SNAP Review – Super Powered Smash Masters

Super Powered Smash Masters is a customizable card game from Dark Unicorn Games. This simple superhero brawling game was designed by Adam Cogan, and the base set allows for 2-4 players, ages 8 and up.

Your goal? Beat up your opponents.

How to Play

Take one of the four pre-sorted decks and separate the red-backed character stack from the blue-backed deck.

Draw five cards from your deck into your hand, and choose three cards from the character deck to put in your starting row, face down. This is your active team; the rest of the character stack is your reserve.

All players flip over their active characters, and the brawl begins!

“Flip a coin, or a car, to determine who goes first…”

On your turn, you must perform one action:

• Attack with a Smash card
• Use an active character’s power
• Play a Story card
• Play a Super card from your hand (if you have the matching character on your active team)
• Or, discard some cards from your hand and draw new ones.

The core of the game is the Smash cards and the Story cards.

When you play a Smash card, you begin a Smash Battle! Announce which rival hero you’re attacking. They can counter with a Smash card (or a Team-up card). You can counter that with another Smash card. Keep countering until one player doesn’t have any more Smash cards or doesn’t want to keep playing them. That character becomes stunned (or defeated if the other player used a Team-up.)

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You could play a Story card instead.

Story cards have effects all over the place, from reviving characters, to drawing extra cards, to defeating specific types of characters.

Keep playing cards until one player has managed to defeat all the heroes on other player(s) team(s). That player is the winner – “the smash-iest, super-power-iest master of them all.”

Impressions

Super Powered Smash Masters is a fun game. The cards are very evocative of comic books, and Asher loves being able to “beat up” his brother or sister without getting in trouble.

Anitra’s favorite are the Story cards. Every single one tells a story, full of text and great art. The heroes themselves are quite interesting too.

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Andrew loves the tongue-in-cheek approach to comic books found in Super Powered Smash Masters. It’s unapologetic in its humor, without being inappropriate for kids.

The game can get a little long in the tooth, and repeated games can feel rather same-y. But it’s all in good fun, and so easy to pick up and get started that we’d generally recommend it (for strong readers).

We rate Super Powered Smash Masters 3.5 pows out of 5.

Ask for it at your local game store or comic book store, or get it directly from Dark Unicorn Games.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Super Powered Smash Masters from Dark Unicorn Games for this review.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?