Each player selects two different factions to play with. For gameplay purposes, each player is considered the owner of the factions they chose. Shuffle together your two factions to make a 40-card deck. If your factions have any titans, place them near your deck. (See Titans)
Next, make your base deck. You don’t have to play with all the bases at once. Each set comes with bases meant to go along with the factions in that set,
but If you shuffle all 120 (or more) bases together, there isn’t much chance for a player to get to see the bases that are best for the factions they are playing! So we recommend you just grab the bases from the sets the chosen factions came from. For example, if you are playing Halfling Kung Fu Fighters vs. Mega Trooper Rock Stars vs. Orc Grannies, take the bases from That ‘70s Expansion, Smash Up: Munchkin, Big in Japan and What Were We Thinking? to make your base deck. Shuffle those base cards together.
If any of the sets used in your game has extra decks (e.g. Madness for Cthulhu, Monsters and Treasure for Munchkin), shuffle those decks and set them out too. (Okay, the Madness deck doesn’t need to be shuffled.)
Draw one base per player, plus one (e.g., four bases for three players), and place them face up in the middle of the table. If any of the bases needs monsters, add them now (see Monsters & Treasures).
All players draw five cards from their decks. If you have no minions in your opening hand, you may show your hand, discard it, and draw a new hand of five cards; you must keep the second hand. The first player is the person who (in order of priority) was most recently:
- abducted by an alien,
- press-ganged by a pirate,
- bitten by a vampire,
- burned by a dragon,
- kissed by a princess,
- driven insane by Cthulu
- attacked by a teddy bear, or
- eaten by an orc
If no one meets the criteria, then you'll just have to figure out who goes first on your own.
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