One Year Later

Just one year ago, players everywhere joined the heroic team of mutants, the X-Men, in their struggle to save the world when X-Men: Mutant Insurrection hit store shelves. Since that day, loads of players have battled the likes of Magneto and the Hellfire Club alongside iconic X-Men, such as Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, and Phoenix.

Today, we’d like to take a brief look back at this exciting game and shout out a few of the folks who helped bring it to life!

Of Dice and X-Men

For those of you not in the know, in every game of X-Men: Mutant Insurrection, your goal is to complete a series of objectives in preparation for the final showdown against one of the X-Men’s iconic foes. You and up to five other players each choose one of sixteen mutants to play as, each of them boasting their own unique talents and dice combinations.

In order to complete the objectives on a mission, you’ll roll the dice on your mutant’s power card and match the symbols rolled to the symbols on the mission card. Since the X-Men are always working together, another hero on the same mission as you can diversify your dice pool and give you new abilities by lending you their assist card.

In this example, Wolverine is lending Cyclops a red and blue die, and the ability “Fastball Special.”

Complete enough missions, and you can challenge the villain in the final showdown. Defeat the villain, and you win the game! Of course, just completing the missions won’t be enough to save the day; you also have to complete them quickly. The game features a threat track that gradually counts up as you play, and if the threat level would ever be raised above 15, it’s game over. 

Here we have the final showdown versus Dark Phoenix. The X-Men have their work cut out for them!

There are many people who worked together to bring this exciting game to life, and today we would like to provide a quick shoutout to three of them.

First off are, of course, the designers of the game: Richard Launius and Brandon Perdue. The ideas and mechanics brought to the table by these two minds provide a terrific retelling of the tale of the X-Men and their struggles to protect a world that despises them. The core experience of X-Men: Mutant Insurrection is largely due to Launius and Perdue’s game design chops, but there is another experienced game maker who contributed as well: Reiner Knizia. A longtime designer with over 600 published games to his name, Knizia is the one who inspired the dice mechanic that is so central to Mutant Insurrection and how it is played. The game wouldn’t be the same without him!

The Battle Continues

To all of you who played X-Men: Mutant Insurrection this past year, we at FFG would like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And to those of you who have not yet picked it up, we hope that this year you will give it a try!

You can find out more about X-Men: Mutant Insurrection here. The Blackbird is ready to launch—join the X-Men in their fight for the future!