X-Men: Mutant Insurrection

“To Me, My X-Men!”

Never has Charles Xavier’s famous catchphrase been more appropriate than in X-Men Mutant Insurrection. This is a game devoted to fans of the Merry Mutants, a side of the Marvel family that usually seems more of an afterthought in today’s world. Play as most of your favourite X-Men while you battle through a selection of missions and enemies using a dice rolling mechanic. This game employs fantastic co-op game features for 1-6 players, where you can choose from 16 different X-Men to play as. Each character has their own health, unique ability, assist cards which can be given to team mates to help them out during missions, and a combination of dice that they can roll on their turn. The dice in the game are the central mechanic – they are used to complete missions and defeat the various X-Men villains that will show up in each playthrough.

The dice are split into 3 colours, each representing a different aspect of the X-Men – red dice symbolise fighting skill, blue dice intelligence and teamwork and yellow dice their mutant powers. They all have their own ratio of symbols which will help you determine what characters are best for which missions – for example Wolverine is mostly red (fighting) dice with some blue (teamwork) dice, whereas Phoenix is mostly yellow (mutant power) with some blue dice.

During setup the players will choose their starting character from the standees and place them on the thematic Blackbird cardboard model, taking also their character’s power card and assist card. The Xavier School For Higher Learning is the next part of the game to assemble, which features three different school cards including the Danger Room, Cerebro and Xavier’s Office. These locations can be visited during the game on a player’s turn to give them different support options. You then need to prepare the continent decks (the amount of these will vary depending on the amount of people playing) by placing however many decks you need face down next to each other – this is the main play area of the game so make sure each player has easy access to the continent decks. The missions that you will complete throughout the game are chosen from these five different continent decks, which represent the X-Men travelling the world saving fellow mutants or defeating their enemies.

There is also an interesting threat track which is split into three different colours to show how difficult or easy the game is becoming, with each colour section of the track having its own progressively difficult threat deck which will throw spanners in the works of the X-Men’s plans each turn. As the threat track advances each mission card will have more objectives to complete, or add extra dice symbols onto objectives instead, thereby increasing the difficulty of the missions. Once the threat track reaches the final number, the game is over and the X-Men have lost, so it is important to manage the track and perform actions which will help halt the advance of said track.

There are several well designed tokens in the game, including damage tokens to show how much health your character has lost, training tokens that will give you a free dice symbol to spend on your turn, showdown tokens which are utilised in the final showdown of the game, and success tokens that cover up the various mission objectives once you have completed them. The success tokens are a neat design to remind the players which objectives on the mission cards they have previously completed. The next thing to do is to flip the top card on the either one or two continent decks, depending on how many people are playing.

Finally, and most importantly to determine how your game of X-Men Insurrection will play, you must choose one of eight different plots to play through. This plot card will tell the story of the game, each one chosen from key parts of X-Men history, and will guide the players through the game until they reach the final showdown. Once the final showdown begins, the rest of the area cards are discarded, including school cards and continent cards. The threat track is also ignored. The showdown will consist of two or more mission cards with their own objectives on that the players must now complete. Once an objective has been completed a showdown token will be put on that mission, and each mission will have its own number of tokens it will need on it for the players to complete it. When every showdown mission has its required amount of showdown tokens placed on it, the X-Men have stopped the crisis and won the game!

Complete Missions, Save The Day

The core of X-Men Mutant Insurrection revolves around attempting the missions that come from the continent decks and the plot cards. These are attempted by deploying characters onto them. Once all X-Men have been deployed to a mission card, an active hero must be chosen and that player will take their turn. They start by assembling their dice pool, which they will do by first gathering the colour dice shown on their power card – for example Gambit has two red, one yellow and one blue on his power card, so his player will collect those dice.

The next step is assist cards – if another player has deployed their character to the same mission as the active hero they can choose to give them their assist card, meaning that they can then choose to collect the dice from either their own assist card or the assisting player’s card. This can help if the assisting player has a better dice combination for the particular mission on their assist card than the active hero. Once the required six dice have been collected it’s time to roll the dice and see if you can complete objectives. Dice will be spent to complete objectives on the mission card and to complete an objective you must complete all the requirements on the objective. The requirements are broken down into power, teamwork and fight, and these symbols are on all the dice in different ratios making it important to have the right combination of dice available to increase your chance of completing all the objectives and succeeding at the mission. If by the end of everyone’s turn the mission/s have been completed you will be receive a reward, which can take the form of healing, reducing threat, creating a bond between characters or taking a mutant card. A mutant card will be a supporting X-Man which will add bonuses to your character’s turn, including things such as dice re-rolls or changing dice faces to more favourable ones. Bonds represent the relationships between the X-Men fluctuating positively or negatively depending on the situation.

When a hero gains a bond they take a bond card from the bottom of the deck and then choose another hero to share that bond with. Bonds will give the heroes who share the card a bonus if they deploy at the same mission during the deployment phase. If the players fail to complete a mission however, they will suffer a Failure, which will result in several different negative effects such as losing health, reducing threat and breaking bonds. If a bond is broken both players who share that bond must flip the card over and will now suffer a negative effect if they both deploy at the same mission. If a character happens to lose all their health then their player will need to discard their current hero and replace them with one that hasn’t already been used, meaning that no player will be eliminated from the game.

Game Design

X-Men Mutant Insurrection is a Fantasy Flight game, so all components are up to their usual standards, especially the game’s tokens and the design of the Blackbird. The artwork in the game is top quality; there is no mistaking which X-Men character is represented on each card and the standees really shine with colours and designs. The Blackbird model is another great touch for fans of the comics, being instantly recognisable as the X-Men’s choice of aircraft. The dice are excellent quality – the colours pop and each symbol is very clearly printed. X-Men Mutant Insurrection was designed by Richard Launius and Brandon Perdue and it’s easy to see that Richard’s Elder Sign board game was the template for this one, using many similar mechanics throughout the game. One could argue that this game is an easier, more family friendly version of Elder Sign, but if you’re an avid X-Men fan then the theme alone will make that claim easy to discredit. Not only are there more than enough mutants to choose from as you play through the various plots but there are seventeen other mutants from the X-Men universe in the mutant deck (the Multiple Man is the only mutant in that deck that shows up more than once which ties into his mutant power).

Any X-Men fan will identify and enjoy playing through the plots as well, key moments from X-Men history including battling Magneto and his acolytes, exploring the island of Krakoa or facing off against the Hellfire Club. In essence, the game could be seen as so thematic that casual visitors to the Marvel universe may struggle to follow the plots or the meaning behind them or even identify with the several characters and their powers/effects in the game. The game’s several decks could also be seen as limited, due to there being only five cards in each continent deck, only five villain cards and only eight different plots to play through. Several key characters are also surprisingly missing from the game such as Nightcrawler, Psylocke and villains such as Apocalypse and Mister Sinister – these seem like strange choices to be left out of the game.

Final Thoughts

The game itself is easy to play, turns are fast paced and inclusive – synergy and combination of turns and characters are important to successfully completing the missions. There is a choice of difficulty by placing the threat track in four different starting positions, so you can choose to challenge yourself or instead have a more laid back game. It is great for younger gamers, the game box suggests fourteen plus but due to the basis of the game being matching the dice symbols with the ones on the mission cards younger people could follow the game quite easily with older players assisting them. Teamwork and co-operation are the key to this game with the bond cards being a fantastic touch, encouraging a maximum amount of players to get involved and discovering how the relationships between the X-Men change and influence how you play through the missions. They are also a nice thematic touch as the comic book mutants are always evolving their relations with one other.

Overall, X-Men Mutant Insurrection is a must-get for any X-Men fan out there and a much welcome addition to Fantasy Flight’s library of games, especially as there is a lack of Marvel board games focusing on this exciting corner of the Marvel Universe.