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The Showdowns are also appropriately dramatic. When you enter the final stage of the game, all other components are set aside and you flip all the story missions you’ve completed. These missions fit together to make a tableau of the finale with exciting art and missions to complete. I won’t spoil anything here, but some of the later showdowns employ some very clever mechanics to keep the heroes guessing! Room For Improvement Bonds offer bonuses when two bonded members of the team are on the same mission –but when a bond is broken this becomes a burden, giving both players negative effects when working together. It models the kind of storylines of the X-Men universe well, but it’s frustrating that failure begets angst that leaves your team weaker. It can be fixed of course, but when Wolverine won’t be in the same room as Angel then you do feel more like a school teacher mediating on the playground than a superhero team.
Brandon Perdue has a storied past, having previously worked on the epic and expansively supported The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth and Heroes of Terrinoth, a dice and card game that might begin to sound familiar over the next few paragraphs. With Marvel being more popular than it’s ever been before, now’s the time to lure your friends into playing board games with you via the appeal of their favourite MCU characters. How could they resist a board game with Captain America and The Hulk, that also happens to be really great, too? To give you some ideas to indulge your love of the comics, films and TV shows, here’s our list of the best Marvel board games.So, where are we meant to peg these particular X-men and villains? Nowhere particularly, suggests Perdue, “ Mutant Insurrection goes for classic or iconic looks to the characters so that it’s not attached to a specific version of the X-Men.” To attempt a mission, a player will roll 6 dice (three different colors of dice), decided by their character cards or an assist card given to them by another X-man at the mission. If a player is assisted, two of their dice are swapped out for the ones on the assist card, and they also gain an additional special power as well. Once you’ve rolled your dice, you have two chances to re-roll your dice in search of the results that you need to complete your objectives. You can reroll any number of dice freely, but beware the villainy result! Some missions, such as a fight with the ground-shaking Avalanche, have a deadly villainy effect—if you’re fighting Avalanche, you’ll suffer two damage to reroll dice showing the villainy result.
It’s the little things that bring a game to life. A miniature X-Jet that serves no purpose, beyond providing a place to put your characters between missions, is exactly the kind of fluff you’d want from a game like this. The quality of materials is strong, and the interchangeable cardboard hero standees are all superbly illustrated. If the players beat all the lines of the mission, a reward is handed out to the players there. If, after a player is finished, there are still objectives to be attempted, any other players at the mission can then try. Once all players have had a turn, if the mission is still not completed, the players there suffer the failure penalty and can try again on a future turn. Like the actual X-Men, the heroes’ abilities aren’t created equal. Some play out just like their comic book equivalents should and are almost always useful, such as Rogue’s primary ability of power absorption - which lets her duplicate the talent of any other hero and assist with an offensive energy drain. Others nail the flavour but are more situationally useful, like Shadowcat’s ability to turn a teammate intangible so they’ll ignore damage. Unfortunately a lot of them are just slight variations on each other, providing rerolls or converting dice with vague justifications, such as Jubilee’s fireworks or Beast’s enhanced agility. Any dice game runs the risk of being at the mercy of chance, but X-Men: Mutant Insurrection has a lot of features to mitigate this issue. Different dice are weighted towards certain symbols. All heroes are allowed two re-rolls when attempting a mission. There are hero powers and mutant support cards which can manipulate the dice by offering additional re-rolls, conversion to or from certain symbols, or training tokens that act like a stored dice roll to be cashed in when needed.
Meanwhile, Cosmic Encounter has always engaged my designer brain with its vast array of special abilities and how different the experience can be depending on the aliens at the table.” Each X-Men character has both a basic card (showing four dice and one ability) and an assist card (showing two dice and an ability.) When undertaking missions, a core theme in X-Men: Mutant Insurrection is the ability to assist another character at the same location by handing over your assist card – which then temporarily replaces the assist card of the other character. In this way, and to continue the example above, Wolverine could assist Phoenix by covering her assist card with his own, so that when she rolls her “normal” dice, she will add Wolverines two “assist” dice (and the ability printed on his card) which would likely mean she rolls more physical (red die) effects than she otherwise would. When you are together you’ll get a powerful bonus from that bond,” explains Purdue, “however, if you’re on the negative side, the reverse is true: being together makes you subject to difficult penalties.” Between missions, and during the main phase of the game, players can also decide whether to retreat to Professor Xavier’s office for a pep talk, or to the Danger Room. Both of these will help your character heal and provide you with training tokens or other bonuses. Like any game like this, being out of the action is useful, but only while you’ve got cover. Each player takes control of one or more X-Men. There are missions represented by tarot-sized cards, each with a series of objectives. Objectives are made up of symbols that must be rolled on different coloured dice. Each hero has access to a different combination of dice and is better equipped to collect specific symbols.
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