Genegrafter is a superhero card and dice game.

Title: Genegrafter

Year Published: 2012

Designer: Erik Dahlman

Publisher: Albino Dragon

Players: 2-4

Game Time: 10 Mins

Set-up Time: >5 Mins

Ages: 10+

Theme: Superhero

Mechanic: Dice Rolling, Hand Management

How to win: Have the most Genetic markers.

Game Description

Genegrafter is a superhero card and dice game that was designed to be easy to pick up and start playing within minutes but still offer enough complexity so that more advanced players won’t get bored.

The core game is comprised of a deck of 54 cards that include Characters, Abilities, and Events. The goal of the game is to have more Genetic Markers than your opponents when the last DNA Strand is revealed.

Set-Up

Each player gets a player board, 3 attack tokens and 3 defence tokens

Remove the Yellow Even cards and DNA strands from the deck, shuffle the rest and deal 5 cards to each player.

Put the Event and DNA cards back in the deck and shuffle.

Game Play

The game is played over 4 phases

1 – Draw a card

If it is an event card, follow the instructions and draw another card. If the card is a DNA strand, put it to one side and draw another card.

2 – Play a character card from your hand.

You may play up the 3 character cards per turn, you must play at least one if you have one.

3 – Battle

Choose a character and an opposing character to fight.
Take turns playing action cards face down for attack/defence dice to help in battle.
Resolve action cards one at a time with the last placed, first resolved.
Both players roll the number of dice they are allocated, the highest wins, defender wins ties.
Winners place the losing character into their Gene-pool.

4 – Discard

Discard down to 7 cards.

End Game

When the 3rd DNA strand is revealed, the game ends with the player with the most Genetic Markers in their score pile the winner.

Round-Up

We found a lot of the time only the last surviving character is ever on the table so you go around the table drawing and discarding. Finally, when someone plays a character, they fight, someone wins, and we’re back down to one character in play again.

Also, one of the Event cards says “The player with the most Genetic markers swaps his Gene-pool with the player with the lowest”. So you can actually win by only fighting once.

Rating

Awful game. The only positive is we laugh at it while playing so it’s been enjoyable, but not for the right reasons.

I give it 2/10

Initial Thoughts from Tabletop Day 2013 of Genegrafter

The second game we played for TableTop Day was Genegrafter.

In Genegrafter you fight with your characters against your opponent’s characters and win/lose with dice rolls.

Sadly, the ‘playtest’ gene wasn’t available.

So you draw cards, play a guy down, choose a guy and fight someone else’s guy, play cards to increase your dice, your opponent does the same, each player rolls the dice, highest wins.

You then usually win the opponent’s card and it goes into your gene pool. Whoever has the highest gene pool at the end of the game wins.

So there you go. That’s pretty much it…

Oh, wait, event cards. There are event cards that you play immediately and then draw another card. There is an action card that swaps the smallest gene pool with the highest, I was the smallest.

I drew it.
I played it.
My gene pool was the smallest.
My gene pool was then the biggest.
2 turns later the game ended and I won.

Everyone was disappointed. Here is my winning gene pool.

I like to think we were playing it wrong. I don’t think we were.

We’ll give it another go to see if anything changes but I don’t think this is going to stay off eBay for long.

Jesta ThaRogue