KAPOW! Board Game First Impressions

KAPOW! has heroes and villains in an epic fight.

It’s done with regular and customisable dice.

Superhero — or supervillain? You decide in this buildable dice game. Your customizable dice pool is used to execute a variety of superpowers. Gain special abilities and new play experiences by taking on the role of six different heroes or villains.

KAPOW! Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

Players roll their dice behind the screen and assign them to the matching colour symbols on their player board.

Players lift up their board simultaneously and will use their dice to attack, block and power up abilities to deal damage to their opponent.

Some of these abilities allow you to gain news side for the customisable dice which you can also gain. These are rolled alongside the regularly printed dice and are assigned in the same way. However, some of the spaces refer to the specific type of die that can be placed there.

How do you win?

Attacking deals damage to the player and if you reduce your opponent’s health to 0 you win.

Main Mechanisms

Dice placement obviously and “Simultaneous action selection” is technically there.

This was the second PvP game I played at UK Games Expo 2023.

USP

The main selling point is that there are those customisable dice that are fun to use and change up the gameplay somewhat. They’re hardly unique though as Dice Forge did it in a deck-building style game and Roll for the Galaxy had it as a (very expensive) expansion.

Theme

Superheroes and Supervillains… It doesn’t really come out in the theme apart from words like “Zap” and “Pow” next to the actions. but the bit you actually read is just called “2 Base Attack”.

Setup

Give each player a board, a set of dice and a screen and I think that’s it.

Components & Artwork

The printed dice were really nice. The custom dice themselves were good too although the sides fell off while rolling but I don’t think I was pushing hard enough to be fair.

Ease of Teaching

It is easy to teach, everything you need to know is behind your screen.

Similar Games

Apart from the customisable dice games mentioned earlier, you can look at 2 player combat games which could include Epic Game Card and Hero Realms from the same publisher.

KAPOW! Review

Positives

The dice placement and customisable dice are good fun.

There are different characters in the box each with different abilities.

Negatives

The only options are 1v1, 2v1 or 2v2.

With no other game behind the PvP combat, it would wear a little thin very quickly.

Summary

It’s a good idea, it’s just lacking any real game.

Jesta ThaRogue