Looney Tunes Mayhem

Under normal circumstances, I would not touch this with oven gloves on. But when you are hunting for board games that might win over your successor, you make concessions — and that is how I ended up with Looney Tunes Mayhem. The pre-painted miniatures are undeniably its biggest asset: they look good on the table and, in effect, sell the box all by themselves. Except Looney Tunes no longer seem to have such automatic appeal for children either, so I am left wondering what exactly these miniatures are meant to save.

A game lasts around half an hour. Each side chooses two characters from those available, and the goal is the straightforward, honest goal of an arena game: beat up the opposing team before they beat up yours. Players activate their characters alternately, so there is at least a basic sense of flow and you are not simply sitting there while the other player takes their whole turn.

Abilities are dice-based, and that is where the game starts gazing nostalgically at chaos without having the nerve to dive fully into it. The framework of alternating activations and dice-based abilities is sort of okay, but the game never makes up its mind whether it wants to be a yolo dice game or something more orderly and controlled. The result is a character brawl that works, technically, yet leaves almost nothing behind.

And as though the blandness of the base experience were not enough, it is not even simple enough for two six-year-olds to play by themselves. If someone decides to take it seriously and add expansions, things become even more disappointing: there are completely broken combinations, with the Sylvester/Coyote pairing being the obvious example. To me, this is a cash grab and a missed opportunity: a 2023 production relying on its miniatures so it does not have to justify the game that comes with them.