Each year, Fantasy Flight Games hosts an “in flight report” at GenCon, the largest board game convention in the United States. This year, as the convention went digital, they presented that report live on Twitch, highlighting upcoming releases and announcing new products for the rest of 2020 and beyond. This year one of their biggest announcements was a new game of particular interest to X-Men fans: X-Men: Mutant Insurrection, which stars everyone’s favorite mutant superheroes in a one to six player cooperative dice game.
Designed by Richard Launius and Brandon Perdue, the game is a re-imagined take on Fantasy Flight’s Lovecraft game Elder Sign, expanding upon that game and giving it a unique superhero spin all while featuring all new, original artwork made just for the game. In X-Men: Mutant Insurrection, players will each take on the role of X-Men who will travel the globe to complete missions, all to build towards the ultimate showdown with a villainous mastermind. With sixteen X-Men to choose from, ranging from icons like Wolverine and Storm to deeper cuts like Armor and Forge, and eight scenarios to battle against, from confronting the Sentinels and their Master Mold to recreating the legendary Dark Phoenix saga, there’s an extraordinary amount of replayability out of the box in what Fantasy Flight has described as a “comprehensive X-Men experience.”
Each turn, players will have a choice: deploy their X-Men heroes to a mission or go to the X-Mansion to rest and prepare for future missions using the Danger Room or Cerebro. Most of the game is built around missions. To complete a mission, a player will collect six dice — four of their own, two from an ally’s assist card — of varying colors. Each character collects a different distribution of dice, representing X-Men’s fighting ability, mutant powers, and teamwork. Someone like Colossus is a specialist at doing damage with red fighting dice, while a character like Forge has a lot of blue teamwork dice, representing his inventions enabling his allies to solve complex problems. Once their dice are assembled, the player rolls them all — re-rolling any dice they don’t like up to two more times — in an attempt to match the symbols on the mission’s objectives. These symbols represent the X-Man doing damage, using their powers, and their teamwork, with the corresponding dice being particularly good at rolling the associated symbol. Once all players have gone, if all the objectives on a mission are completed, it is cleared from play.
By completing story missions, the players will advance the story, but by completing other missions they can earn valuable tools to help them prepare for their final showdown. For example, they might find a young mutant struggling to use their powers, thereby gaining an ally like Rictor to join their side. X-Men can also form strong bonds from Camaraderie to Trust or even Love, allowing heroes on the same mission to earn a boots. However, if they fail, the situation can grow far worse. Bonds can be broken: Trust, for example, can become Suspicion, making it worse for heroes to go to the same mission. And all times, the X-Men have to be aware of the level of threat facing mutantkind. As it rises, missions will get more challenging to complete and new challenges, like menacing Sentinels, will raise the stakes. If it ever gets too high, the players will lose the game.
As the story progresses, eventually the players will arrive at the final showdown, a multi-part mission up against the villain of the scenario, featuring beautiful panoramic art original to the game. If the X-Men, their mutant allies, and their strong bonds can defeat the villain, they will win the game.
X-Men: Mutant Insurrection is currently projected for release in February 2021 for $54.95, though the release date is subject to change. You can pre-order it at your local board game store today!
