Marvel’s Dice Masters: The Amazing Spider-Man is a dice building tabletop game. The game features your favourite characters from the Spider-Man universe like Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Kingpin and more.
You will need to build your own team of either heroes or villians and battle it out against your opponent to try and take them down.
The set contains 44 custom dice, 38 cards and two dice bags – everything you need for two players wanting to duke it out.
I will be honest, I wasn’t that enamoured by the prospect of playing this. I don’t really know what it was, maybe it was my lack of love for the Marvel Universe, or maybe it was that I’d never played a Dice game before, but I persevered.
Initially I read through the rule book, but I just wasn’t taking it in and eventually went on YouTube to watch how to play it – personally I found this method a lot easier.
Before you start playing I would recommend heading to the wizkids site to download and print out a copy of the playing board, the one in the booklet isn’t big enough. You can find a link directly to it here.
To start you will need to have two characters cards for yourself and your opponent and their corresponding die. Then you need to pick three basic action cards and place each one with a colour reminder card and the dice that go with that colour card. Finally each put eight character dice in to each bag.
Essentially each round consists of a number of steps which are:-
Clear and Draw – this involves clearing any dice in your reserve pool and placing them in the used pile, then drawing 4 dice from your bag and rolling them. If you’re bag runs out you can then place all the dice from your used pile in the bag and draw the remaining number of dice you need.
Roll and Reroll – Once you’ve rolled your dice, if you want to you can reroll any number of them to see if you get a better result, but you must then keep that new roll.
Main Step – In this step you can either purchase dice by spending energy. Each character has an energy value to by it in the top left card, you will need at least one of that energy in your reserve pool to be able to buy that characters dice.
You can also field characters in this round. Each character has a fielding cost in the upper left corner of the die – you must spend that amount of energy to field that die. If you’ve rolled any action dice you can also make use of them by either spending the generic energy shown or by activating it’s ability specified on the card. Some of the dice have what is called a burst ability – shown by an asterisk, you must activate the burst ability if you choose to play the dice.
Then we have the Attack Step – This is where you will declare your attackers and your blockers. Each character dice has an attack value – top right, and a defense value – bottom right.. Your aim is to try and knock out their characters so that you can then deal damage to the player directly. The player has a total of 20 hit points (or 10 if you want to play a beginner game) and you need to deplete them to 0 in order to win.
Finally you have the Cleanup Step – Here, blocked or blocking characters that were not KO’d go back to the field zone and pretty much all other dice go in to the used pile. All card effects and any damage dealt to characters are reset too.
Now, that is a very quick overview of the basics of the game, there is a lot more to it, but honestly I don’t think I could explain it in enough details without prattling on for ages, so I will just leave it at that.
For some reason it seemed to take me a long time for actually get what I was doing and like I said earlier watching the video really helped, but once I understood it, it seemed kind of simple. I put some of this down to the fact that I’ve never really played any dice games before so didn’t have a clue how they would work.
Personally, I can’t really see me getting in to this game all that much, but I can understand how it would appeal to fans of the franchises that they represent and fans of dice games. However, I liked the the way it was all presented, the cards and dice looked good and everything seems to be of a decent quality – even the dice bags which aren’t paper, although they might look like they are.
There are also a large number of expansions and extra cards packs that you can get that will really expand your collection to mix up the gameplay even more. I guess this could end up proving costly, but if you play it enough you will want to be able to vary up the games each time you play and adding to your collection will allow for a lot more replay ability.
The bottom line is, is that it’s just not a game for me though. But if you’re a fan of dice games and the Marvel universe then I think you would really enjoy playing it. It’s a quick game and very portable making it excellent for taking places and playing with your friends.
-Will
