Alderac Entertainment Group Smash up Card Game

Product Information

When Spidey and friends coming swinging into the game, they bring with them the ability to move from one location to the next with ease. Their main strength comes when they come together to fight in numbers. Spiderman will strengthen all other players; Miles Morales will reduce the opposing player's strength and Ghost-Spider can add extra cards into your hand when deployed. They are a great team to fight with and together. A truly brilliant faction brought to the game which has a Game of Thrones influence, particularly the Lannister house. They are cunning and full of deceit. The minions constantly changing allegiance (that’s right, your opponents will control your minions at times) but this is part of the overall strategy and will take a bit more thought in how you achieve the win. I can see this faction not necessarily working well with all factions, but they will be devastating with others making them an exciting faction to play with. Where care will be needed is they don’t carry a lot of power on side. This type of faction will be stronger in 3 and 4 player games.

Like any additional box set of Smash Up it comes with new base content. You can use either in the new game play or as you always have. All the bases again coming with a little quirky ability that usually upsets one player around the table before it is broken. The wonderful thing about all these bases (throughout Smash Up) is they really do change the dynamic of the game and totally influence strategy from the start. More Titans There is a lot to love about Cease and Desist and that is four totally different new factions brought into the game. What is safe to say is each faction brings its own unique strengths to the game and also carry area’s that can be exploited by opponents. There isn’t the perfect faction in this set so the second faction each gets paired with will very much determine how effective they can truly be. Get the right partner and some of these will be unstoppable. I love that after 10 years of content creation they have created a new game to which all previous content can be used. A couple of the rules on cards do not work but the creators have taken steps to deal with that and now I have two gaming rule mechanisms for Smash Up which is truly wonderful. For me, Smash Up is a nerd-fest box of fun in a box. The seemingly endless amount of combinations that the expansions offer give the game some serious longevity and you don’t even have to collect them all if you don’t want to. It’s not difficult to teach, but can overstay its welcome when maxed at four players and you may need to put in a little bit of extra effort and cash to fully streamline the gameplay with the assistance of the Geeky Box and BoardGameGeek files.

The victory points (VP) are awarded based on the total power of the minions that each player has placed there. Given Zombies were part of the core set and vampires were part of one of the earlier/first expansions. It is incredible it’s taken 10 years to see skeletons arrive as a faction in the game as they are so obvious and a popular theme in the gaming world. They are finally here in Smash Up. Unsurprisingly we also see the burying rules appear with the skeletons, makes total sense to me with them being undead. For me, the skeletons are not going to play well with all and they will need the right faction to partner to get the best out of their burying ability. They do provide plenty of entertainment when they come rising out of the ground. Sheep Some people I know have criticised the game in general. They see with every new set or expansion coming out being that little bit stronger than before and that makes the original content almost uncompetitive. They feel the base game was perfect and it should have been left there. From my experience that is just not the case. I see two factions being shuffled together and where a player may not succeed is the random chance element (of shuffled cards) not coming in out in the most successful way for the side. Isn’t it the random element of games we love that makes for that variation and replayability in a game? I know it is the reason I cannot stand chess as there is no random chance. For me, I simply get some other factions out to mix up, go again and see what happens because it is truly exciting to see how they blend and perform in a unique way every time. I love how the game plays and completely disagree with those critics. It’s Disney Each combination plays very differently than the others. With eight different factions in the standard box there is a lot of opportunity for different combinations and gameplay styles in the base box.

Also, the game is meant to be a light conflict game, nothing serious whatsoever, therefore you shouldn’t really be too concerned about equal balance – a lot of the fun is in trying out weird and wonderful combos. How about some Dwarven Princesses? Or Vampiric Cyborg Apes? Each group of characters in Smash Up: Marvel feels very different. Lets tale a look at the eight on this box.

Base location cards are placed on the table which represent the battlegrounds that the factions will be fighting over. Players take it in turns to place their minions in each base and play any actions to affect the field but may only place one of each per turn. Other than that, there is no additional cost to consider. Your goal is to conquer bases, while stopping your opponents from doing the same. Each faction has distinct abilities and ways of playing, meaning that Wizards and Robots will aim to conquer bases in a different way that Wizards and Ninjas would! In Smash Up all these terminologies are very important as they define when an ability can be triggered. Read carefully! 😉 Smash Up came out in 2012 and has since seen many different expansions and variations. One of the most recent is Smash Up: Marvel which brings in the wonderful world of Marvel into the crazy universe. The basic concept of Smash Up is to bring two different groups of characters and abilities from completely different worlds into one.