Lunchtime gaming has been a wonderful surprise for me.
The ability to play games during my work day
has done so much to ease work stress for my friends and I.
To make it even better, we’ve had 3 people
who’ve never previously gamed at all join us.
As wonderful as gaming at lunch is, finding games that play quick enough
and are new-player friendly can be quite a challenge.
We needed a game that would support up to 6
players and be done in about 25 minutes.
Lucky for me, I was shown Mars Attacks: The Dice Game at a convention
and I knew it would be a perfect fit for my group.
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| A great picture of the components from www.bleedingcool.com |
Mars Attacks comes with 29 location cards, 1 Difficulty
card, 4 player tokens in each of 6 colors, a start player marker, and most
importantly, the dice.
You get 10 of
these awesome yellow dice.
There are 2
nukes, 2 aliens, and 2 ray guns on each die.
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| Dice, player tokens, and cards |
To start the game, you shuffle the locations and then make 4
stacks with 1 card per player in each stack.
Place these face down and flip the top card. On a player’s turn, they pick a card to go
after and roll the dice until they decide to stop or they bust out by rolling
too many nukes.
Busting out is half the fun of the game! Each location card may have up to two nuke
symbols on it. There’s also the
Difficulty card that has 1 nuke on the hard side and 2 nukes on the easy
side. Count up all the visible nukes in
the play area. If you roll that many
nukes on your turn, you bust and get nothing.
The number of nukes will change throughout the game which makes for an
interesting ride. One round, it may be
almost impossible to bust. Others, it
may be really easy. The schadenfreude
runs deep in this game. Watching someone
fail miserably can be almost as much fun as winning a key card.
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| Examples of the Cities and Monuments |
I really like that there are two different kinds of
locations.
The Cities are the standard
kind and have 3-12 spaces on them.
To claim
a city, you need to roll ray guns equal to that number.
You get to re-roll until you bust or decided
to stop.
The Monuments are a bit
different. These cards show Martian heads.
You only get one roll each turn and what you get is what you get.
This gives the Monuments a wonderful element
of chance that creates some excellent swings of fortune.
A few of the cities even have special rules for taking them
to spice things up. Los Angeles uses
nukes instead of Martians or ray guns. Detroit needs to be taken in one
turn. And then there’s my favorite: Las
Vegas. If Las Vegas is in play and you
bust out, you put your token on it or move it forward if it’s already
there. The first player to bust three
times gets Vegas. It’s such a fun card.
Completing a location usually takes multiple turns so you
get great competition as multiple players race towards victory. The tension ratchets up as someone gets close
because the losers get nothing and have wasted all their time while the winner
gets the card which will give them victory points. It’s all or nothing so the stakes are pretty
high.
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| Las Vegas, my favorite card in the game |
Some cards have special abilities which can either give you
an instant bonus or an Ongoing power.
What’s
really awesome is that cards with powers are worth less victory points so you
need to decide if you want big points or a bonus.
When the card comes up in the game will also
affect your decision.
But if players are
avoiding one card, that might be a great chance for someone else to get in
there and steal easy points.
You can see
how this helps create choices, something that a lot of dice-rollers lack.
The box says 3-6 players, but this game shines at the higher
player count. The extra competition is
awesome and the cards get crowded quickly.
You have more decisions to make as to where you try to go which adds to
the game. Turns are very quick so there’s
not much downtime at all. The playtime
of 20 minutes is pretty much spot on, even at the higher player count.
Steve Jackson Games’ biggest dice-rolling hit thus far has
been Zombie Dice. I personally like
Zombie Dice, but with Mars Attacks around, it doesn’t get played. Mars Attacks trumps it in almost every
way. Sure, it’s not quite as portable
because of the cards, but it has more interaction which is a great improvement. The competition for the cards is exactly what
I want in a dice game. I find that the
special abilities, special capture rules, and different card types add a huge
amount to what would otherwise be an overly-simple game. The extra development pays off big time,
here.
When you add in the fact that this plays 6 and plays in
about 20 minutes, you have a winner.
This game is absolutely perfect for a lunchtime game group or as a
filler between games. The dice look great
as do the cards. For about $20, you get
a game that will play many, many times and it will always play
differently. That’s a lot to ask for,
but Steve Jackson Games delivered in a big way.
This game deserves a LOT more attention than it’s gotten. With the right publicity, this could give
Zombie Dice a run for it’s money as the king of SJG dice games.
