Marvel Dice Throne
Marvel Dice Throne is a game involving rolling dice a lot (one might guess that given the name), and it has a nice deck / character building aspect, too.
Each player picks one of eight Marvel characters. For each character, there’s a whole collection of character board, individual cards, status tokens, and dice. That means the game’s box is sizeable.
The point of the game is to let up to four characters engage in a battle wherein they, bluntly spoken, smack one another around the place by applying various super powers. For my test, I chose to let Captain Marvel play against Black Panther - for no particular reason.
Each of the character boxes contains, as mentioned, a selection of items and cards. These are all set out to prepare the game. In the image below, you can see the setup at the start of the game. The characters start out at full health (indicated by the oblong counter to the upper left of the character tableau). They also have a certain amount of combat points (CP, indicated by the round counter). Each character also has a starting set of four cards.
The rules are learned quickly: in each round, the acting character first does some deck building by selling and playing cards (CP are the currency). Next, the character attacks an opponent, who can deflect (some of) the damage by activating defensive skills. This is followed by another round of deck building to wind things down. Each character has special abilities, which are depicted by special cardboard tokens. These add a lot of spice to the game, and make for some surprises.
So far, so good - it’s plain and simple. The game is fast-paced and quite a lot of fun, because the combinations of cards and special abilities, together with the random element added by the many many dice rolls, make for many variations. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
Captain Marvel won this round, by the way. Narrowly.
Tags: games