Game review
Castle Crashing the Beard
6.5 / 10
- Developer
- BoMToons (Nick Pasto) — programming, background art and sound design; character art by Luis; boss design by Coaly; voice acting by Tom Fulp (voicing his own caricature) and The Swain; music including NemesisTheory's "Rose at Dawn"
- Publisher
- Self-published on Newgrounds
- Released
- 12 March 2008
- Platforms
- Browser (Flash)
- Genre
- Boss-rush action brawler
- Monetisation
- No sponsorship, no ad preroll beyond Newgrounds' own standard portal advertising, no premium version. Despite the premise sounding like it could be tied to a fundraiser, no source found in researching this review connects the game to any charity or donation drive — it reads as a straightforward, unsponsored community submission made for portal exposure and awards, nothing more
- Players
- Single-player only. Local co-op was added in the 2021 HD remake and is not present in this version
The short version
Castle Crashing the Beard is a joke that happens to also be a competent little boss-rush game. The premise is entirely inside baseball — Tom Fulp grew a beard and vowed not to shave until The Behemoth finished Castle Crashers, and BoMToons built a two-phase fight against that beard, personified as a floating, taunting head voiced by Fulp himself — but the combat underneath the bit is tight: a Castle Crasher-style brawler with combos and a leveling system draped over a boss encounter that actually escalates instead of just getting bigger numbers in phase two.
What it is not is a game with anywhere to go after the joke lands. It is one boss, one fight, maybe fifteen minutes to a clean clear, and the humor depends on already knowing who Tom Fulp is and why his beard was a running gag on Newgrounds in early 2008 — take that context away and what's left is a well-made but slight combat toy. It earned its Daily Feature and its month-end award honestly, on craft rather than nostalgia, but craft applied to fifteen minutes of content only stretches so far.
Biggest strengths
- The two-phase structure gives the boss an actual escalation — new attack patterns and a changed arena in phase two rather than the same fight with a bigger health bar
- Combo-based combat with a leveling system gives the fight more mechanical depth than most single-encounter Newgrounds tributes bother with
- Tom Fulp voicing the taunting, self-mocking beard himself is the funniest single asset in the game and the clearest sign this was made with his blessing rather than at his expense
Biggest weaknesses
- It is one boss fight and nothing else — no second encounter, no mode beyond the main run, and a clean clear leaves no obvious reason to come back
- The entire premise requires knowing the in-joke going in; without that context this is just a short, well-made brawler with an odd floating-beard boss and no explanation of why
- No score table or leaderboard survives from the original release to give the combo/leveling system anywhere to prove itself against other players
Who it's for: Newgrounds regulars and Behemoth fans who already know the Fulp-beard story, and anyone curious what a Castle Crashers-style combo system looks like compressed into a single boss fight.
Our recommendation: Worth the fifteen minutes for the novelty and the genuinely solid combat feel; go in knowing the joke is the point, the fight is the whole game, and there's no reason to return once you've cleared it beyond chasing a cleaner combo score.
6.5 / 10
Castle Crashing the Beard is built on a joke that needs unpacking before the game makes any sense: while The Behemoth spent 2008 finishing Castle Crashers, its co-founder Tom Fulp vowed not to shave until the game shipped, and Newgrounds' staff spent the resulting months joking about his steadily growing beard. Newgrounds developer BoMToons — Nick Pasto, a prolific Newgrounds Art Moderator known for outsized boss battles — turned the bit into an actual game: a Castle Crasher fighting Fulp's own beard, rendered as a taunting floating head, voiced by Fulp himself. It is worth being precise about authorship here, because it is easy to assume otherwise: this is a fan tribute made by BoMToons and collaborators, not an official Behemoth production, and Fulp's only credited contribution is his own voice.
What's actually in the .swf
The whole game is one boss fight, split into two phases, and it plays like a compressed slice of the beat-'em-up it's parodying rather than a single-gimmick minigame. You move with the arrow keys, jump, attack with A, and can hold A to charge a stronger hit — Castle Crashers' own charge-attack idea, borrowed on purpose. A leveling and combo system sits under the fight, rewarding strings of hits rather than just button-mashing through the beard's health bar. Luis supplied the Castle Crasher sprites and Coaly designed the beard boss itself; BoMToons handled the programming, background art and the game's overall shape. NemesisTheory's track "Rose at Dawn" carries the fight musically, alongside reused Newgrounds portal audio.
The escalation is the part that separates this from a one-note tribute. Phase two changes the beard's attack patterns and the arena rather than just padding its health, which is exactly the kind of structural care BoMToons' other boss-focused games are known for. For a game built around a joke with a shelf life of one dev cycle, that's more craft than the premise strictly required.
The joke, and who it's actually for
None of that changes what the game fundamentally is: an in-joke wearing a combat system. The funniest thing in it is Fulp voicing his own beard's taunts — a self-aware touch that makes clear this was made with his cooperation rather than as a jab behind his back — but the entire premise depends on already knowing why a Newgrounds developer would grow a beard and refuse to shave it, and why that was funny to that specific community in March 2008. Play it with that context and the whole thing lands in about fifteen minutes. Play it without that context and it reads as a competently made, slightly strange boss fight against a floating head, with the "why" left entirely off-screen.
That's not a flaw so much as an honest description of what a tribute game is for. It was never built to be legible to a general audience; it was built for the audience that was already following the joke in real time, and it did that job well enough to win Newgrounds' own audience over on its own terms.
Reception, and what the record actually shows
The game was well received on arrival: a Daily Feature the day after its 12 March 2008 upload (one secondary source lists 11 March; the exact day could not be confirmed further), a Weekly Second Place award a week later, and Newgrounds' own vote for Game of the Month for March 2008, ahead of that month's other submissions. Per the Wikigrounds mirror of Newgrounds' own numbers, checked 5 September 2026, it sits at 4.61 out of 5 from 8,715 votes and over two million views — a strong score by the portal's own standards, though those figures reflect the page's current tally rather than a snapshot from 2008, since votes and views kept accumulating for years after release.
One thing worth correcting plainly: nothing in the sourcing for this review — not the Newgrounds record, not contemporary 2008 coverage, not later retrospectives — connects the game to any charity, fundraiser or donation mechanism. It would be easy to assume a "vow not to shave" premise implies a Movember-style charity tie-in, and this review found no evidence that one exists. It is a straight community tribute, funded the same way any other unsponsored Newgrounds submission was: portal ad revenue and nothing bespoke.
Playing it today
The 2008 Flash original is preserved and playable via Ruffle emulation through at least one Internet Archive upload and is catalogued in the Flashpoint Archive for offline play through its launcher, both checked 5 September 2026. It also circulates on several unofficial Flash-mirror sites running their own Ruffle or HTML5 conversions. This review could not directly confirm whether Newgrounds' own hosted copy of the original still serves correctly through the site's in-browser Ruffle player, since the live Newgrounds page returned an access error during research — worth checking yourself before assuming it works there specifically, even though the file clearly survives elsewhere. There is no leaderboard or online component to have gone dark; what's preserved is functionally the same file from March 2008.
Separately, and not part of this review's score, BoMToons released Castle Crashing the Beard HD in April 2021 — a from-scratch native HTML5 remake with new pixel art, a full original soundtrack and local co-op added, marketed as an anniversary edition roughly thirteen years on. It is a different, actively maintained artifact built for modern browsers, not a Ruffle-emulated version of the file this review covers.
Verdict
Castle Crashing the Beard is a better game than an in-joke about a coworker's beard had any obligation to be: a genuinely two-phase boss fight, a combo-and-leveling system that gives the combat some texture, and Fulp's own voice work turning the gag into something closer to a good- natured roast than a jab. It earned its Daily Feature and its Game of the Month vote on the strength of that craft, not just on nostalgia for a joke that has since lost most of its original context. But it is still fifteen minutes wrapped around a single encounter, with nothing built to bring you back once the fight is won, and its humor is squarely aimed at an audience that already knows the story behind it. Score it as what it honestly is: a well-made tribute with a short shelf life, not a hidden full game.
Players who want the joke's actual target should look at Castle Crashers itself, the Behemoth game whose delayed development produced Fulp's beard in the first place. Fans of the same Newgrounds tribute-game tradition should also see Newgrounds Rumble, a platform fighter built from the same community's cast of in-jokes and mascots, and anyone who wants BoMToons' boss-battle instincts applied to a longer game should look for Chibi Knight, the project he made with his daughter that later became a full Steam release.
Pros and cons
Pros
- The two-phase structure gives the boss an actual escalation — new attack patterns and a changed arena in phase two rather than the same fight with a bigger health bar
- Combo-based combat with a leveling system gives the fight more mechanical depth than most single-encounter Newgrounds tributes bother with
- Tom Fulp voicing the taunting, self-mocking beard himself is the funniest single asset in the game and the clearest sign this was made with his blessing rather than at his expense
- BoMToons' art and Luis's Castle Crasher sprites read as a confident, faithful nod to The Behemoth's then-unreleased game rather than a cheap reskin
Cons
- It is one boss fight and nothing else — no second encounter, no mode beyond the main run, and a clean clear leaves no obvious reason to come back
- The entire premise requires knowing the in-joke going in; without that context this is just a short, well-made brawler with an odd floating-beard boss and no explanation of why
- No score table or leaderboard survives from the original release to give the combo/leveling system anywhere to prove itself against other players
- Despite a premise that sounds charity-adjacent, no monetisation or donation angle exists — worth flagging since it is easy to assume otherwise from the setup alone