Yet Perdue’s throughline for this game comes from somewhere a little further out, “my big influences for games like Mutant Insurrection – and I guess really for most games – are tabletop RPGs and Cosmic Encounter,” says Perdue, “RPGs with rulesets that varied a lot depending on your character type, like Shadowrun, really cemented for me how powerful mechanics can be in helping to make a theme or setting engaging, and I love the freeform storytelling.” The overall goal is to advance the plot cards. These will be mission-specific, but usually involve beating certain missions or villains throughout the game. Players can even look forward to a few mini-narratives interspersed throughout the missions. As players work their way through the plot cards, they’ll eventually end at a Final Showdown. This is a multi-turn battle with 2-4 mission cards that require the heroes to defeat them all or die trying. You can send up to 3 heroes to a location. Game Experience: 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. After you’ve chosen which mission you’re going to take on, it’s time to roll your dice! Wolverine and Cyclops will each have a chance to defeat Avalanche, but you leap forward with Cyclops to take the first swing. Even though Wolverine isn’t leading the charge this turn, he’s still able to assist, and Cyclops can benefit from Wolverine’s assist card, gathering two red dice and two yellow dice from his own card, plus another red die and a blue die from Wolverine’s One of the most fundamental things about X-Men stories, to me, is the way that they aren’t just about fighting a bad guy and saving the day,” says Purdue, “they’re soap opera, and the drama between the X-Men is sometimes as dangerous as any foe they face. At the same time, the connections the X-Men form are often their greatest strength.”

To take down a mission, you and any other mutants that join you in this fight will have to work together to complete the mission card’s objectives. For example, It’s an undeniable fact that one of the most popular aspects of the Marvel comics and films are the epic battles between the superheroes and their dreaded nemesis. There’s a reason why, love it or hate it, pretty much every entry in the MCU has to end with a CGI-filled action scene, and Marvel: Strike Teams knows that too. A dungeon-crawling game for two people, Marvel: Strike Teams enables players to recreate or envision big Marvel battles of their own. Cyclops attempts the main mission, but he can also benefit from the dice and special ability on Wolverine's assist card!

Inevitably, if you and your team manage to stay alive long enough, the story rises to a climactic showdown, in which the heroes work together to take down a particularly overwhelming threat. It’s a fun way to give the tail end of the game an injection of excitement, especially as your mutants charge into battle, already fatigued and worn down by the battles from earlier in the game. The dice are split into 3 colours, each representing a different aspect of the X-Men – red dice symbolise fighting skill, blue dice intelligence and teamwork and yellow dice their mutant powers. They all have their own ratio of symbols which will help you determine what characters are best for which missions – for example Wolverine is mostly red (fighting) dice with some blue (teamwork) dice, whereas Phoenix is mostly yellow (mutant power) with some blue dice. To complete the objectives at a mission, you’ll have to roll the dice shown on your mutant’s power card. If there’s another hero at the mission with you, they can diversify your dice pool and offer new abilities by sharing their assist card with you. For example, if you’re playing as Cyclops and Wolverine is assisting you in this mission, you’ll gather three red dice, two yellow dice, and one blue die.

Though the world may despise them, the team of heroic mutants known as X-Men fight tirelessly to protect humanity from the sinister machinations of evildoers. Leap into the action with X-Men: Mutant Insurrection, a fast-paced, cooperative, dice-driven card game for one to six players! You’ll build a team of iconic heroes like Wolverine, Rogue, Storm, and Jubilee, embark on dangerous missions around the world, and accelerate toward a thrilling showdown with a villain like Dark Phoenix, Magneto, or the Hellfire Club. Marvel Dice Masters is a series of dice-rolling games in which various superheroes from the comics universe have been shrunken down into an adorable little die. All joking aside, Marvel Dice Masters comes from the minds of the co-designers of Quarriors!, which is a great dice game in its own right, and offers a surprising amount of depth. The missions and scenarios reference familiar plotlines from the comics, making them feel faithful to the universe. Due to the popularity of the original game, there are many, many different versions of Love Letter out there, including one featuring Batman characters from Marvel’s rival comics company: DC. Most of these are simple re-themes that keep most of the gameplay mechanics from the base game, but with one or two extra elements like characters from a known property or roles with abilities unique to that version. There are a lot of heroes and a host of other mutants who can be recruited as supporting characters. Most of the powers are very similar, and mainly offer rerolls for certain dice colours and symbols. There are exceptions, of course. Shadowcat’s threat-specific phasing ability is notably unique. And Angel’s ability to move success markers from one objective to another is one of the best in the game. The X-Men are known for their unique abilities, and a bit more variety in this area would really help the replayability. Final ThoughtsFor reasons that I can’t explain, I tend to shy away from cooperative board games. The likes of Pandemic (especially Pandemic Legacy), Arkham Horror: Final Hour and Horrified always seem to go down well when we play them here, but I think my family thrives on the competitive nature of direct confrontation. Regardless, when we get the chance to review a new cooperative game, we all seem to rise to the challenge. Where Fantasy Flight Games newest cooperative game, X-Men: Mutant Insurrection, is concerned, the IP and generous amount of content was more than enough to whet the appetite nicely. 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.

This variety of mission translates into what the dice themselves represent. Not only is there the expected fighty symbols for tactically walloping someone, there’s also teamwork and power symbols. The latter relates to those mutants who wield huge power – such as Storm’s ability to control the weather, whereas teamwork represents something a little closer to research or investigation. X-Men: Mutant Insurrection is a fully cooperative tabletop game for one to six players. While experienced players can blast through a game solo or with a partner in a bit over an hour, the game really comes into its own with three or more players, and I’d expect that to be a two-hour-plus playthrough for most groups. I recommend a larger group size because so much of the X-Men mythology circulates around the ideas of community, teamwork, and competing personalities, and it’s hard to nail that vibe unless you have a similar mix of different folks at the table. Marvel Champions: The Card Game takes the very well-worn formula of players coming together as a band of heroes to fight a classic villain, and mixes things up with its clever approach to card gameplay and challenge. A living card game from the publisher behind Arkham Horror: The Card Game, Marvel Champions manages to provide a unique experience that rewards and punishes its players in equal measure. 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. Should a team not complete their mission within the player turn, the failure option is triggered, and threat is usually increased.

Creative Play

Players win the game by successfully completing missions. Gain rewards and keep the global threat to a minimum. They must also push through specific story missions, which will lead to a final showdown against one of many infamous X-nemeses. Players lose if the global threat becomes too high. Once in the showdown, they lose if all the heroes are defeated. One nice feature of this game is that, until the final showdown, any time a player loses their hero, they can simply grab a new one and keep playing. They might lose some boons and support cards they’ve collected, but they are still able to join in the action. You Don’t Have To Be Domino A board game themed specifically around those incredible mutants, X-Men: Mutant Insurrection has players experiencing a series of scenarios inspired by classic storylines from the comics, including the Dark Phoenix saga and Hellfire Club. Featuring a gathering of all the usual mutant suspects, such as Wolverine and Rogue, as well as some more unlikely characters like Jubilee and Domino, Mutant Insurrection is based on the formula established by Elder Sign, but injects things with a distinctly Marvel twist. But that’s kind of the point. Pulling it off as a team feels great, and the boss showdowns – comprised of a panorama of multiple cards that have to be defeated in dramatic fashion – are tough. While the standees instead of minis and the freeform layout of the game still makes it feel a little cheaper than a ‘proper’ X-men outing, its heart is entirely in the right place.

This flashy natural rubber game mat, measuring 26” x 36” offers a clear play surface to situate your missions, while artwork of Wolverine and Rogue leaping into action keeps you in the moment. The Strangest Heroes of All Having to consider if a mission is going to go south because Wolverine and Cyclops hate each other is a pretty perfect marriage of mechanics and flavour.There are evil forces arrayed against you however, and they won’t stop while the X-Men are still alive. After the mission phase each round, threat will increase, pushing the heroes towards defeat. Threat cards can lead to devastating events or dangerous Sentinels that deploy to missions and make them even more difficult to defeat. Players can choose from 16 different X-Men to control, from the franchise’s biggest stars such as Wolverine and Rogue down to deeper cuts like Armor and Magik. Because the game is fully cooperative, you’re welcome to play more than one character if you have fewer than six people at your table; the game plays at its best with four or more characters, since you’ll get more complexity in choosing your team-ups and get to see more missions. 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. For the casual or lapsed comics reader, understanding that Armor, one of the X-Men included in this box, is from a timeline when the Scarlet Witch stripped nearly a million mutants of their powers, leaving only a handful with their abilities, is likely to be a novel and interesting springboard into a whole new love of the comics. Equally, Krakoa mentioned above, is literally a sentient island in the pacific ocean who managed to capture a number of the original X-Men (Cyclops, Angel, Iceman, Jean Grey and so on) before having them liberated by, what were at the time the ‘New X-Men’ (Colossus, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Storm etc). All of this is really to highlight that these character’s histories are just made out of the parts we’ve already experienced of them through comics, film and TV. We play games with familiar characters from other media partly for exploration and partly for that aspect of remixing something we know. This is due to not only hero powers, but that there are three different types of dice. I appreciated that the dice were broken up into 3 different types, each of which favors one of the game’s icons. This prompted decisions where we would discuss which X-man to send where based on how their dice were distributed. Throughout the game, your hero can also acquire bonds with other heroes (or have them broken for detrimental effects) that give you bonuses for being at the same mission. So, the decision of which mission to attempt and who to send there wasn’t always that obvious.