Marvel Dice Throne Review

If you’ve never played Dice Throne you need to head to your nearest local game store and purchase one of the two packs of characters. It’s such a simplistic idea but there is so much strategy.

Dice Throne quickly became one of my favourite games when I received it as a Christmas gift a few years ago, and just recently the publishing team behind the game were nice enough to send over Marvel Dice Throne, a version of Dice Throne based in the Marvel Universe. Did I find this as much fun as the original? Let’s take a look.

What is the Dice Throne?

Dice Throne is predominantly a 1v1 battle game between two characters using dice, Yahtzee style. The game can be played with 3 or 4 players, but it works best, in my opinion, at 2. Players work with two dials and a number of different abilities. One dial has your health points (generally 50 to start a game) while the other has your combat points (CP) which will be used to purchase and use cards.

In front of you will be your player board, which will include basic attacks, basic defence, special attacks, and more. Using these various abilities will depend on which dice you role when attacking and defending. On offence, you will get to roll dice up to three times to get the combination you want, while on defence you generally only get one dice roll, with a specific number of defence dice.

Throughout the game, you will be using cards from your hand to manipulate your rolls, help with defence, and more. The first person to lose all their health points loses the game!

What makes Marvel Dice Throne so unique?

I’m not a huge Marvel fan, and I’ve been very open about that over the past few years. If there was a Star Wars Dice Throne, I would be much more interested. Still, knowing how these characters operate in their movies and comic books makes playing them in Dice Throne more interesting.

I’ve played as Spider-Man and Loki, and the various abilities and special tokens they have meant a lot to me as they were things I knew Spider-Man and Loki had in their repertoire.

When playing standard Dice Throne, it can be harder to enjoy the theme of the game, as you are just playing with generic gunslingers or ninjas. With Marvel, I feel just a bit more invested.

Outside of that, the concepts are all the same. You are using dice the same way, manipulating dice in the same way, etc. Each character does have unique abilities and powers that might not be present in basic Dice Throne.

For example, Loki has illusion cards which an attacking player must choose (one of three). Depending on what card is chosen, Loki can defend 0 damage, defend ½ damage, or defend all damage. It’s a crap shoot, yes, but doesn’t the idea of an illusion with Loki just make so much sense?

Final Thoughts

If you enjoy dice games then Dice Throne is something you want to invest in. This is a great little package, and the way they are boxes is amazing. Everything you need to play is in character specific boxes, which makes setup and clean-up so much quicker. This is a great system, and one I think you will like!