Munchkin Warhammer 40,000 Super Mega Set

Back in 2019 I introduced you to Munchkin Warhammer 40,000, the crossover of Steve Jackson Games' card game classic and the grim darkness of the far future. Over the following years we covered the German releases of the supplements as well: Faith and Firepower, Savagery and Sorcery and Cults and Cogs. After that, the German line went quiet. Three more supplements were released in English, but never made it into a German box. Until now.

With the Munchkin Warhammer 40,000 Super-Mega-Set, Pegasus Spiele puts the complete line into one big box. Base game, all six supplements, accessories and a handful of promo items. For three of those supplements, Rank and Vile (Abscheuliche Ränge), Storming the Warp (Die Erstürmung des Warps) and Grudges and Gore (Groll und Gemetzel), this is the very first German release.

What is it about?

If you have never played Munchkin, here is the short version. Munchkin is a card game that parodies classic roleplaying. You kick down doors, fight monsters, grab their loot and level up. The first player to reach level 10 wins. That sounds like a cooperative dungeon crawl, but it is the exact opposite. Everybody at the table wants to reach level 10 first, so you help each other only if it pays off, and you happily stab your friends in the back the moment they are about to win.

Munchkin Warhammer 40,000 takes this formula into the 41st millennium. Instead of becoming an elf or a dwarf, you join an Army. Instead of a sword +2 you carry a bolter, and instead of an orc you face a Pink Horror of Tzeentch. The real fun lies in the details, though. Many cards do not just play in the Warhammer universe, they play in the Warhammer hobby. You suffer a curse because you forgot your terrain at home, an unpainted enemy miniature loses five levels, and a converted model gives you a bonus. Designer Andrew Hackard and illustrator John Kovalic, a self-confessed 40k fan, clearly know both the lore and the hobby. Over 700 cards later, I am still amazed how few of them feel like random Codex names slapped onto generic cards.

The Super-Mega-Set is exclusive to the German market. Pegasus already did the same for classic Munchkin, putting the fantasy base game and its expansions into one box, and now the Warhammer 40,000 line gets the same treatment. All of the content is available in English, but only as separate products, the oldest of them since 2019 and the most recent one, Grudges and Gore, only since early 2026.

What's in the box?

You will find the details further below, so here is just the summary. The box contains:

• 778 game cards
• 6 level counters
• 6 six-sided dice
• 1 Kill-o-Meter
• 3 bookmarks
• German rules

The 778 cards break down into the base game (168 cards), Faith and Firepower, Savagery and Sorcery, Cults and Cogs, Rank and Vile and Grudges and Gore (112 cards each) and Storming the Warp (20 Dungeons and 16 Portals). On top come the four exclusive cards each from the Kill-o-Meter and the Chaos Dice, both released by Steve Jackson Games as separate accessories back in 2019 and now localised for the first time, and six promo cards.

In addition, the box comes with a vacuum-moulded inlay that can be used to sort and store the card decks. It even includes a sheet of stickers, so you can label and separate the card decks, and you get a proper overview of how to store everything.

The promo items deserve a closer look. Six promo cards, two of them new, and three bookmarks, one of them new, are included. In the Munchkin world, these are usually handed out at conventions, tournaments or in magazines. Back in 2019, one of the bookmarks came with the White Dwarf, another one was part of the release tournaments. If you missed those, this is a very easy way to complete your collection.

The instructions cover the rules very clearly and give you a proper overview of the different types of cards, the turn sequence as well as the content of this boxed set. But more on the way Munchkin plays further down.

The Kill-o-Meter is a two-sided dial counter to track your combat strength. The level counters replace the gameboard of the US base game, which was never part of the compact German version. The counters can be stored in the clear top tray of the inlay, keeping everything safe and in place when you are not playing.

And the dice are, well, dice. Six of them, but these are regular D6 in yellow and blue, not the Chaos Dice sold in the US with the Munchkin icon in place of the one. The four cards from the Chaos Dice set are included, though.

How does it play?

The complete rules are available as free PDFs on the official Munchkin website, one for the base game and one for each supplement. Here is an overview of what you can expect, including what the supplements add.

Setup and character creation

The cards are split into two decks, Door (yellow) and Treasure (blue). Each player receives four cards from each deck and starts as a level 1 civilian. If you have an Army card in your starting hand, you can play it right away, along with any items you can use. Each Army comes with its own special abilities, and you gain them the moment the card is in front of you. You can discard an Army at any time, even in the middle of a fight, and you can only belong to one Army at once. The exception is the Alliance card, which lets you combine two Armies, or play a single Army with all its advantages but none of its disadvantages.

A turn in the grim darkness

Each turn has three phases. First, you kick down the door by drawing the top Door card face up. If it is a monster, you have to fight it. If it is a curse, it hits you immediately. Anything else you can keep or play.

If you did not meet a monster, you have two options. You can Look for Trouble and play a monster from your hand to fight it, or you can Loot the Room and draw another Door card face down. Here the first Army ability already kicks in: Tyranids may fight a monster they draw while looting, nobody else can.

The last phase is Charity. If you have more than five cards in your hand, you have to give the excess to the player with the lowest level. That rule alone keeps the game surprisingly balanced, because the player in last place keeps receiving cards.

Combat and asking for help

Combat is simple. Your level plus all bonuses from items and cards is your combat strength. If it is higher than the monster's, you win, gain a level and draw the number of Treasures shown on the monster card. Ties go to the monster.

Of course, it is never that simple. Every other player can interfere. They can make the monster stronger with enhancers, add a second monster to the fight, or curse you at the worst possible moment. Monsters tagged Undead or Chaos may even join a fight with another monster of the same tag without any extra card. After you think you have won, the rules give the table about 2.6 seconds to object. I love that rule.

If you cannot win alone, you can ask for help. One player may join you and add their combat strength to yours, and usually you will have to bribe them with items or a share of the loot. Only you gain the level, unless your helper is an Ork and you win by ten or more. Then the Ork goes up a level as well, which is a nice nod to the Waaagh.

Running away and death

If you lose, you have to run away. Roll the die, on a 5 or 6 you escape. If you fail, the monster's Bad Stuff happens, from losing an item to losing levels, up to death. Death in Munchkin is not the end. You keep your level and your Army, but the other players loot your body and you start your next turn with fresh cards.

Items, Big items and Vehicles

Most Treasures are items. You can equip one headgear, one suit of armour, one pair of footgear and two one-handed items or one two-handed item. Some items can only be used by a specific Army, like the Plasma Incinerator for Ultramarines. You can carry as many small items as you like, but only one Big item. Vehicles are a special case: you may only have one, but it does not count against your Big items. At any point during your turn outside of combat, you can sell items worth 1,000 gold pieces for a level, but never for the winning level. Level 10 has to be earned by killing a monster.

What the supplements add

Faith and Firepower, Savagery and Sorcery and Cults and Cogs do not add new mechanics. They add new Armies (Adepta Sororitas and T'au, Space Wolves and Thousand Sons, Genestealer Cults and Adeptus Mechanicus), plus new monsters, items and curses. Each of them also contains extra Army cards for the factions from the earlier boxes. Once all three are mixed in, every Army appears five times in the Door deck. If precise balance matters to you, the rules suggest removing surplus Army cards, but honestly, in a game of Munchkin a slight imbalance hardly matters. You can identify which card comes from which supplement by the little icon on the bottom of each card.

Rank and Vile brings three Armies at once, the Astra Militarum, the Drukhari and the forces of Chaos with the servants of all four Chaos gods. Grudges and Gore follows with the Adeptus Custodes, the Leagues of Votann and the World Eaters. With all supplements combined, you have 18 Armies to choose from. Both sets use the familiar rules and simply add more of everything.

Storming the Warp is the odd one out, because it introduces two new card types. Dungeons are double-sized cards that represent worlds of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. They form their own deck, and one of them is face up from the start of the game. As long as a Dungeon is in play, its effects apply to all players. Portals are shuffled into the Door deck. When you draw one, you follow its instructions and enter a new Dungeon, with or without leaving the old one, and then draw a replacement Door. Yes, you can be in several Dungeons at the same time. You can also discard four cards from your hand during your turn to discover an exit and draw a new Dungeon. Since we are playing with all supplements, the rules recommend using all 16 Portals. With a deck of this size, the designers even suggest shuffling the Portals into roughly 150 Door cards so they do not get lost.

778 cards on one table

Which brings us to the obvious question: do you really want to play with all of it at once? You can, and the game will work. But a deck of this size changes the experience. The more cards in the decks, the less often you will see your favourite cards and the more random the draws become. My suggestion: build your own deck for the evening. Pick the Armies your group enjoys, add the matching supplements and keep the rest for the next game night. The big box makes that easy, because everything is in one place and each card carries the icon of the set it comes from as mentioned above.

The base rules also offer two optional rules for a faster game, and with a deck this big I would recommend them. Before kicking down the door, you draw an additional face down Door card at the start of your turn, and looting the room gives you a Treasure instead of a Door. On top of that, you can allow shared victories, so the helper also wins if the player they helped reaches level 10.

Mixing with other Munchkin sets

All Munchkin games share the same rule base and can be combined. Balance will be a bit off, but chaos is part of the Munchkin nature anyway. The obvious partner is Munchkin Warhammer Age of Sigmar, but in my opinion the best thematic match is Star Munchkin and its second part. Star Munchkin pokes fun at just about every sci-fi genre out there, and mixing it with the grim darkness of the 41st millennium works surprisingly well. If you want to go further, Storming the Warp can be combined with the Dungeons from other Munchkin sets, such as Munchkin 6 Double Dungeons or Munchkin Cthulhu 4 Crazed Caverns.

What's next?

With seven card sets, the Warhammer 40,000 line is one of the larger Munchkin spin-offs, and Steve Jackson Games still supports it, with Grudges and Gore released only this year. Further supplements in English are likely, and with this big box the German line is fully caught up for the first time. Whether future supplements will be released as separate German boxes again, or saved for another collection, remains to be seen. The major factions are covered, and with 18 Armies the setting is already very broadly represented. What is left are mostly "sub factions", such as further Space Marine chapters like the Dark Angels or Blood Angels, or traitor legions like the Emperor's Children. I am sure those cards would find their way into this box without problems, but the question is whether Munchkin Warhammer 40,000 really needs them and whether there would be a market for them. In Germany in particular, there was a reason the last supplements were not localised.

Conclusion

The Munchkin Warhammer 40,000 Super-Mega-Set is the most complete package of this game you can get, in any way. 778 cards, 18 Armies, the Dungeons from Storming the Warp, the Kill-o-Meter, the additional cards and a selection of promo items that are otherwise hard to come by. For German players, three of the supplements, the Kill-o-Meter and the accessory cards are available in their language for the very first time.

The price is the real highlight. A base game usually costs 25 EUR, a supplement 15 EUR. Bought separately, the content of this box adds up to well over 100 EUR, and that is without the accessories and promos, some of which were never available in German at all. The Super-Mega-Set has a list price of 50 EUR, and online you can find it for around 40 EUR. That is less than half, for everything. I can hardly think of a better value for money in a licensed Warhammer product.

The game itself has not changed. It is still fast, light and mean in the best sense. It is a great game for a casual evening, a break between rounds at a tournament weekend or a game night with friends who do not care about the difference between a Space Marine and a Custodian. And if they do, they will find dozens of inside jokes about our hobby on these cards. If you already own the base game and the first three supplements in German, the big box is still worth a look for the three new supplements, the accessories and the promos alone. If you never played Munchkin Warhammer 40,000, there is no better way to start. A super set indeed, made with the humour we know from the Munchkin series and very well adapted to the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Munchkin is a brand by Steve Jackson Games and distributed in Germany by Pegasus Spiele.

The reviewed product item was provided by the manufacturer.