Invincible is comic book series about a kid with “super-man” like powers; this comic book series is unique because it has one voice (Robert Kirkman) through the entire run of the series.  Most comics are lucky if they get a consistent voice for 3 years.  The series started at issue #1 in January 2003 and finished up with issue #144 in February 2018.  For 15 years, over the run of the series, we saw Mark Grayson mature and evolve from a kid to a man.  It’s a very mature series, but it is very well written.  Even the art stayed consistent (between two artists:  Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley) over the run of the series!

I really liked this comic book series (having collected the entire run from beginning to end), but it is quite mature: there is quite a number of mature topics.  The series is also incredibly violent and has very graphic fights.

Fast forward to July 2024: Dire Wolf has come up with an Invincible board game called Invincible: The Hero-Building Game!

This is a cooperative board game for 1-4 Players, 45-90 minutes with Ages 13+.  See above! Invincible is a cooperative boss battler game where players have to take out the big baddie (and do other heroic stuff along the way).  I will say this: the board game is much much much less violent and graphic than the cartoon or the comic series.  If you were worried about the violence or maturity, especially for a boss-battler game, don’t fret!  That 13+ for ages is an accurate depiction.

Invincible: The Hero-Building Game is an interesting twist on the cooperative super-hero genre: it’s a bag-building game!  We’ll see elements from other modern board games: Orleans (with its bag-building, especially with the Invasion cooperative expansion), Marvel United (with its super-hero theming and civilians mechanisms), Marvel Champions (with its super-hero theming and Threat mechanism), and Quacks of Quedlingburg (for the push-your-luck).

I ordered my copy from the Direwolf website, and it arrived at my house in early July 2024.  Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

I was grumpy when I opened my box: the rulebook had shifted around during shipping and got all folded and messed up!

See the can of Coke for perspective: this is a normal sized box.

Each player assumes the role of one of 4 characters from the Invincible universe: Invincible, Atom Eve, Rex Splode, or Robot.  See above and below.

Each player also gets a standee. See above.

This is a bag-building game (we mentioned earlier), so each player gets their own bag to put cubes into: see above for the bags and the cubes.

There’s a bunch of scenarios that come in the game.  You can choose to play them in order, as one-shots, or in an ordered campaign. See the first “suggested” scenario above.

There’s a bunch of civilians to protect: if the players ever have too many civilian casualties, the game is over! Players lose!

The game board is three regions of a city (A, B, and C).  Bad guys appear and fight our heroes, or threaten civilians (if there are any in their zone).  If a zone is ever bereft of civilians, the game is over!  So, it’s a bit of balancing act making sure the civilians are safe while still taking out the big bads.

The mechanism for keeping track of civilian casualties is pretty simple: there’s actually a casualties track below the main city boards.

Bad guys appear in the city and cause havoc, threatening civilians or just doing damage to our heroes!

Each players starting bag contains the cubes above: 6 black and 3 orange, yellow, blue, purple.  The cubes are used to “power” abilities in the heroes.

As the game progresses, you can “buy” more powers: see above as Invincible has more powers to put cubes on!

It’s fairly intuitive how to place the cubes: obviously, a single yellow cube will activate the power above!  And there’s also orange, purple, blue, and black cubes in the game!

The black cubes are a mixed blessing: they are wild (so can be used for any color on any power), but if you ever draw 5 black cubes, you crash!  A crashing hero has to stop and will take some damage (because he pushed himself too hard).   You can save a hero from crashing, but it stops another player.

A crashing player will roll the black/red dice to see how damage the “crash” did.  If someone tries to save the hero, then the white dice will indicate how successful the save was!  You aren’t even guaranteed to save a crashing hero!

There are also “bad news” cards (this is a co-op game after all): the event cards come out after all players decide to finish and quit drawing from their bag.  These symbols will cause different villains to do different things … usually hitting the heroes or threatening civilians!

If the heroes can handle the final villains, they win!   The above scenario needs the the heroes to defeat 3 Flaxans in order to win!

This is a boss-battling bag-building game!  (Say that three times fast!) The components are decent, but not super high-quality.  Most of the cardboard is kind of thin.  The cards aren’t great quality (they need linen-finishing I think), but the art of the cards is very consistent with the Invincible universe.   Unfortunately, this is not the same level of production as a giant Kickstarter: I can imagine a world where the cards are linen-finished, the boards are nicer, some of the villains have special tokens, and the hero standees are acrylic standees!  But that’s not what we have here.  Still, everything was very readable, and all the components worked.  UPDATE: After about 5 plays, the blue bag for Invincible has developed a hole in the bottom! Grrr…

Rulebook

The rulebook was pretty good.

It gets about a B on the Chair Test: I can put it on the chair next to me, keep it open flat, and consult it while I play.  It only gets a B because it’s just a little bigger and the paper quality is a little flimsy.  (Maybe I am just grumpy my rulebook got smashed before I even opened my box).

The Components page is excellent: it spans two pages and is easy to correlate all the components against their labels.

The rulebook even does a good job of separating what components you will need for your first game (Episode 1) vs a Full Game vs. Episode-Specific Components!  See above! That’s really nice!

The set-up pages do just what I want: two full pages (well three pafe) labelling and showing the steps with a giant picture showing up what things look like!  See above!  The set-up even separates “Episode 1” (first play) from Full Game!  Again, really nice!

Generally, this rulebook was good at showing pictures and explaining how everything works.

There’s no index (booo!) and no glossary (boooo!), but there is a Keywords and Card Mechanisms section.  This isn’t a super complex game, and I was able to find rules when I needed them, but an index would have been helpful.

The back cover was quite useful with a list of a lot (but not all) icons.

In general, I was happy with the rulebook.   The lack of index and my squished rulebook were my two main complaints.

Onboarding

It’s been a while since I had a game direct me through my first game so nicely.  The Episode 1 deck is all set for you: you don’t shuffle it at all!

The Episode 1 game is a simplified version of the game, showing off the main mechanisms before jumping into the full rules.    That first Episode 1 deck has everything separated out to easily set-up and play.

Luckily, there are instructions to resetting the first scenario!  I have played the first game (both solo and cooperatively) and the full game a few times, but I plan to teach this game a lot at RichieCon, (and I did: see here) so I will reset the game back to “Episode 1” for teaching purposes.   I think it might have been nice to label the Episode 1 cards so it would be a little easier to reset, but heck, I am just happy they had a list of instructions for that reset!

The onboarding was pretty darn good!  It wasn’t quite as good as onboarding as Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth (that game sets the bar very high for your first game: see our review here for more discussion), but it was pretty darn good.

Solo Play

There are solo rules!  Huzzah! The game follows Saunders’ Law and has a viable solo mode!

In the solo mode, you still have to take control of 2 heroes: See above as the solo player takes control of Invincible and Atom Eve.  

Basically, the solo player alternates between the two characters as-if it were a 2-Player game.  There is no true solo play (one character) in this game.  I suspect it’s because you need 2 characters to be able to catch each other when you crash (see Gameplay section above); that crash mechanism is brutal, and a second character helps mitigate that.

There’s some strange rules about sharing/not sharing the hands and confidence during the training phase … which I just ignored.  I just played the solo game as if it were a full 2-Character game: no exceptional rules. Having these weird sharing/non-sharing powers/confidence rules from the solo section takes me away from the main flow of the game! I want to be able to feel like I am playing the main game with no exceptions.  I understand why they wanted to do this: it feels like you have to think less about which powers to buy, but in the end since every other rule is just like a 2-Character game, (including maintaining two bags, two characters, and every other rule), I just played solo as 2 characters.  And it worked fine.  I recommend this way for playing solo!

There is quite a bit of maintenance to operate the game, as you operate two characters, the bad guys, the event deck, the confidence phases, and everything else!  But it never felt too overwhelming; I felt like the turns moved along pretty quickly.

My first game was Episode 1 with the two characters Invincible and Atom Eve.  The game took away just enough of the extra rules to make the game more palatable to set-up and play, but it still taught the core of the game.  I also appreciated that specific bad guys were chosen to come out: they were all “simple bad guys”, which is what you want in your first game.

I have learned now to keep two chairs out for games with Episodes: The rulebook and episode guide (see above).

I lost my first game because one too many civilians died in Zone C.  (Remember, if any zone is bereft of civilians, you lose!).  So, I “pretended” one civilian had survived, so I made my may to the endgame, just so I could see what that endgame looked like.

With that one change, I was able to defeat Flaxan Invasion! (Take out three Flaxan baddies: see above).

Obviously, the game was a bit challenging since I (strictly speaking) lost!  But it was close, and I had a good time learning how the game worked! See above for my “winning” game!

My second game was Episode 2: This is the full game!  Welcome to the Big Leagues!

The game still unfolds the game way, but now you have more powers to manage! Set-up is not too much more difficult, as (remember) the rulebook does have good descriptions for Episode 1 and Full Game mode!

Players now have Signature Powers and Ultimate Powers! The Ultimate Powers go beneath a power you have and can only be activated if the the power above has already been activated!

The Signature Power now goes on your board: See as Atom Eve has her Bubble Up Signature Power (in addition to get Starter Power: Convenient Creation!)

The game becomes a lot harder now, as you have to generally start worrying about more! Not only do you have to save the civilians and beat-up the bad guys, but you have to worry more about Threat!  Dealing with Threat reminds me of Marvel Champions: instead of fighting on a turn, you may try to add Threat markers (see Villain above) to stop him!  Above, the Villain is trying to blow-up the heads on Mount Rushmore, so you have to “eliminate that Threat!”

In the Full Game, you character ends up with a lot more Powers!  See above as Invincible has bought 3 Powers, and 2 Ultimate Powers, most of these needed for dealing with Threat!

The Full Game is great: I am really glad they have the Episode 1 on-boarding experience, but it felt great to jump into Episode 2!  It was challenging and interesting the whole way!

I look forward to more solo plays.  This is just a blast!  And you can play any Episode in any order!

But, I suspect my next few plays will be teaching this game cooperatively to my friends at my Game Groups and at RichieCon (Editor’s Note: I did teach it cooperatively at RichieCon!)!  I think Invincible will be a hot game at RichieCon!  (One thing to note for Set-Up: leave space beneath your character card for 2 cards so it’s easy to add Ultimate Powers!  You can see I didn’t quite leave enough space, and the Ultimate Powers are hanging off the board).

Cooperative Play

Cooperative play went smoothly: Sam and I started with Episode 1, and frankly it was very easy to teach.  We had a smooth time!  Sam didn’t even really know who Invincible was, but he still enjoyed the game.  I am an avoid Superhero gamer, but Sam was fairly neutral on the theme … but he still liked it!

Now that I have some plays under my belt, this was a breeze to teach.  The cooperative elements worked really well: we were able to “save each other” from crashes twice!  I asked for help a number of times: “Hey, if you can do one more damage, we can take this guy out!”  And Sam would ask for help when he needed it!

Sam liked the game! He said to me “After RichieCon, I want to play the campaign! This was fun!”

I also had ulterior motives to teach Sam the game: I wanted him to be able to teach Invincible at RichieCon!  I am pretty sure this will be a hot game!!!  The TV show is hot right now, the game is  getting good buzz!   If I can’t teach, Sam will be my goto teacher!

Things I Liked

O1) One of my favorite aspects of this game is that it embraces Player Selected Turn Order (PSTO): fine grained: See above as the rules describe how “Players can pull and play their cubes in any order they wish!”  This allows players to hold back a little when needed to coordinate their actions! It’s also cool because it’s fine-grained (meaning players can intersperse their actions across turns)!   But, what tends to happen is very similar as we saw in Slay The Spire: (see review here):  Play tends to proceed simultaneously (everyone draws from their bag and plays simultaneously) until we get the points where it’s clear we need to coordinate … if someone crashes, or we need to save some civilians (to not lose), or to take out a baddie completely, or whatever makes sense!   Like Slay The Spire, we paradoxically have Simultaneous Actions (which moves the game along) but also fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order (which keeps up cooperation when needed)!  I love how this works in Invincible!

2) I loved how you always feel like you are getting better and better in this game!  Every turn you typically buy a power and a new cube for your bag!  You just always feel like you get better and better as you play!  And you get choices: Which powers do I buy?  Which color cube do I buy? The level-up system just keep you invested in the characters!

3) I like how this game really embraces the Invincible comic vibe: the art on every card is different, like a “snapshot” from the Invincible universe!   People like me, who love the comic, really appreciate how this makes it feel like the comic.  People who don’t know the series can still enjoy the comic-booky vibe that permeates the game!

Things I Didn’t Like

one) At the end of the day, what you draw from the bag is still random.  And the Event Deck can be a little too random.  Although there are countless mitigation techniques for drawing cubes (you can add cubes, you can redraw one pull, you save another hero from crashing, etc.), sometimes that randomness can just get you … and it’s frustrating.  It’s very frustrating when you pull 3 black cubes on your first turn!  Ergh.  Like I said, there are plenty of mitigation techniques (including you can get KO’ed three times before the game ends) .  As for the Event Cards: I do remember Episode 1 ending because the event card  just destroyed so many civilians … I never saw that coming!  This randomness is just something to be aware of … but since this is a boss-battler, there has to be some elements of randomness to keep it spicy.

2) It feels like the production could be a little better: the cards aren’t great quality (even though the art is), and a lot of the boards feel a little cheap. And my Invincible bag developed a hole!!! I would love if there were acrylic standees this this! But, we get cardboard standees.  And, like I said earlier, the blue bag has already developed a hole in it! Argh!!

Conclusion

Invincible is a really good cooperative bag-building boss-battler.  Despite a slightly lesser production quality and some innate randomness, this game could easily be my favorite game of the year!

The upgrade path is fantastic as you feel like you are always upgrading and leveling-up your character!  The Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained) and Simultaneous Actions make the game flow quick when it needs to and become contemplative when it needs to!  The game just naturally ebbs and flows!

The solo game is fantastic, as is the cooperative game! I could see chipping away at the campaign over time!  It’s so easy to get this to the table! It’s fun as a solo game, despite still having to run two characters!

Objectively, I would give Invincible a 9/10, but if you love the comic world like I do, maybe you’d bump it to a 9.5/10 or a 10/10!  This is a great game!  Invincible would easily make my Top 10 Cooperative SuperHero Games!