Invincible The Dice Game review — A brutal push-your-luck game

Invincible The Dice Game from Skybound and Mantic is a push-your-luck filler game based on the popular Invincible comic by Robert Kirkman. With a single deck of cards and some custom dice, does this super hero game pack enough of a punch to land on your table? I’m not going to give you the answer now! You have to read the review.

Gameplay in Invincible is all about pushing your luck, and that is it. Are you feeling lucky? This game takes that one mechanic and runs with it, no fluff or design bloat to interfere with that one simple question. On your turn you will take the colored dice, three health cubes, and flip a card from the deck. You are then faced with an important choice. How many and what color dice do you want to wager on defeating the enemy you just revealed? Once you have chosen your dice you simply roll them and see if your number of hits is bigger than the enemies health. If it is, you kill them and decide to fight another one or pass the turn. If you did not get enough hits, you’ll take the damage printed on the card and try again until you succeed or lose all three of your own hit points (the game calls them energy). Each defeated card is kept for points and the first to 15 points wins. If you die, you lose every card you have defeated that turn.

The push-your-luck aspect of the game is due to two things, the deck and the dice. The deck of enemies ranges from easy to wildly unfair while the dice are pure probabilities. On your turn, you have to fight one card but after that you can choose to go again or pass. Once you flip a card though, you have to fight it until either you or the enemy dies. No take backs. The trick is, you only get to use three dice plus the blue power die, and once you use a die, it’s gone. So you have to choose to gamble on flipping a card combined with an ever dwindling pool of dice. Not all dice are created equal either. The yellow dice are basically garbage with a 50/50 shot at one hit. Orange dice are pretty decent but you only get three of them. Red’s are great but you only have two. The black die is guaranteed success with a chance of a big hit but it’s the only one. You reroll the blue power die every fight and it mostly helps you with extra hits, rerolls, or shields but has a one out of six chance to steal one of your three precious hit points as well.

Turns are quick and brutal. The enemies range from one to five hit points and will deal between zero and three hits to you if you don’t take them out. Occasionally you’ll flip a card that just takes a health from you automatically or steals your dice. The extreme range of cards can make the game feel very swingy. One person is getting lucky with easy fights while another gets pummeled by back to back big baddies. Trying to make smart decisions based on your shrinking dice pool is hard to manage with such large swings in the enemy cards and no ability to compensate once you choose to flip a card. Because of that, most turns are going to be fighting two or maybe three enemies. Staying in the fight any longer is sure to lead to disaster.

Production quality is pretty nice. The box isn’t any bigger than it needs to be and is wrapped in comic art. That same comic art carries onto all of the cards which are all surprisingly family friendly given the mature nature of the source material, with the exception of the Knockout card that could be a bit too bloody for the entire family. The cards themselves are standard weight with a pleasant linen finish that makes shuffling a breeze. The custom dice are great and the color coded strength is a nice touch.

Invincible The Dice game is fun for a few rounds but can feel overly punishing. It’s a push-your-luck game but feels like it’s a bit too luck dependent with the information you can control with your dice pool not being enough to compensate for the swinginess of the deck. I’d be happy to play it as a quick filler but wouldn’t seek it out.

Unless otherwise stated, the product in this article was provided for review purposes.