Smash Up game review

My boys got a cool new card game for their birthday. We’ve been playing Smash up so much since March we’ve already bought two expansions. It’s made a great addition to our gameschooling, and as Future Ticia 2024 is updating this post we have so many expansions now. SO MANY. It’s a great Card game, and uses one of my favorite play styles, worker placement.

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Smash UP game, what is it?

Smash UP game has a unique gameplay, you choose two different factions (robots and wizards for example) and mix them together.  Because each faction has a different playing style, it’s difficult to categorize.

Zombies, Robots, and Wizards all play as card cycling.  You are moving through cards quickly to get the maximum effect

Ninjas, Pirates, Tricksters, and Aliens are attack cards.  They all have cards that will attack other players, destroying their cards or making them not work properly.

Dinosaurs and Tricksters are enhancement factions.  They have lots of make this card better for a turn or two.

You see what I mean about not being easy to categorize?

Future Ticia 2024 has decided to call it a worker placement as you have to place minions to win the game.

How to play Smash Up game

The game starts with everyone choosing two factions.  The first player chooses their faction, then it cycles around as everyone chooses their first faction, and the choice reverses and the last player chooses their second faction first and the first player chooses last.  Then you shuffle all of your cards together and draw five cards.

On your turn you can do two things:

1. Play a minion.
2. Play an action.

How you do those two things determines how the rest of your turn goes.  Some minions give you extra actions or abilities when you play them, and some actions let you play more actions.

After you have played all of your cards you check to see if any base has scored (a base scores when the total number of minions there {and any actions affecting them} goes over the point total required), once a base scores all of the points are passed out and you draw two cards.

Play continues like this until someone has 15 points.  One nice thing about this game, if everyone is playing well together it can play in about 30 minutes.  That’s a rare thing in our house.

Our house rules for a Smash Up game

Because there are several different factions in play and not everyone knows all of the factions, we’ve developed some house rules.

1. Play one card at a time, and explain why that card has happened.
2. Talents (which are from the Expansions) only apply to minions/cards on the base the character is played.  If a minion is moved from that base before the player’s turn comes again the talent applies to the card until the next turn.
3. Minions on a base are stacked according to the player to make it easier to see which minions go together.

Smash Up Expansions we own

Okay, that’s really it.  It’s a fairly straightforward game to play.  So far we’ve bought two expansions:

That is not true anymore. We have so many expansions, that even with the Broken Token organizer we can’t fit all of the cards. The boys bought the Bigger Geekier Box. It has one faction in the box, but really it’s just designed to make your game function better.

I will attempt to include all of the expansions I know we have, but we have a lot of expansions. And while this is no longer my boys’ favorite game, they still really enjoy it.

• Pretty Pretty Smash Up– Princesses, Cats, Horses, and Fairies, all things cute and pretty and they are powerful.  Seriously horses are scary and powerful and the Princesses, wow! Future Ticia 2024 loves to play with the Not My Little Pony faction, it’s so hilarious
• Smash Up Awesome Level 9000 Board Game– Steampunk, killer plants, Bear calvary, and ghosts.  The boss from the Bear Calvary is what led to our house rule on the talents only applying to a single base.  His power is crazy big.
• Smash Up 10th Anniversary game– my boys bought this because it updated some of the base factions to be more in line with the other factions, and streamlined some rules
• What were we thinking?– Grannies are weird
• International Incident– bought primarily because of Luchadores
• Culture Shock Expansion– it has the Brothers Grimm
• Big in Japan– Kaiju

More great gameschooling ideas

We’ve played a lot of board games over the years, here are a few I’m going to recommend today:

• Welcome to the Dungeon game
• Soul of the Empire board game
• Transamerica
• Minecraft card game resource management card game
• Tempurra Card Game