Berserkdingo

KoT:Power-Up brings to the table a new component and an additional character (A lovely Panda…who knows Kung-fu).

This new component is the Evolution Deck, which is a character-specific set of cards that give unique (but not OP) powers to each monster in our core game along with the new challenger.

The mechanic to obtain these cards is getting 3 hearts in your end roll, either if you are outside or inside of Tokyo.

This opens new possibilities to the monsters who are in control of Tokyo (e.g. The Kraken has an evolution card that lets him heal for 2 on that turn)

Evolution cards have the same categories as the cards in the Power deck; Keep and Discard, but in this case is Permanent and Temporal Evolution.

I would highly recommend getting this expansion so your 5-6 players game gets even more crazy.

As the first expansion for DM, UXM brings a lot of great cards/dice (some already are Meta) and other mechanics that are kinda awkward at the moment (or rarely used – e.g. Heroic)

As expected, this set focus mainly in our favorite mutant heroes (and villains).

The new global abilities seen here are really good (PXG, anyone?) and have become fan favorite in no time.

Other abilities, as previously mentioned, have still to prove their worth – Heroic requires you to have 2 characters on the field with this condition and after assigning the team duo, you get an ability from each one of them. Sadly, most of them aren’t worthy of the trouble to field expensive characters that met this criteria.

The only sad part about this expansion is that Wizkids have stated that even when the dice from characters that appear both in AvX and UXM share the same stats and burst icons, they can’t be mixed.

How is this? Let’s say you have a Wolverine AvX card and 2 yellow dice from said set. Then you get your hands on another Wolvie, but from UXM, which has blue dice but the same stats/face die/burst icon as the yellow one.

One would thing you could mix them up since they are basically the same dice (but different color, pardon that minor detail) and only the card is the one that can’t be duplicated on your team, but that would be incorrect.

A great expansion (and more to come, thankfully) and cheap as the core game.

Can’t go wrong with that.

Dice Masters is a fast-paced (unless your opponent over-thinks all his moves, hehe), very accessible ($0.99 per 2 random die & cards) dice game.

Components

A team consists of 8 basic dice, 6 action dice and up to 20 character/item dice (which can be a mix from the 8 character/item limit you can bring as your team, taking in consideration the Max amount of die for each one of them)

This can be obtained within a Starter Pack ($15 – still very accessible) or can be shared by someone who already owns it (since the starter has everything for a 2-player setup)

Time

Once the rules (pretty confusing in the instruction booklet, pretty easy once you get to play) are learned and you have played 1 game, the flow of the game goes really fast, which is something I like about this game.

Game mechanic

Pretty much an offensive dice-building game where your main objective is to lower your opponent’s HP to 0, centered in a Marvel (soon DC) theme.

I believe the success the game its due to the very accessible price for the boosters and also the amount of dice one can handle in a match (its just something about rolling from 5 to 15 dice at the time, lol), aside from being a fast game.

Each turn you grab 4 dice from the the die bag and roll them. You choose to keep any (or all) of the die you rolled, then proceed to roll the rest again.

If you chose to keep energy, you can buy a character/item/basic action as long as you have enough dice as marked in the upper left corner of their card and at least 1 of those dice has a face as the one in the card (bolt,mask,shield,fist – no need for a specific energy when it comes to buy basic actions)

If you get a character’s die face (once you have some of them in your bag) or a sidekick face, you can field them by paying their cost, which needs from 0 to 3 energies.

In the case of the action die (an exclamation sign), you don’t need to pay them. You just use them in your main turn.

Once you buy, field and/or use all your dice, you can go ahead and attack or pass your turn.

When starting your next turn, if you are unable to pull 4 die from your bag, you grab everything in it and put all the used die inside, grabbing the ones you need to have 4.

Rinse and repeat 🙂

One thing that changes the amount of die you roll at the beginning of your turn is that when a character is knocked-out, it doesn’t go to your used area, instead, it goes to a Prep area, where it stays until your next turn and then it is included (as extra) with your 4 normal dice from the turn.

This is just an overall review of the game and their mechanics, of course. Once you start playing, you will see there are more advance things to learn, like the “in transition” area and the timings of abilities, along with Global abilities.

Opinion

Wizkids took a great thematic and grabbed a nice, cheap and fast gameplay (also addictive…catch ’em all!) into a mix and got himself a winner.

Best enjoyed casual at the beginning (since OP gameplay requires more strict rules – but this changes once you master all of them!), this can be played by anyone and at any time.

As a brand-new RPG user, I must say PF brings an easy-to-learn mechanic to what it is.

I hardly had trouble filling out my character’s sheet with the stats and when the campaign started everything was crystal clear.

My group is fairly new to PF but we didn’t had any troubles with the rules.

If your GM is a seasoned player, I don’t think he will have troubles picking this one up and run a successful campaign.

The king and The Baron give the core game just a little boost of variety, since they tend to be a little boost of points if you happen to have one of them in your power.

The extra 7 tiles are really great since they shown a rare mix of the 3 elements of the game (farm, castle, road). An example of one of them is a tile that looks like a shuriken.

If you ever happen to stumble across this expansion and it’s below 7 or 5 dlls, don’t hesitate on grabbing it.

The first time I opened this game it caught me immediately.

Easy-to-learn and fast-paced are a couple of the qualities that make this game so fun for a wide variety of players.

The Core game doesn’t add special qualities to the monsters, so in a game of 5-6 players, you could win by being totally aggressive or being in the shadows; collecting energy for special abilities found in the SP Deck or rolling for those Triple numbers and go crazy with victory points.

Awesome game to be played with more than 3-4 friends. 1-2 players are still enjoyable but more a recommended (IMO)

Magic has that special quality of having infinite ways to play it and you can’t just go “meta” with some specific cards; you could have a $1K deck and be beaten by a guy who is just starting.

There’s a play style for almost everyone with his 5 mana colors (and combinations of them just expand this) and that makes the replay value be at 100% for me; you can be bored of playing 1 color and create a bi-color deck or play with a mono-color you didn’t gave a chance before.

The simplicity (yet, the limitless ways of play with all the expansions available) make this game perfect for new tabletop players.

The rules are plain simple and easy to learn, so players can catch up with the gameplay right away.

Aside from looking very simple, this game hides a lot of strategy and cunning (you can just mess the other players’ play with a simple tile)

A great choice for anyone