Smash Up - Tips & Strategies

If you’ve played more than a few games of Smash Up, you know games can easily be overwhelmed by the high-powered factions. One house rule we’ve taken to invoking occasionally is “faction removal,” where some decks are just plain taken out of consideration for draft. While this isn’t very fun with just the base set as it limits your options, it is easier with the Awesome Level 9000 expansion, now that there are twelve total factions in the game.

Contenders for removal, in order, are Zombies (recursion), Wizards (card draw), Robots (swarm), and Tricksters (discard). Each of these has a theme that is somewhat overpowered compared to the rest. Not all of them need to be removed in every game, but it does mix things up a bit to not have to deal with the same high-powered schticks all of the time. If you change this up at all, I would recommend not removing either Ninjas or Pirates, since those are the only two factions with a surprise factor (being able to move or play minions at the last moment when bases are scoring).

You can get a lot of mileage out of combining this with the “random factions” house rule. For the three-deck variant (which we’ve taken to calling Super Smash Up in our playgroup), we will set aside the “removed” factions, draft two decks from among the remaining eight factions, then randomly distribute the high-powered factions to each player (up to four) to make 60-card decks.

Once you have played the game a few times it is easy to see that some factions can compliment others easily. Soon some factions are overlooked, we have added a house rule that allows a little more randomness. We roll a dice to determine which factions each person gets. We also keep track so that you can’t be either of the same factions from one game to the next.

Ever wonder what would happen if you smashed up more than two factions? One creative way to do this is to have all the cards face up on the table. Have one person add any card they want to their deck, then the person to their left does the same continue around the table until everyone has 40 cards. Shuffle and begin playing.

This also fixes some problems with factions that some consider to be overpowered. Say your group agrees that wizards and zombies are somewhat better than the other factions. Now everyone can have a piece of those factions, eliminating any perceived unfair advantages.

You can easily play more than 4 players, the only thing you need is an expansion to get enough decks.