By its very nature every game of Smash Up plays differently as the different pairings of decks can lead to drastically different strategies. Before you know it bases are scoring all over the place and players are suddenly close to claiming victory. What felt like a slow and strategic game suddenly because a fast and furious attempt to outsmart and outmanoeuvre your opponents. Players are chaining actions and minions, moving minions between bases and boosting their minions’ power.

Smash Up’s true beauty emerges when you realise how best to combine your two factions.Īt first Smash Up seems a bit slow, you play a couple of rounds and you start to think that those bases are never going to score, and then all of a sudden the game gains momentum. Zombies claim cards from the discard pile, wizards cycle through their deck, Ninjas can assassinate or move in at the last minute and aliens teleport people in and out of bases. That’s where the simplicity ends, because every minion and action is different and every faction has its own style. Most cards take a traditional route and award less points the further down the podium you stand however the odd base will do something sneaky like offer more points to the player in second place.Įvery minion has its own abaility making every card and deck unique.Įach turn you get to play one minion card and one action card from your hand. Players then get awarded points for first, second and third place as outlined by the base card. To win the base you simply have to be the player with the highest combined power of minions when the total power of all minions at the base exceeds the threshold. A number of bases are dealt out, each base having a threshold and three scores. With your deck now built, and shuffled, it’s time to start claiming some bases and scoring some points. There are even loads of expansions that add lovecraftain monsters and pretty girls with steam powered jet packs but we’ll leave expansions out of today’s discussion. These factions cover every single form of gaming and nerd culture trope possible, there are pirates, ninjas, zombies, robots and plenty of others. To play you build your deck by selecting two factions and shuffling them together, see shufflebuilding. Smash Up is a shufflebuilding game, I say ‘a’ it could well be the only shufflebuilding game. Well all of these things have been crammed into a single game, and things are about to kick off, you could say there’s going to be a Smash Up. Remember when the concept of pirates versus ninjas was the flavour of the day? These days it’s impossible to make a game without zombies, or aliens or dinosaurs armed with missile launchers.

Sneaky ninja kickstarter game