Mars Attacks: The Dice Game

The Mars Attacks Dice Game by Steve Jackson Games is a standard push your luck dice game with players deciding to continue rolling or stopping and banking their dice roll.

The Theme: You are Martians! Your mission is to destroy Earth by first taking down the United States. You can choose to attack different cities and monuments in the United States. You need to roll ray-guns to take over cities, and you need to roll martians to take over monuments.

Set up: the playing area is made up of 4 location piles which have varied amounts of cards depending on how many people are playing. Also, a difficulty card is placed next to the location piles. The difficulty card has one nuke symbol (the hard mode side) or two nukes (the regular mode side). Most location cards will also display a nuke symbol in one of the corners(The Nukes will be explained in the dice section of this review). Players get 4 tokens to represent their martians progress at the locations. Each player may have 1 token on each location, meaning players can be at all 4 locations at once as long as they have banked points while rolling for each location. decide who is going first and give them the first player token.

Locations and monuments: There are a lot of cities and monuments which give this game a lot of replay value as you will get different cites and monuments each game. some cities and monuments give you special ongoing abilities or one time effects when you capture them. Each location gives you victory points with monuments usually giving a higher amount of victory points as you only may roll once with no re-rolls when attacking monuments. Most locations will have a nuke symbol on them, some have 2, some have none. Basically, the more nukes the easier the game difficulty.

The Dice and the results: The game comes with yellow dice which have 3 results, 2 red ray-guns, 2 green martian, 2 black nuke symbols. Ray-guns are the most common form of scoring points, but for monuments you need the martian result to score. Martian results can be re-rolled while attacking cities but you must re-roll all the martian results at once, they may not be re-rolled while rolling for monuments (when attacking monuments you get only one roll with no rerolls unless you have gained a power). Nukes are generally bad. If a player rolls more nukes than are collectively shown on the 4 location cards and the difficulty card they can not bank points and are forced to end their turn.

Player turns: Players place one of their martian token on a location then take all the dice and roll them. If attacking a city, you roll, then count the nukes. if you have rolled less nukes than are shown on the locations and difficulty cards you may re-roll all the martian results. pLayers decide when to stop and bank their ray-gun results for points. Once a player has enough points at that location, they may claim the card and score its victory points, as well as gain any ability the card may provide (green text on location cards) or one time instant abilities (red text on location cards). once a location has been captured, the card is moved to in-front of the player who captured it and the card under it is flipped. If a pile is empty play continues till it is the first players turn again, in which the game ends.

Overall, I really like Mars Attacks: The Dice game. It is very similar to Zombie Dice and I recommend it for anyone who likes push your luck Dice games. This game is unique in that players have the option to move from one goal to another freely and can be working on 4 different locations at once, though, in games with more than 2 players, it is generally better to stick to 1 or 2 locations as a way to avoid stretching yourself too thin in. The game takes about 3 times as long as Zombie dice but play is more competitive as players can visually see the progress of other players at each location and it can become a race to take a location, with the victory points going to who ever can reach the locations point goal first. You can kind of imagine it as zombie dice but instead of a brain goal for game ending victory, there is a point goal for several locations and it is who ever has more victory points from locations when a pile runs out wins. It is not as portable as zombie dice but can easily fit in a small bag or backpack.
Great game for most gamers, not a deep game so strategy gamers might not care for this one too much.