Thanos Rising: Avengers Infinity War First Impressions

Thanos Rising: Avengers Infinity War is a co-op dice game of defeating Thanos.

But as it’s set in Infinity War that’s not likely to happen.

Players recruit heroes and assemble a team to face off against Thanos and his villainous forces in an effort to thwart him from accomplishing his master plan: Collecting all six Infinity Stones to power the Infinity Gauntlet and wreak havoc on the very fabric of reality.

Thanos Rising: Avengers Infinity War Gameplay

The main part of the setup is putting the huge Thanos figure in the middle of a ring that contains 3 deployment zones. Around this ring, several cards are placed. Each round players will put their token into one of the deployment zones to activate it for their turn.

Then the active player will roll the Infinity Stone die to see which Infinity stone gets a counter. (5 counters and it activates, more on those in a bit) They also roll the Thanos die to see if he rotates left or right or activates the abilities of the Villains in the zone he’s in.

Thanos then does 1 damage to all Hero cards in the deployment zone he is in. If your deployment token is in there, he also damages each of your Heroes

Then the player rolls their own dice with their dice pool determined by their team leader card as well as members of that team. The dice are placed on symbols in the deployment zone to recruit Heroes or damage Villains.

Match all the symbols on a hero and they’re brought into the player’s team. Get all the symbols on a Villain and they get a damage token.

There are other bits and bobs but that’s generally what you’re doing.

If the players defeat 7 villains they win. If Thanos collects all 6 Infinity Stones, 10 heroes are defeated or 1 player has their whole team defeated they lose.

Theme

All the MCUs are there. Every single one of them.

Setup

Not much to do. Some boards, cards and a Thanos. It takes up more table space than you’d think!

Components & Artwork

The components are nice. Obviously, Thanos is fun and looms over the table. The cubes and Infinity Gems look nice. I mean they’re standard parts that are in other games but they look good.

The dice are good quality too.

The art and iconography are pretty good. The art is from the films and looks really nice.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

Teaching is a little odd really. It seems both simple and fiddly at the same time. It makes sense but there is a lot of little things to remember.

Having read a 1 sheet overview of the rules on BGG for this article I still feel we played it wrong in places.

It is a family game, but not the most accessible.

Thanos Rising: Avengers Infinity War Summary

As far as open information co-ops go, this isn’t that great.

I much prefer Samurai Spirit. It works in a similar way but with cards.

For a similar game with dice, I would prefer Flatline, something real-time to kill off the alpha gamer.

I’m still riding the Avengers: End Game hype at the moment so I’m loving anything MCU.

But, the game is just ‘OK’ I guess. I do prefer something better from my co-ops but I won’t complain about anything Avengers!

Jesta ThaRogue