Super Mission Force: first thoughts

Having previously played superhero games with my kids using some basic rules of my own creation, we wanted something a bit more in-depth (as in my bare bones rule set essentially each hero was a set of similar stats with a single special ability), but still simple and quick enough that my five year old could play it with us. Having seen other people playing it online, I thought we’d give Super Mission Force a try. 

While there is an excellent set of character creation rules in the rule book, for speed I grabbed some pre-generated characters from the Files section in the Four Colour Studios Facebook group. I figured for our first game while we’re learning the rules we would take a single character each, and stick to basic abilities (ignoring manoeuvres). My son wanted to be Venom, obviously, so I figured I’d take Spider-Man, for thematic reasons. My daughter, on the other hand, wanted to be Boom Boom, because I described her as ‘blowing things up and being sassy’, which apparently appealed.

According to the profiles it would be an even match for Venom to take on both Spider-Man and Boom Boom, so we set up our map to represent Venom bumping into the pair of heroes on their way home from a mission. Despite rolling fewer dice, my son was able to win the initiative on the first turn and so Venom was able to web swing his way across the entire map immediately:

Fun fact - we ended up using pretty much just this sixth of the map for the entire game. 

Super Mission Force uses a goal system (actually, I think it officially uses the trademarked Goalsystem) wherein you roll a dice pool and count successes, and I realised that I could use the dice from my old Havok set:

I figured this would be handy for the kids, counting skulls as one and explosions as two, rather than having to parse the numbers on a pile of regular dice. Inevitably, we all rolled terribly and so the game lasted longer than was statistically likely.

Also, our home printer didn’t want to behave today, so I hand wrote stat cards onto index cards for this game:

 

Long story short, Spider-man and Boom Boom did their best, but just couldn’t do consistent enough damage to overcome Venom’s health regeneration (despite managing to drop him down to his last health at one point). At one point Spider-Man webbed Venom so successfully that he could only break free if he rolled 6 successes on 4 dice, but they couldn’t even take him down despite him being totally immobilised, and my sone rolls better than his father so Venom was able to burst his bonds and wreak vengeance on the heroes:

Final thoughts: I like it! It was slightly slow going while we got used to the basic rules, but even my five year old was able to grasp the general mechanics pretty quickly. The game got a bit samey towards the end (punch, punch, try to stun so can run away then jump in for a big punch), but I think that’s more to do with there being so few figures on the board that rounds were pretty quick - with more figures per side, there would be more variety in each round. Not that we didn’t enjoy it with just a single figure each, as the goal system makes for fairly dramatic turns, where sometimes you roll a ton of dice and get bupkiss, only for your five year old to roll a statistically unlikely result on four dice to then rip himself out of your webs and proceed to murder everyone, so I think we’ll be playing again…