Kingdom of Loathing (KoL) has come into my life and is quickly earning its place in my heart as my favorite internet-based game (one of the best online games of all platforms, too). Tank introduced me to this game a little more than a week ago and I already can't wait until I can play again!

It's a fantasy swords and sorcery type game with a Monty Pythonish twist. If you ever played the card game, 'Munchkin' then I can tell you it's similar to that sense of humor. It's a fairly simple game based on the game style idea of Gary Gygax and his band of nerds (Dungeons & Dragons); where you have stats like strength, intelligence, charisma, and others put into diferent character concepts like: 'fighter', 'wizard', and 'theif' (for those of you more familar with the works of Gary Gygax and his fellows, forgive me for dumbing it down; the common masses won't know what I'm talking about otherwise). However, KoL uses stats like Muscle, Mysticality, and Moxie and gives you six classes loosly based on character classes from the origional D&D game (two per 'class-type'). My character is a 'turtle tamer', which is supposed to be some sort of ranger. But there are others like the mighty seal clubber, the powerful sauceror, the mystic pastamancer, the smooth disco bandits, and crafty acordian theives.

If this is already sounding a little weird then hold on, it only gets worse from here on in. Moving through adventures ranging from Mt.Mchugelarge of the Big Mountains (look out for the rabbits of the Dire Warrens!), and The Copse of the Deep Fat Friars (watch out for for G imps, L imps, and P imps!) you collect the currency of the kingdom; it's not gold or silver or dollers, no; it's meat. That's right, m-e-a-t, meat. Like the cut muscle mass from an animal. I think you get me now. You use this meat as you would any other money; you can buy equipment for your next adventure, you can trade with other players, buy skills or training to improve you character, or mash it up to make meat paste in order to glue things together (well, I guess you can't do that last one with Mr. Washington or gold coins).

As you adventure, you gain a sort of sub-stat for each attribute ("You've won! You gain 15 chutzpa and 10 beefiness!" - this means you've gotten more points toward your next Moxie point and next Muscle point.) Gain enough of the attribute required for your class, you go up a level. But you have only a limited amount of turns you can take everyday (probably for the good of us all). You start out with a base of forty but that can increase depending on what items you own what what clan you're in. But you can eat and booze it up to get more.

It's impossible to go into all the details of the game here. There are clans for banding like-minded people together to trade 'goodies', a whole slew of items to find, combine into other items, and trade. There are countless monsters to fight that are both punny and fearsome (sorta). There is a "player vs player" mode where you can pit your character against other players in the game (but only if you want to!). The list goes on and on.

If you have one hour of your day to kill while checking e-mail, waiting for that roast to be done, or just sitting around until your significent other gets out of the goddamn bathroom, give KoL a shot. I assure you, it's more than it seems.

The website is: kingdomofloathing.com

-Gabriel