Kapow! Volume 1 review— Zip! bop! wham! etc!

There’s a famous Splotter saying that’s been paraphrased to if you can’t lose a game on the first turn, why do you have it? Well, deck building games have been struggling with that question all hulked out on gamma rays. Ever since Dominion, the first several rounds in deck building have been rote buy a thing or two from the market and pass, shuffle your deck and hope you drew the card that you bought so you can actually do something snoozefests. Kapow!’s answer works because it’s a dice pool builder, but it’s both extremely thematic for a game about comic book fights and easily my favorite solution: immediacy.

 

At the beginning of each of Kapow!’s rounds, both players put up their screens and roll their entire pool of dice, with certain faces being needed to activate certain abilities. The generic player abilities fall under 3 categories: attack, defense, and utility, which involves gaining dice and bonus faces, and other stuff that doesn’t fall under the other two. Once both players are happy with their assignments, they reveal, doing damage to each other if they have more attack than the other has defense and gaining dice and faces to their pool for next round. Some may bemoan the randomness of a die roll, but with pools this large (you start with 5-6 depending on character and that quickly balloons), you’re not going to get any more random than mediocre draws in a deck builder. Yes, a particularly poor roll or placement from a low health character against an aggressive opponent can lead to a turn one loss, but that means this game has high stakes turn one, something I’ve never seen another deck/pool builder do to this extent. Also, so what? That loss probably took all of 5 minutes, just learn your lesson, reset and play a fresh game.

 

Even a cursory view will reveal that attacks have better numbers than defenses, while defenses provide faces to slot into your blank action die, so defenses are simply better than attacks early game, but still less efficient in ramping up than gaining whole fresh dice off utility abilities. Of course, those abilities don’t interact with your opponents in any way, so the premise here is a much more complicated and informed rock paper scissors. Colored trait dice have more or less of certain faces than others, and your screen has a handy reminder, so yeah you’re building your pool to more reliably activate what you want, but you also become predictable. Your opponent that bought a bunch of red and yellow dice? Yeah, they’ll be able to hit you real good, but chances are that’s all they’ll be doing, so if you can survive those swings, you’ll have larger pools to have a defense that they’ll have a hard time breaking through while also swinging back when they can’t defend. That’s just the generic no-character game, but characters add that extra bit of spice that makes Kapow! really sizzle. Every character has a starting pool and 4 unique powers that nudge you in a general direction, but don’t necessarily dictate your play style. With the exception of Victor Kane, who pretty exclusively wants to attack really hard and harvest dice off it, the cast exists to enable whatever the hell you get up to in a neat thematic way. I’ve also got my review for Volume 2 coming out soon, so keep a lookout for that, same bat-time, same bat-channel!

 

 

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