I finally got my hands on a copy of Gother Than Thou the other day. No, I didn’t get to play it. The owner, and everyone around who had played it, assured me that it really wasn’t very good at all, but that I should definitely look through the deck. True enough, the mechanics were minimal and uninteresting, but the cards were hysterical. Eyeliner gains you Gothliness (gain enough of it to win the game), but too much loses it instead. Most cards grant Gothliness at the cost of money (Big Tin Ankh, Boots!!!, Wardrobe Sale), while a Visit From Mom does just the opposite, fattening your wallet at the cost of the precious darkness in your soul. A Disturbing German Accent is worth Gothliness free of charge, while a Disturbing Southern Accent penalizes it. Genital Piercings are good too, but get too many and you’ll fall over. No, I’m not making that up.

There are other games that fit this mold, although Gother Than Thou is probably the most extreme. To the best of my knowledge, Chez Geek started the trend. Players took the roles of early-twenties roommates (not much of a stretch), each striving to attain, through possessions and activities, enough Slack to outweigh the drudgery of the mortal coil plus the added insult of employment. The game lacked depth, but the cards (illustrated by John Kovalic) oozed humor through their nature, interaction, illustrations, and flavor quotes. Having the Übergeek in your room cost you Slack, but you could kick him out with the power of the Busy Signal. There was no particular strategy to this—certainly he was not enough of a threat to waste space in your hand on a Busy Signal—but when you happened to draw one at the right time, it was certainly funny. Having a Live In S.O  around not only grants Slack in itself, but improves the benefit you get from Backrub cards and makes it so you always get the same, nice amount of Slack from the otherwise-chaotic Nookie cards. Chez Geek spawned a number of sequels and variants (Chez Goth, Chez Grunt, Chez Greek…). None added anything great rules-wise; the fun was in cards themselves and the lampooning of the people and lifestyles they described.

Getting close to the serious-game end of the spectrum, players in Munchkin (also wonderfully illustrated by Kovalic) take the role of characters in a tabletop RPG. The cards include parodies of D&D and stock-fantasy monsters and items, as well as the strategies players use to game the system (“Convenient Addition Error,” “Bribe the GM With Food,” etc.) Unlike the other games I’ve mentioned, Munchkin is deep enough to be interesting to play. Unfortunately, it tends to be damned unfair; the rich get richer all the time, and an unlucky monster card can set you right back to the beginning of the game, especially if your fellow players are actively working against you as well. This is all very much in the spirit of the game, which is good, because the game is deliberately evoking and lampooning the cutthroat, dubiously-ethical feel of lousy D&D games. No other game could get away with that set of rules. It’s not a game to play every day, but it does its job well, and if the game happens to proceed briskly, playing it can be almost as fun as looking at the cards.

Because I like giving things titles, I’ll give the title of a “Just Read the Cards” game to any game whose primary payoff is in looking at the materials, rather than playing the game. I don’t mean to sound derogatory, because it can be a big payoff and Chez Geek, in particular, is worth the price of admission.