same elements of some of the most despised games like Monopoly and LIFE.
But with the right group, Killer Bunnies works. If everyone at the table is a gamer who appreciates chaos in their games, this is about as enjoyable as you can get. It’s one of those games that can create so many good stories, where the best strategist can have his board wiped and the guy who’s in last can pull off a huge upset.
The game’s about journey, not destination. If you’re one of those gamers who plays to win, stay away. If you can enjoy just spending time with your friends using the game as a social link, this is the perfect game (especially if you’re pop culture savvy).
One year after Munchkin was published, Killer Bunnies comes on the scene to compete in the genre of closed, comedic card games:
You play the game by placing cards face down on the table. You may place only one card per turn. Two turns after you place that card, it is revealed and played. The goal of the game is to get golden carrot cards by either buying them or getting them through special abilities of cards. Once the last golden carrot is taken, the game ends. The carrot cards are shuffled together and if one of your carrots is chosen, you win the game. You cannot win if you don’t have at least one bunny on the board. Bunnies give you bonuses for having 3 of the same color or type. You can keep your bunnies alive by buying food cards or you can kill the bunnies of other players by using various brutal cards.
The cards often make humorous references to pop culture like to Dr. Who or The Terminator. They are colorful with pretty simple art and are laminated so they don’t wear as much as cards from other games.
Although the cards are high quality, the game is garbage. Even if you have all but one carrot, you still have a chance at losing the game. Worse than that though, is that you have to wait 2 turns to have your cards played so there is little reaction to the game as it goes on. Also, the theme of killing bunnies is kinda gross, especially for anyone familiar with Watership Down.
Overall, this is just not a very good game for $25. If you’re going to spend $25 on a game of this genre, buy Munchkin, or if you already have Munchkin, Munchkin: Legends.
This can be fun game with a very strange mix of people.
I’ve played this with younger cousins and they always have a blast.
As someone mentioned above, you play to play and laugh, not to win.
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Pro’s –
You will laugh like crazy while playing.
Quick enough to play thru generally.
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Con’s –
Rules are vague at times, leaving for confusion or worse screaming matches.
Goal is predetermined. It’s a numbers game really.
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Overall, it can be a fun game. I do own it, but can’t remember the last time I played it. People generally love it or hate it, it seems.
I do like random, luck-based games that are fast and entertaining. However, this game requires too much time and thought to be of that variety. If I’m going to devise a plan for my subsequent turns, I would like it to matter. Also, the win condition has only one sure strategy: Take all the carrots, which is an improbable feat at best.
I posted in the Tips & Strategies section my remedy. It summarizes a house rule wherein the winning Magic carrot is randomly determined and revealed at the outset. I also suggest a simple Victory Point system, the non-Magic carrots being worth 1 VP and the Magic carrot 5 VP (or more or less, depending on how many carrots you play with).