The Walking Dead: The Dice Game and Invincible: The Dice Game Review - Fast, Push Your Luck Dice Game
The two new Image Comics-inspired dice game offers a quick but fun experience.
Invincible: The Dice Game and its sister game The Walking Dead: The Dice Game offers players with a quick, push-your-luck style game that can be enjoyed during commercial breaks while watching an episode of their corresponding television series. Released earlier this year by Mantic Games, both Invincible: The Dice Game and The Walking Dead: The Dice Game utilize the same game mechanics that balances dice pool management and point scoring in a quick-paced experience. Each game has cards themed to their respective franchises and have slightly different nomenclature to refer to Victory Points and damage, but the two games offer the same experience otherwise.
The objective of both games is to be the first to score 15 or more Victory Points (called Reputation in Invincible and Supplies in The Walking Dead). On a player's turn, they draw a card with either allies or enemies from the game's respective franchise on it. Each card has a value on it that players need to meet or beat and players can commit up to three dice from a pool of attack dice to defeat that card. The attack dice have varying degrees of strength to them, with yellow representing the weakest kind of dice and black representing the strongest. Once an attack dice has been rolled, it's permanently removed from that player's pool so most of the decision making comes from deciding how much to commit with each attack roll. Adding additional wrinkles to each roll is the Special Dice, which can boost attack, block damage or occasionally cause players to lose health even if they win.
The core mechanic here is choosing which attack dice and how many to commit to a roll. If a player commits strong dice to a roll, they'll likely defeat the card but put themselves in a situation where they don't have the necessary dice to defeat a subsequent enemy. Committing too few dice or only using the weak yellow dice means potentially "losing" to the card, which comes with other consequences. I like that players always started off with the same pool of dice and their decisions ultimately make for how long they last in a round. I felt like the game could have benefitted from additional abilities that trigger based on certain dice combos or the use of certain dice, but I also understand that this is a game meant more for quick decisions rather than farming for certain combos or results.
During a turn, each player has three health cubes and they can lose health if they fail to defeat a character on their turn. The health cubes act as a secondary timer and another stress point for a player, as a player may need to bail out of their turn should they get down to 1 health cube on their turn. If a player runs out of health cubes, they receive no victory points from the cards they previously defeated on their turn, which is where the push your luck comes into play. Does a player hope to pull an easy card to gain one more victory point on their turn, or do they play conservatively and keep their points for the round? It's the central question for the game and making the wrong decision can cost you the game.
While the theming for the two games is rather weak (there's no deviation in the ruleset to help the game fit a superhero or zombie theme), the underlying game system is fun and quick. It's a lightweight game, but it moves fast and there's not really any rules for players to get tripped on, which makes it an ideal game that can be enjoyed during commercials or while waiting for someone to arrive for game night. While the $20 recommended price point might be a touch high given how quick the game moves, it could be worth it if it becomes a regular part of game night.
