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. Cyclops attempts the main mission, but he can also benefit from the dice and special ability on Wolverine's assist card! The missions and scenarios reference familiar plotlines from the comics, making them feel faithful to the universe. 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 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:

Succeeding or failing in missions can cause heroes to gain or break bonds representing their relationships with one another. Positive bonds, like respect, can provide powerful buffs like free training if two bonded heroes are on the same mission together. Its counterpart, resentment, prevents you from training or using training tokens. Having to consider if a mission is going to go south because Wolverine and Cyclops hate each other even though they should have the firepower to make it work is a pretty perfect marriage of mechanics and flavour.With every component for each villain carefully themed to fit their aesthetic - from the player pieces to the player boards - and the mechanics shifting to align with their tactical approach, the amount of care that’s been put into Marvel Villainous is really impressive and wonderful to see. 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. One of the major projects announced during the In-Flight Report was X-Men Mutant Insurrection. Gerber describes it as a "co-operative dice-driven game" supporting up to 6 players. You must assemble a team of X-Men to complete missions around the world and thwart major X-Men supervillains. Heroes can form bonds with one another, and those bonds can become strained, complicating play in various ways. There will be a large variety of characters to choose from including fan favorites Gambit, Wolverine, and Storm, among others. There are quite a number of co-op board games on this list - considering the themes of working together against a great evil is a common one in Marvel stories - so how does Marvel United manage to stand out? Besides its striking chibi art-style, which manages to make the stoic Captain America look positively adorable, it’s Marvel United’s gameplay that makes it so special. A co-op board game that has players protecting humanity as a team of mutant characters The standees and art-style in Mutant Insurrection make it a love letter to the X-Men comic series.

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. 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.” The missions that you complete don’t exist in a vacuum—there are eight different scenarios in X-Men: Mutant Insurrection, and each one pits you against a deadly threat. As you complete your objectives and advance through the scenario, you’re pushing ever closer to a massive showdown against the villain. These showdowns unfold across a panoramic portrayal of your ultimate battle, pulling together multiple missions into an epic conflict. It will take every hero on your team to defeat your foes and win the scenario! Calling All X-Men! Over the course of the game, you may have opportunities to forge a bond with another hero, uniting your two characters with a bond likeThe next step is assist cards – if another player has deployed their character to the same mission as the active hero they can choose to give them their assist card, meaning that they can then choose to collect the dice from either their own assist card or the assisting player’s card. This can help if the assisting player has a better dice combination for the particular mission on their assist card than the active hero. Once the required six dice have been collected it’s time to roll the dice and see if you can complete objectives. Dice will be spent to complete objectives on the mission card and to complete an objective you must complete all the requirements on the objective. The requirements are broken down into power, teamwork and fight, and these symbols are on all the dice in different ratios making it important to have the right combination of dice available to increase your chance of completing all the objectives and succeeding at the mission. If by the end of everyone’s turn the mission/s have been completed you will be receive a reward, which can take the form of healing, reducing threat, creating a bond between characters or taking a mutant card. A mutant card will be a supporting X-Man which will add bonuses to your character’s turn, including things such as dice re-rolls or changing dice faces to more favourable ones. Bonds represent the relationships between the X-Men fluctuating positively or negatively depending on the situation. 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.”

A twist on the beloved deduction card game that’s more than just a different theme As it is in the original Love letter game, each card in Infinity Gauntlet has a different power. Equally important to their core abilities is each character’s assistance card, which indicates how they bolster their allies. Each provides two additional dice representing their core competency, plus a special ability. For instance, Colossus can provide a teammate with two additional red dice and act as their bodyguard, taking any damage for them. A mutant fighting alone will get their own dice but can’t use their assist ability, meaning it’s almost always better to be paired up. Save the galaxy from the threat of the Mad Titan in this intense board game The plastic figure of Thanos in the middle of this board definitely makes the game stand out.That idea is at the heart of X-Men: Mutant Insurrection, a fully cooperative dice-rolling game where up to six players battle against a series of classic villains. Designers Richard Launius and Brandon Perdue understand that while the X-Men may be individually powerful, their success and failure is always based on how they function as a team. In the game, this dynamic is reflected by bonds, double-sided cards that have a positive effect on one side and a negative effect on the other,” says Purdue, “bond cards come in pairs, and when you get one you give the matching card to another player.” The X-Men hold a special place in many comic fans’ hearts, and I’m no exception. While my tastes in comics have broadened over the years to include a ton of other great books, my enthusiasm for comics started with the Children of the Atom. I remain a big fan of Xavier’s mutants, and the myriad stories they’ve been a part of over the years. That’s why I was especially curious about Fantasy Flight’s take on the X-Men franchise; the teams there often reveal an uncanny talent for recognizing the unique tone of a licensed property, and finding a way to reflect that in the mechanics and flavor of a new board game. I’m happy to say that X-Men: Mutant Insurrection is no exception. By balancing an action-focused, dice-driven battle system with a clever approach to alliances and character relationships, the new game has all the drama and flair of some of the great superhero comic runs. Final Score: 3.5 Stars – A good evolution of the Elder Sign system that creates a fun cooperative experience with solid replay value.