Invincible the Dice Game

• Designer: uncredited
• Publisher: Mantic Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Flat River Games

The Guardians of the Globe are recruiting for an open spot in their group of super heroes, and you are determined to prove your worth!

In Invincible: The Dice Game, players take the role of the hopefuls who are required to undertake a live trial by battling villains and besting other heroes! Who can earn the most reputation and join the Guardians, without losing the respect of their peers?

Players take turns trying to progress as far as they can through the challenge deck, while battling enemies and gaining reputation. Will you lose too much energy, or will you bask in the glory you have earned?

To set up the game, shuffle the Challenge Deck and place it on the table.  The Challenge deck include Event cards, Villains, Heroes and Reputation cards.  All of the attack dice (yellow, orange, red, black) are made available as well as the 3 red Energy cubes. The blue special die is also put on the table.

At the start of a turn, the active player gets all the attack dice and 3 Energy cubes. The top card of the Challenge deck is flipped up, and depending on the type of card that is flipped up, the player has to defeat the hero/villain or resolve the special effect printed on it.

For Hero/Villain cards, you will find a Challenge Value in an orange circle – this is the number of pips that the player must roll on their dice to defeat it.  On the top, you might find Reputation stars which will be gained if you defeat the card.  Finally, at the bottom of the card, you will see how many energy cubes you will lose if you don’t defeat the character.

To fight, you roll the blue special die and up to three Attack dice (you can choose the colors).  They are rolled together, then you count the pips written on the attack dice as well as figuring out the effect of the blue die.  If you match or exceed the Challenge Value, you beat the card and you place it in front of you (to score the Reputation).  Any Attack dice used in that fight are passed to the next player on the left.  You can choose to end your turn voluntarily after you defeat a card.  If so, you keep all cards that you defeated this turn into your permanent score pile.

If you do not beat the card, you lose energy cubes as seen in the bottom right corner of the card (they are passed to the next player in turn order), and then you move any attack dice with pips showing onto the card – they represent the partial damage done to the card.  The other dice are passed to the next player.  You now roll again trying to again defeat the card.  If you run out of Attack dice while fighting OR you have no more Attack dice to roll, you are defeated, and you turn ends immediately.  You score no points for the turn and you place any cards from this round into the discard pile.

Continue playing until one player has 15 or more Reputation points in their score pile.  All other players get one more turn to try to beat the player who triggered the game end, and the player with the most points wins.  If there is a tie, those tied players play a tiebreaker round, repeating this until a winner is found.

My thoughts on the game

This is a really odd duck for the hobby – the box has the title on it, but no mention of a designer.  The box does at least tell you that it is for “2+ players” but no upper limit is mentioned on the box nor the rules.  Additionally, the box has five languages on it, but the rules and cards are only in English.  I thought this felt a little familiar, and as it turns out, it is a re-adaptation of Hellboy the DIce Game.  This version has a superhero-theme, but no other IP tie-in that I can discern.

The rules are on a single sheet of paper – and for what it’s worth, the rules are pretty clear.  The game is pretty simple, and I’ve found that if I leave up the chart for the meaning of the blue special dice faces – everyone can refer to them as needed.

Invincible is a straightforward push-your-luck dice chucker.  You can push your luck in two ways. First, on each roll, you have to decide how many Attack dice you want to roll.   Then, when you defeat a card, you have to decide if you’re going to keep going this turn or simply stop and lock in your winnings.  The enemies range in strength from 1 to 5, so there is a lot of variability in what you will find. There are also a couple of event cards that can cause you to lose an Energy cube or force you to discard a die – so there’s always a risk that you’re going to randomly flip up a card that you simply can’t beat.

Between the random card flips and good old dice luck, this game is definitely unpredictable, and for the most part, this is the main charm of the game.  There isn’t a lot of high level strategy going on here – but there is enough to consider to make this an actual game as opposed to just dice chucking.  Invincible made it to the table a few times as a filler, but it has proven itself to be merely vincible, soon to be replaced by the new game on the block.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers:

Matt C: I previewed this game last fall at Gen Con. It was mildly interesting. I’ve gotten in one play and would not say no to another. To follow up on the IP, Invincible is one of Image Comic’s main staples, releasing for the first time around 2003. Its main character is a young super-man type character but the comic (and Amazon series) is much darker than DC and even most Marvel comics. However, I did not feel like this game leans into that darker setting.

Until your next appointment, 

The Gaming Doctor