I have two small negatives about Super Battle. First, it feels like a missed opportunity that this game does not integrate with the original, and second, the box is far larger than it needs to be. These issues aside, however, the production of this game is top-notch, and it’s great fun to play. Rhino Hero is joined by three other action heroes and hanging spider monkeys. Includes 2 dice for hero battles when they land on the same floor.

For me, this is one of my ‘lazy games’– when I know we’ve got people coming around and I’m not feeling at my most sociable, or when there’s a bit of a wait on the dinner and I’ve got an irritable teen and an interfering Nana, I’ll look to Rhino Hero to entertain them (and me) for a short space of time. Each player starts the game with five cards, unless there are only two of you in which case you start with seven. Your hand is made up of roof cards only, with each one having a different action on it that, once played, affect the game in some way. The wall tiles remain in a draw pile to the side which should be taken from at the beginning of each players turn. s Rhino Hero is one of, if not my #1, favorite game from family game publisher HABA Games. It garnered a 5 Star review here on BGQ and makes it’s way to our gaming table early and often (with and without kids present). So when I heard they were releasing a sequel, I was all in. I just hoped that they didn’t screw up a brilliant game by bogging it down with too many unnecessary rules. Let’s find out if they did. Is it going to enthrall those of us who are more tactically minded and want to feel like we’ve worked a bit harder for our victory? Probably not, nor is it going to be a game that you revisit for its own replay-ability and depth. The quirk of this game is in its humour-inducing ability, not in its own greatness. It is one-dimensional and is better played with a few of you. It also requires a level surface with no surplus movement – a fan the other end of the room or an un-even table will cause you problems – which makes it limited in where and when you can play it. If you’re looking for a game that is made well, with illustrations that will make you smile and a premise that is easy-to-learn and easy-to-teach then this is a great starting point. It’s difficult to find a game that keeps all the family engaged these days – there’s so many distractions with social media and technology on demand that sitting kids down for anything longer than half an hour is a task, but with Rhino Hero you can set-up, play and declare a winner in well-under 15 minutes.There are no serious issues with colour blindness, or at least no issues that can’t be very easily resolved through context clues and spatial awareness. For example, the dice you use are differentiated by colour (and in one case by style of number) but while the colour choices are fine for most categories of colour blindness there will be edge cases where that’s not true. No but seriously my son loves to do the “single tall wall with a floor on top” move that immediately starts teetering precariously The game box states that Rhino Hero Super Battle (designed by Scott Frisco and Steven Strumpf) is suitable for 5-99-year-olds. What’s amazing about this game is that not only are people of all ages capable of playing the game but the rules contain great ways of allowing younger players to stand a chance of winning against older players. These include: Super Battle emulates the perfect crescendo; a smooth and circumspect event but as the skyscraper grows, the tension begins to build until the grand finale of everything toppling over and exploding like a firework of urban landscape. The entire rhythm of the game then basically works towards making sure things get big and things get tall. This means that when the last player actually does make the move that causes the whole thing to come tumbling down there’s a proportionate payout for the work you did. It’s not that this is necessarily better than what Rhino Hero accomplished but it’s different and in a way that I personally believe makes it a more genuinely enjoyable experience. It gives you more opportunity for skilful and strategic play, but it never loses the core of what makes Rhino Hero itself worth playing – the sheer anarchic fun that comes from destroying something beautiful. You might spend a little more on this than you would for Rhino Hero itself but I don’t think for an instant you’d find yourself regretting the extra. Unusually, I might even go an additional step and say ‘Seriously, get both – you can mix and match and that’s the best of all possible worlds’. This isn’t a circumstance where one game obsoletes the other – they can co-exist in the same game library because they are going to give you different flavours of the experience. It’s like having strawberry and chocolate ice-cream in the freezer. Having one doesn’t mean you won’t fancy the other when you finally get around to grabbing a bowl.

To set up the game, players place three large tiles in a row on the table, to act as the base of the tower. Each player chooses a hero and receives a hand of three floor cards. Then you roll the movement die and move your hero up or down the amount of floors shown on the die (-1 to 3). If you reach a level that already has another player, you battle by rolling opposing dice. The loser goes down a floor. The rules to Super Battle are so deceptively simple that even your pet dog will understand them, although dogs don’t have thumbs so probably best not to play this with your dog…or any animal really.Super Battle changes that by giving players autonomy as to where they’ll place their card, and the structure you’ve all been collaborative architecting will provide whole suite of meaningful options around that. Those options will draw in position, precarity, and the confidence each player has in their ability to work within the constraints of the construction. Maybe you place a really dodgy roof on a really dodgy wall hoping that it’s just on the right side of robustness for you to make it stay, but not so robust anyone will want to build on it. There’s nothing to stop another player looking at what you’ve done and saying ‘blow that’ before placing their own roof somewhere different. Eventually your structure will become so interconnected that every placement impacts on every other card but that doesn’t mean every point of play is as risky as every other. More than this, each player will have their own views on what is risky and what is not. You might find yourself driving the next player towards the place you want them to build only to find they had different ideas as to the destination of their own card. Super heroes share colour palettes, which might be a problem when you’re trying to work out which is yours in a frantic melee, but they also have completely unique art and distinctive form factors.