Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
In Mars Attacks: The Dice Game, the Martian players compete to see who can subjugate which U.S. cities first.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Read the full game description
In Mars Attacks: The Dice Game, the Martian players compete to see who can subjugate which U.S. cities first. At the start of the game, four stacks of cards are dealt out randomly, with each stack having as many cards as players. On a turn, the player first declares which city they want to attack, then rolls all ten dice. Any dice showing the "nuke" symbol are locked and cannot be rerolled. Laser guns are similarly locked, allowing the player to reroll only the alien heads. If the player rerolls and ever has as many nuke symbols showing as the number on the face-up cards and the supplementary token, their turn ends; otherwise they can stop at any time, and if they don't have enough guns or alien heads to claim their target, they mark their total with one of their tokens, allowing them to add on to this number on a future turn — assuming that someone else doesn't claim the card first. Some city cards have special powers, such as Seattle's, which allows you to place one die on the symbol of your choice prior to rolling. Las Vegas, true to its nature, wants you to go bust multiple times in order to claim the card. Whoever ends up decimating the largest portion of the earth wins. Ak ak ak ak ak!