Looney Tunes Mayhem Review: Get Ready to Embrace the Chaos

With their brand-new board game Looney Tunes Mayhem, CMON is embracing the chaotic fun of the Looney Tunes franchise, and those who play it will find the franchise’s zaniness and trademark humor intact.

To defeat their opponent and earn 5 Victory Points, players will form a team of two. The game includes adorable characters like Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, and Wile E. Coyote.

It’s a straightforward idea, but to succeed, you’ll need to plan your moves carefully, make the most of your skills, and make use of your teammates and their surroundings.

It’s this welcome layer of complexity that makes Looney Tunes Mayhem such a fun play. As the name suggests, you’ll be controlling Looney Tunes characters and using skills that seem straight out of the cartoons.

A separate character pack that includes Tweety Bird, Sylvester, Wile E. Coyote, and Roadrunner is available in addition to the core set’s Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and Taz characters.

Each has two abilities available to them, and the double-sided Toon Dashboards have a different set of abilities. Additionally, each of your characters has one special ability that they can use, but how much use you make of it will depend on how you roll and distribute your dice.

You and your opponent roll two dice at the beginning of each round, add the results, and then decide who goes first based on who has the highest total. The strategy will then be put into action when you use those dice rolls to activate your Tunes.

The Standard Effect and the Special Effect are the two levels of each ability. You will always experience the Standard, but if you rolled a number that is equal to or greater than the number specified on the ability, you will experience the Special Ability tier.

However, there is still another tier to take into account. The Mayhem die, which determines the amount of damage attacks deal, will also be rolled along with your other dice because it has the potential to contain a star.

If they do, text on your abilities with a star next to it will be activated that round, giving you three possible levels to unlock on any given turn. This forces you to carefully consider who the best Toon is to lead the turn, how that sets up your other Toon later in the round, and how that sets you up for your opponent’s next turn.

Even though these fundamental choices provide entertainment on their own, the game still offers you additional tactical options. With the help of those unique abilities, you can force your adversary into one of your spaces or another, strike them with melee and ranged attacks, stun them, and more.

Although I found setting up traps to be the most entertaining option, you can also heal your teammates, protect them from harm, or attack your opponents with poison tokens.

Wile E. Coyote excels at this in particular because he can use his skills to place two traps in a single space and quickly swarm several spaces with traps. However, you can also use traps as other characters to great effect.

If you can use Obstacle Tokens, Flee Tokens, and Poison Tokens as you lay traps, you will be a damage-dealing machine.

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It took me playing the game a second time before I truly understood the chaos that can happen during a game after working with traps and obstacles. That’s because the suggested starting group didn’t embrace traps or obstacles, but it succeeded in conveying the essential gameplay elements.

When I started combining different characters, the game came to life because some characters can avoid traps while others can manipulate and draw more Mayhem cards, which are also essential to carry out your plans but are highly sought after because you only get a few for the entire game.

It’s fun to try out all the Toons and select a few that fit your playing style, so it’s disappointing that there’s only room for one upgrade pack.

Some of my favorite characters from the Kickstarter, like Yosemite Sam, Marvin the Martian, and Foghorn Leghorn, were among the eight additional characters that were available only to backers.

Even though having more character and ability lineups to choose from would have made the game more replayable, the eight-character lineup will be sufficient on its own for many players.

Locations, which each have a different activation when you land on them, are still unmentioned. I like how the 10-space grid keeps your characters close together and speeds up interaction in those fun and useful locations.

However, having more options would have been nice before each game. Since the objective is so straightforward—you simply want to accumulate 5 Victory Points—any opportunity to change up how you reach that number would help keep the game interesting.

It’s delightful chaos when everything comes together, which can create tense situations. I once came within one Victory Point of winning, but my adversary made every effort to prevent that from happening.

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Obstacles were placed in my path, and then Mayhem cards and abilities kept trying to pull and push my Toons out of position, making it difficult for me to even reach the area I needed.

This back-and-forth was exciting and tense, which added to the victory. That kind of experience will largely depend on finding the ideal combination of Tunes and abilities that suit your play style. That doesn’t happen in every game, mind you.

You might be surprised by how strategic Looney Tunes Mayhem can be. It lives up to its name and embraces the silly and outrageous nature of the franchise.

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