Thanos Rising
Thanos Rising is a coop dice rolling game where players take on the role of a superhero team trying to stop Thanos claiming all the infinity stones. My wife and I love Marvel and given my competitive streak we play a lot of coops to keep the peace at home, so this looked like it checked all the boxes...
The TL;DR
Great components
Nice connection to the theme
Too luck based
Tough to win Coop
Its a game that looks great on the table - the gauntlet is really well done with its colour coded gems, the dice are well defined and the largely unnecessary Thanos figure really does have some table presence.
Like many coops this game has several ways to loose and only one way to win. You lose if Thanos gets all of the Infinity Stones, ten heroes are defeated or one player loses all the heroes in their team. We lost all three games I played because of a team losing all their heroes.
You win the game by defeating a set number of the villains. I'm not a huge fan of this - I want to feel I defeat the big bad, not his minions, but I get why it works this way given the theme. I played three games with four players on the beginner setting aiming to defeat seven villains.
You start the game by selecting a team leader; Captain America, Dr Strange, Gamora or Black Panther, taking their card and the player board for their respective base of operations. This sets you up with a base pool of dice of different colours, a special ability from your headquarters and a bonus ability from your leader if you have an other hero from their team. These abilities are cool but rarely come into play until later in the game.
The game has a really nice mechanic for activating Thanos and all of this part of the turn is really well connected to the game's theme. On every player's turn after they have selected where they will be that turn, special dice determine a random sector of the board where Thanos will damage any players present and trigger any villains. This part of the turn typically also adds one (or more) gems to a specific infinity stone and once there are enough gems on a stone, Thanos has gained that stone and a powerful additional ability.
The rest of your turn is a simple dice chucking/matching mechanic similar to that seen in Age of War or Elder Sign with Thanos Rising sitting between these two in terms of complexity.
Once you've rolled/re-rolled your dice they allow you to either; do damage to a villain, recruit new heroes or trigger abilities in heroes already recruited.
This is where the game fell down for me, specifically in the early turns - over three games I managed to recruit just one hero meaning the game just never got started and I typically had no real choices. This isn't just a matter of my poor luck (though that was part of it), but something I feel is built into the game - in our first game only one player managed to recruit a new hero.
Recruiting heroes typically requires rolling the right resources across all of your initially available dice without any ability to change/adjust those dice, just re-rolls with unassigned dice. As a result its actually pretty likely at the start that you'll not be able to recruit a new hero and face the same lack of options on future turns.
Damaging a villain is possible with fewer dice, allowing for some mitigation of chance, but this assumes you have one of the weaker villains up early in the game and even then there are unlikely to be enough for all players, inevitably leaving one team as a weak link (in our games me). Even when the other players were doing well they had to spend significant resources propping up my team because my turns were so anaemic.
Each time you damage a villain you do gain a bonus token which provides a one off advantage to a player. Unfortunately while these bonus tokens can be incredibly useful, you gain them at random. You'll almost always want the ones that add a dice, or a specific resource, but particularly early on you'll need them so that you have a chance to build your team and get something of an engine going. Its actually pretty underwhelming to gain the ability to remove a gem from an infinity stone or heal damage though these can be useful later.
The result is a tough to win coop mainly because little cubes of plastic don't always play ball.
