Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I only have 180 seconds.
Vengeance: Roll & Fight (2022, Mighty Boards) is the fastest roll-and-write game I’ve ever played, which on easy solo mode is 45 seconds per round, four rounds total. So I’ve got to tell you about this game in just three minutes!
The Rules Are Light
You get a Hero with a Trait and a negative that affects their turn. That Hero starts in a Den, a lair with a bunch of bad guys—gunmen, henchmen, grunts, a Boss.
All the bad guys want you dead. But you don’t have time to want them dead, because your goal is simple: run at the boss, kill as many bad guys as you can on the way, then get out of the Den with the least amount of resistance.
You’ll do that by rolling a boatload of dice.
A Roll and Write For People Who Like Action Flicks (Me)
There’s literally no backstory provided for this game. That’s good, because we don’t have time to talk about it anyway.
Each of the four rounds in Vengeance: Roll & Fight are the same. (Mighty Boards sent me the second episode, but the first episode is the same format, with different Hero and Boss characters.) You’ll have a pre-fight phase where you get a little something extra: maybe some training to learn one of your Hero’s eight abilities, a chance to heal, maybe a “charge” of an item you can use in a fight later.
Then you roll dice. Four at a time. Two of the six die faces feature a character running somewhere, while the other sides of the standard D6 are a gun, a knife, a double knife, and a wound. Your player board tells you what your rolled combinations will do. For instance, roll two guns plus a gun or a knife, and you’ll be able to shoot a bad guy in an adjacent room. Assign combos, then you’ll get more dice.
Your training will yield access to better actions. With one of the characters, you can train to use an action called Gunkata—that sounds better than Fire, right? Other abilities are ongoing powers. For example, one character has a power called Divine Retribution, which allows them to kill off gunmen who wounded them during the same turn.
Oh yeah.
In multiplayer games of Vengeance: Roll & Fight, you’ll be grabbing dice from a shared pool, a pool that runs out fast considering that all players are rolling, grabbing, cursing, rolling, yelling, grabbing again as fast as they can. In solo (the preferred route, now that I’ve played six games across both formats), you’ll grab from a pool of 20 dice, but you only have 45 seconds to roll as many combos as you can…on easy mode.
On hard, you only get 25 seconds per round. That means you’ll spend maybe four or five minutes playing an entire game of Vengeance: Roll & Fight in solo.
Oh yeah.
A game of Vengeance: Roll & Fight feels like a run through that long hallway sequence in Oldboy (the original, not the Spike Lee version). It’s all action. It’s incredibly well filmed. It’s a thrill ride for the viewer.
The Den maps are fantastic. You’ve got ten of them (on five double-sided, well-illustrated dry erase boards). Want to fight in a bullet-riddled church? We’ve got you. Italian restaurant? Yep. Japanese dojo-style residence? Naturally.
All this works because the insert is perfect, allowing for a game this quick to be set up even quicker.
The Quick and the Dead
Vengeance: Roll & Fight is for anyone looking to run through the roll-and-write gauntlet with a fresh coat of bloody, action trope paint. It’s easy to teach, fun to play, and super quick.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a bad guy in the next room whose face wants to meet my baseball bat. Ready? FIGHT!!!
Vengeance: Roll & Fight—Episode 2 details
- Designer: Dávid Turczi, Gordon Calleja, Noralie Lubbers
- Artists: Axel Torvenius
- Publishers: Don't Panic Games, Mighty Boards, Taverna Ludica Games
- Release Date: 2022
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Area Movement, Dice Rolling, Paper-and-Pencil, Push Your Luck, Real-Time, Variable Player Powers
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.30052 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Vengeance: Roll & Fight—Episode 2.
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