Children of the Atom

Your missions lie at the heart of every game of X-Men: Mutant Insurrection. You’ll save humans from imminent danger, travel across the globe to advance the story, or come face-to-face with a villainous mutant intent on rampant destruction. No matter where your mission takes you, every mission offers a series of objectives that you’ll need to complete, using the symbols that you roll on your dice.  

At the start of the game, you’ll choose your character from among sixteen distinct mutants, each boasting their own unique talents and dice. Some mutants, such as Wolverine, excel at combat, while Angel can use his powers of flight to zip past tricky objectives. Balancing the powers and abilities that each mutant brings to the table is crucial if you’re going to push forward and complete your missions.

You and your fellow mutants begin each round on the Blackbird, circling the globe and evaluating the threats present at any given time. You have three choices of where to deploy your character: you can take on a faceup mission, head to a continent deck and reveal a brand-new mission, or return to Xavier’s School where you can recuperate or prepare for future tests in Cerebro or the Danger Room.

To take down a mission, you and any other mutants that join you in this fight will have to work together to complete the mission card’s objectives. For example, Lost Mutants features three objectives, each with its own requirements of power, teamwork, and fighting strength. If you can complete all three missions on Lost Mutants by the end of the round, you’ve successfully completed the mission! If any objectives remain uncompleted, however, you’ll suffer the Failure outcome and be forced back to the Blackbird at the end of the round!

To complete the objectives at a mission, you’ll have to roll the dice shown on your mutant’s power card. If there’s another hero at the mission with you, they can diversify your dice pool and offer new abilities by sharing their assist card with you. For example, if you’re playing as Cyclops and Wolverine is assisting you in this mission, you’ll gather three red dice, two yellow dice, and one blue die.

Once you’ve rolled your dice, you have two chances to re-roll your dice in search of the results that you need to complete your objectives. You can reroll any number of dice freely, but beware the villainy result! Some missions, such as a fight with the ground-shaking Avalanche, have a deadly villainy effect—if you’re fighting Avalanche, you’ll suffer two damage to reroll dice showing the villainy result.

After your two re-rolls are spent, you’ll use your final results to complete as many objectives as you can. As an example, in Cyclops and Wolverine’s fight against Avalanche, you end up with seven fight, a power, a teamwork, and a villainy, as shown above. That’s enough to complete the first and third objectives on Avalanche’s mission card, though you’ll also need to take a damage to finish the first objective. There’s only one objective left, and hopefully Wolverine can finish the job on his turn with Cyclops’s assistance!

Fight for the Future

Time is of the essence as the X-Men complete their missions, of course. Every turn, the threat track advances, fueled by the number of threat symbols shown on missions and other cards in play. With each tier of the threat track, cards are drawn from a new threat deck, with progressively more dangerous effects, including powerful Sentinels that deploy to missions and make them much more difficult to complete.

The outlook may seem grim for the X-Men, but they’re not alone in this fight. Other mutants, like Rictor and Cypher, can be discovered and rescued during a successfully completed mission. Even more than other mutants, however, the bonds that you forge between the X-Men may be your greatest advantage.

Over the course of the game, you may have opportunities to forge a bond with another hero, uniting your two characters with a bond like Love or Camaraderie and gaining a boon so long as these two heroes deploy to the same mission. These bonds can make your team stronger together than they could ever be apart, but no bond is bulletproof. Love can turn to Regret, Camaraderie may lead to Betrayal, and these negative bonds will also have consequences if two heroes forced apart by bitterness take on the same mission.

The missions that you complete don’t exist in a vacuum—there are eight different scenarios in X-Men: Mutant Insurrection, and each one pits you against a deadly threat. As you complete your objectives and advance through the scenario, you’re pushing ever closer to a massive showdown against the villain. These showdowns unfold across a panoramic portrayal of your ultimate battle, pulling together multiple missions into an epic conflict. It will take every hero on your team to defeat your foes and win the scenario!

Calling All X-Men!

Earth is in danger, and the X-Men are all that stands in its way. Pick your team, leap into the Blackbird, and start your first missions with X-Men: Mutant Insurrection!