Many years ago a friend and I used to spend hours tossing around game ideas. One of our favorite tactics was taking whatever we found absurd about our culture, looking at from a very anti-social viewpoint, and then making a humorous game from that. Recently I found a little card game that was inline with that philosophy, so much so that for a minute I was wondering what happened to all our old notes and if someone could have gotten a hold of them. Great minds think alike and Aaron Pavo was thinking just like us when he made Let’s Kill.

Let’s Kill is a quick fun little card game where each player plays a serial killer. They vie with each other for choice victims and media attention. It’s that last part that raises this from an average game to something special. We could all get a chuckle out of a game where someone whacks Billy the Third Grader with a Cheese Grater. But in this game he might be a Local Celebrity and it might make the Network News which means this one little incident may take you halfway to winning the game. This shows that while serial killers are monsters for the things they do, they are also desperate for attention and the modern media’s fascination with them (especially if you take into account movies like Silence of the Lambs) has a role in encouraging them. You see, in spite of the games silliness (and boy is it silly) it still has a moral. This was always the hard part back when we were designing games like this. We didn’t want to just be making fun of something. We wanted to use gaming as social commentary. The problem is that message cannot get in the way of game play. If the game is not fun it is a failure no matter your message or intention. That’s the beauty of Let’s Kill. It succeeds on all counts. The message only hits you when you sit back and look at the aftermath; when it turns out that the aforementioned Third Grader might just give you more notoriety than killing the PotUS. Even the rules keep the mood light. They scribble over the pretentious message parts and put a running commentary throughout the rules.

I picked it up just this year at UBcon. I was bummed out that none of the dealers brought any Arkham Horror supplements with them so I was looking for a casual game for 3 players or so. Let’s Kill caught my eye (to be fair I was going thru all the card game boxes) and it’s description hit so close to home that I had to buy it. I played it several times over the Con and had a blast with it. I will say that it will get old after a bit. There just aren’t enough cards to not count them. I hear that there is a supplement that adds a bunch of cards. I will probably have to pick this up at some point if I want to keep playing.