Organ Attack – The Game by The Awkward Yeti

There are board games that teach strategy. There are board games that foster cooperation. There are board games that simulate farming, trading in the Mediterranean, building civilizations, or surviving zombie apocalypses.

And then there’s Organ Attack, a game that asks a much more important question:

What if you could give your friend a case of Kidney Stones while simultaneously protecting yourself with a pair of healthy lungs?

Welcome to the delightfully disturbed world of Organ Attack.

What Is Organ Attack?

The Organ Attack cards

Created by the folks at Awkward Yeti, Organ Attack is a card game inspired by the wildly popular webcomic series featuring personified organs, diseases, and bodily functions. The premise is simple:

Each player starts with a collection of organs.

Your goal?

Destroy everyone else’s organs before they destroy yours.

How do you accomplish this noble medical objective?

By inflicting diseases, injuries, and horrifying bodily ailments upon your opponents while using treatments and immunities to keep yourself alive.

It’s basically Uno if Uno had a dark sense of humor, a basic understanding of anatomy, and absolutely no regard for your long-term health.

First Impressions

The first thing you’ll notice is the artwork.

If you’ve ever seen an Awkward Yeti comic, you’ll immediately recognize the style. The organs are expressive, adorable, and somehow incredibly relatable despite being, well… organs.

The Liver looks perpetually exhausted.

The Brain is stressed.

The Heart is overly emotional.

The Stomach is having a rough day.

Which, if we’re being honest, sounds a lot like most adults.

The artwork carries the game. It gives every card personality and turns what could have been a generic take-that card game into something memorable and genuinely funny.

Even players who don’t normally care about art in board games tend to comment on it.

And when a game can make someone laugh simply by drawing an angry spleen, that’s worth something.

Gameplay: Controlled Chaos

Organ Attack in Progress! (My three daughters and I playing Organ Attack with my mom / their mawmaw)

The rules are straightforward enough that you can teach new players in a matter of minutes.

Each player starts with four organs.

On your turn, you’ll draw cards, play diseases on opponents, cure your own ailments, or use special action cards to wreak havoc around the table.

The diseases range from the mildly inconvenient to the alarmingly realistic.

You might inflict:

• Kidney Stones
• Anxiety
• Heart Attack
• Diabetes
• Cancer
• Infection

And a whole host of other conditions that would normally warrant a trip to the doctor rather than enthusiastic laughter.

The game quickly becomes a battlefield of escalating medical catastrophes.

One player develops asthma.

Another suffers organ failure.

Someone else receives a miraculous transplant.

A fourth player is somehow surviving despite appearing to have every condition known to modern medicine.

It’s glorious.

The “Take That” Factor

Let’s address the elephant in the operating room.

Organ Attack is absolutely a “take that” game.

If your gaming group dislikes direct confrontation, targeted attacks, and occasionally being singled out for reasons that can only be described as petty revenge, this may not be the game for you.

Players are constantly attacking one another.

Alliances form.

Grudges emerge.

Temporary truces collapse almost immediately.

The player who looked safe two turns ago suddenly finds themselves suffering from multiple diseases and missing half their organs.

The player who appeared doomed somehow wins.

There’s a beautiful unpredictability to it.

Unlike deeply strategic games where victory is determined through long-term planning, Organ Attack thrives on chaos, timing, and social dynamics.

The best move isn’t always the mathematically optimal one.

Sometimes it’s simply attacking the person who gave you a heart attack three turns earlier.

Justice must be served.

Surprisingly Educational?

I hesitate to call Organ Attack educational.

That feels like the kind of thing a teacher says right before forcing students to watch a documentary.

But it is interesting how often players begin discussing actual medical conditions during gameplay.

I’ve seen conversations emerge around:

• What the spleen actually does
• Why kidney stones are terrifying
• Whether people can survive without certain organs
• Which diseases are genuinely hereditary
• Why everyone suddenly feels concerned about their liver

No one is becoming a doctor after playing this game.

But they might accidentally learn something.

Accessibility and Replayability

One of Organ Attack’s greatest strengths is accessibility.

You don’t need a dedicated gaming group.

You don’t need an engineering degree.

You don’t need to spend forty-five minutes explaining worker placement mechanics.

You can teach this game to casual gamers, family members, coworkers, and people who haven’t played a board game beyond Monopoly.

The humor does a lot of the heavy lifting.

People immediately understand what’s happening because the concept is inherently funny.

Replayability remains strong because player interactions drive the experience.

No two games unfold quite the same way.

Different disease combinations, shifting alliances, and varying levels of table chaos ensure that every session develops its own personality.

The Downsides

No game is perfect.

The biggest criticism is that luck plays a significant role.

Card draws matter.

Sometimes you’ll get exactly what you need.

Sometimes you’ll stare helplessly at your hand while your opponents systematically dismantle your internal organs.

Players seeking deep strategic complexity may find the experience a bit light.

This isn’t Terraforming Mars.

It isn’t Twilight Imperium.

It isn’t attempting to be.

The game prioritizes fun, interaction, and laughter over intricate decision trees.

Additionally, highly competitive players may occasionally feel frustrated when random card draws determine the outcome of a close game.

But frankly, that’s part of the charm.

The game is less about proving who is the smartest player at the table and more about creating memorable stories.

Final Thoughts

Organ Attack Overview

Organ Attack understands exactly what it wants to be.

It isn’t trying to reinvent tabletop gaming.

It isn’t trying to become the next great strategic masterpiece.

Instead, it delivers something arguably more valuable:

A fast, funny, easy-to-learn game that gets people laughing.

In an era where many board games seem determined to become increasingly complex, Organ Attack embraces simplicity without sacrificing personality.

Its combination of dark humor, charming artwork, accessible gameplay, and relentless player interaction makes it an easy recommendation for casual gaming groups.

Will it become your group’s most strategically revered game?

Probably not.

Will you remember the time your cousin gave you Anxiety, followed by Kidney Stones, before finishing off your Liver with a Heart Attack card?

Absolutely.

And honestly, that’s what good party games are supposed to do.

Rating: 8.5 / 10

Pros

• Fantastic artwork
• Easy to teach and learn
• Constant player interaction
• Genuinely funny theme
• Great for casual groups

Cons

• Significant luck factor
• Limited strategic depth
• Can feel mean-spirited for players who dislike direct attacks

Bottom Line:
Organ Attack is equal parts anatomy lesson, medical nightmare, and comedy show. It’s the kind of game that creates stories you’ll still be laughing about weeks later—assuming your organs survive the experience.

Be on the lookout for more future Board Game reviews! We want to continue to do board game reviews alongside our already popular beer reviews, brewery reviews, hike reviews, and book reviews, so stay tuned for more!

The Awkward Yeti

The Awkward Yeti by Nick Seluk is a popular cartoon strip, primarily online. There has been book collections and other specials, but unlike Peanuts or The Far Side or Wizard of Id, etc; The Awkward Yeti has been primarily online.

You can find The Awkward Yeti online at – The Awkward Yeti – Nick Seluk. It is a relatively wholesome comic strip that details the body organs; brain, heart, stomach, liver, gall bladder, lungs, fat, tongue, etc. in humorous circumstances with their owner (or on their own).

Heart and Brain

Particularly, I enjoy the back and forth between heart and brain. The childish, youthful, fun filled antics of the heart versus the cold, calculating, analyzing, realistic brain. Or the neurotic parts of the brain versus the ‘forget it’ portions of the heart. And thats where this collection of comic strips shine through.

Review

As per GoodReads, the summary reads:

From paying taxes and getting up for work to dancing with kittens and starting a band, readers everywhere will relate to the ongoing struggle between Heart and Brain.

Heart and Brain: An Awkward Yeti Collection illustrates the relationship between the sensible Brain and its emotionally driven counterpart, the Heart.

Boasting more than one million pageviews per month, TheAwkwardYeti.com has become a webcomic staple since its creation in 2012.

Heart and Brain – GoodReads Page

My two favorite characters from the series – Brain and Heart. Their polar opposites but both compliment the other in ways thats only possible due to WHO they are (well, WHAT they represent anyway). This might be my favorite yet of the three books.

Nearly each panel is both funny, and sentimental and/or intelligent and witty/wry. Not all are huge ‘guffaws’ or “lol”, but nearly all are chuckles or a smirk inducing joke, with the added weight of the sentimentality or intelligence behind the panel due to the characters (brain and heart) involved.

I think the great thing about the characters of heart and brain, is how much it gets to the “heart and soul” of us. (See what I did there?) It gets right down to what makes us (as humans) tick. And it embodies our neuroses, our depressions, our ticks, our reasons, and our thoughts. It gets to how sometimes we’re flighty and want to run around in a sunflower field full of butterflies, and sometimes, we need to tamper that with doing our taxes or figuring out our budget for the coming weeks. Nick writes as someone who knows depression and anxiety, and it makes the characters relatable for those of us who also have these symptoms and see ourselves in the characters.

We see ourselves awake at night, thinking about something we did or said thirteen years ago. Or someone worried and paranoid or anxious about a test / promotion / etc. The best thing about the strip is its relateability. There is a few other compilations, as well as much of his stuff online. I fully suggest checking all of Nick Seluk’s other works out as well, especially the other Awkward Yeti works.

My GoodReads Rating: ****
My LibraryThing Rating: ****
Global GoodReads Rating: 4.33 (as of 7.24.21)

Be sure to check out our other book reviews, as well as check out our beer reviews, brewery reviews, brewery news, and much more here on the blog!

Cheers!

-B. Kline

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