Forum Poll Results

Recently, we ran three polls to gather some information from our loyal Munchkin fans who visit our forums. The results have given us a number of things to mull over as we continue planning the future of the Munchkin line. Obviously, these aren't scientific or random polls -- for one thing, all the respondents are self-selected -- but since the forum-goers can be expected to be more involved and more engaged than most Munchkin fans, we're pretty sure these err on the side of enthusiasm for the more, shall we say, immersive elements of the Munchkin experience.

To answer one minor criticism that popped up a couple of times: Yes, the polls are worded pretty loosely. That was intentional. The comment threads pointed out some areas of confusion that are just as useful for our marketing team as the results themselves, because they show where what WE think about Munchkin isn't being communicated clearly enough to the folks who read and post to the Munchkin forums, which probably means it's even less clear to the Munchkin fanbase at large.

Question 1: What is your typical Munchkin game like? The answers here were surprising. For the number of questions that we get about exotic blended games, and the enthusiasm demonstrated by some posters for blending, 75% of the respondents stick to a single core set at a time, mostly with one or more expansions. We certainly aren't going to stop writing cards that work well with other sets, or putting cross-compatibility notes into our rulesheets, but we aren't going to stress quite as much if card A from core set Genre1 and card B from expansion DifferentGenre2 happen to have a weird interaction. We CERTAINLY don't plan to step up our efforts to make sure that doesn't happen -- some would argue that these little glitches are part of the game's charm, after all! (One exception: any set that is fantasy-backed, such as Conan and Pathfinder, WILL get tested with original Munchkin for balance and other issues. Those combinations do seem more popular than cross-genre blends.)

Question 2: Epic? This one was closer to what we expected. A bit over 57% of respondents either have never tried Epic or tried it and decided it wasn't for them. Fair enough. But over 30% play it occasionally, and 10% play it regularly or exclusively. We won't stop writing Epic rules for new sets (and yes, the Conan/Apocalypse update is very close to done; the last round of comments from our Brain Trust has wrapped up), but for now, further Epic support isn't a priority. (Again, consider that almost 60% of the hardcore fans on our forums aren't Epic players, and these are the folks who already know about Epic -- I imagine the fraction of Epic players in the general Munchkin fanbase is even smaller than indicated here.) My only regret here is not asking how many of the people who have never played Epic plan to down the road; that would have been an interesting number to see.

Question 3 (multiple choice): Which Munchkin sets do you play? I asked people to limit it to those games that they played "reasonably often," without going to the trouble of defining that phrase, and I said that if you primarily play blended games, include all the sets that are regular parts of those blended decks. There were a couple of surprises in these results as well; notably, a couple of sets that are historically strong sellers don't seem to be getting played quite so often. Whether this is because they're older and people are sticking with the new hotness, or because they're somehow inferior sets and thus are getting bought but not played, is a question we may explore in a future survey. Without getting too far into the weeds, I'll say that sorting the results by percentage reveals two clear tiers of games with a well-defined break between them. Considering that the Munchkin line keeps getting broader, we're going to have to consider carefully how much support we can give the lower-tier games in a release schedule limited by both time and money. A bit of statistical wonkery: The median number of sets played regularly was 4 sets. That was also the mode, the most common number of sets. The mean, however, was way up at an average of 5.87 sets. This is because the distribution was heavily skewed toward the ends, with 15 out of 203 respondents selecting all 14 choices in the poll. Also, in case you were curious, there were 26 people who only selected one set, and 22 of those one-set-only votes were for Munchkin.

Thanks to all the respondents, especially the people who took the time to add their comments -- we read them all and are thinking about many of the issues they raised. Very special thanks to forum users Brandonson112, Jaconian, and Urist, the three randomly selected recipients of Munchkin care packages. Please email me (just click on my name, below) with your forum name, the email address you use on the forums, and your shipping address, and we'll get those care packages out to you!