Invincible: The Hero-Building Game, Season 2 will debut at Gen Con with a free promo card and is coming to retail soon after! For those who can’t make it to Indianapolis, there will also be a pre-order period on our website the week before!

If you’ve ever spent time in a creative writing class, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “Kill your darlings.” It’s the idea that sometimes you have to let some of your favorite ideas go, because as brilliant as they might be, your book will be tighter without them. Game designers do the same thing all the time, but there’s a phrase we can use to ease the pain: “That’s an expansion idea.” You’re not killing that brilliant new mechanic – you’re just saving it for later!

Of course, most of the time this is the equivalent of sending your darlings to a farm upstate. Most of the time, you can’t be sure there will actually be an expansion when you’re working on a brand new game, let alone one your idea will fit in.

But every once in a while, the stars align. Today, we’re going to talk about Invincible: The Hero-Building Game Season 2, and some “expansion ideas” that, incredibly, made it into an actual expansion. To do that, we’ll have to talk a little about how the original game came together. It might surprise you to learn that Invincible did not start life as a bag-builder… it started out as a dice game.

Of Dice and Bags

Instead of pulling three cubes from a bag, you’d roll three dice, and put cubes on your powers based on the symbols you rolled. You could roll the dice again and again, as long as you hadn’t crashed; some die faces would advance your exertion track. Most of the faces that did this also included a wild symbol, much like the black cubes in the final game.

When we hit on the idea of switching over to bag-building, many things fell into place. But there were some old mechanics that had to go, even if we liked them, because they just didn’t elegantly fit into this new world.

One of these was Fuel. In the dice version of the game, many powers instructed you to “fuel” other powers – basically, put a cube on them as though you’d rolled the appropriate symbol. It was a natural mechanic that enabled all sorts of fun build-arounds. Some cards fueled a specific symbol, others a specific type of power. Still others had abilities that fueled themselves when certain conditions were met.

The fuel mechanic allows you to charge up a power with a token that acts as a “wild” cube… without the crashing!

That made perfect sense when your cubes were just sitting in a supply pile off to the side. But once we switched to bag-building, we suddenly had to ask where these cubes came from – and where they went afterwards. We didn’t want to have players dig around in their bag for a certain cube, and couldn’t expect them to remember to ditch certain cubes at the end of the round – people have a way of forgetting stuff they don’t want to remember. We decided we’d just have to cut the mechanic. A handful of the designs lived on in spirit in the “gain a cube and immediately play it” cycle, but it was a fraction of what we’d had.

Fuel Tokens

Fuel tokens can be used as any color on any power, and sometimes even interact with cards in unique ways.

When it came time to do an expansion, we asked ourselves if there was a way fuel could work, and realized there might be. Back when we gave fuel the axe, we hadn’t known that the game would use cubes; we figured you’d probably pull chits from a bag like in most bag-builders. By the time we started Season 2 though, we’d been using cubes for a while. We realized that we could make fuel use a different kind of token – one you wouldn’t ever mistake for a cube and accidentally scoop into your bag. We gave it a try, and sure enough, it played well, and enabled lots of new designs.

The Fuel mechanic allows for a lot of fun new combos, across Super Powers, Ultimate Powers, and is even a fundamental part of Black Samson’s kit! 

Anatomy of a Falter

A new type of cube! That’s a good thing, right? …Right?

Fuel was, in the grand scheme of things, not a very painful darling to kill the first time around. But there was another aspect of those older, dice-based versions of the game that was much harder to let go of, because it more fundamentally changed how the game played.

For a good stretch of early development, villains didn’t use their basic attacks in the villain phase – they used them during the hero phase. In addition to the exhaustion face, some of the dice had an Attack face. Whenever a hero rolled the attack face, they’d take damage from the villain in their zone with the highest attack value.

This made the hero phase much more tense and tactical. Heroes were incentivized to employ hit-and-run tactics, moving into a zone to hit an enemy, then flying back out before they could take an attack back. Healing took on new context too, allowing you to keep rolling when you’d otherwise be afraid to KO.

Watch out, heroes — the villains have some new tricks up their sleeves in Season 2.

When we switched to bag building, we decided we didn’t want to put two different kinds of bad cubes in the bag. We were also still worried that the game’s free-form turn structure might prove too chaotic – a major concern throughout development – and mid-round damage enhanced that feeling. Little was more jarring than having a teammate inform you that they had taken a game-losing KO while you were paying attention to something else. Changing it so that the only hero-phase damage came from crashing helped a lot (especially once we added Crash Rescues, but that’s another story).

Still, we knew that mid-round damage had been fun. A classic hallmark of an “expansion idea” is that they are a smidge too complex or difficult for newbies, but fun for experienced players – AKA, the players buying expansions. In this case, mid-round damage wasn’t too complex to learn, but it increased gameplay complexity and difficulty… which might just be something the veterans coming back for Season 2 could handle and appreciate.

Falter Cubes

We still didn’t want to make players start with negative cubes in their bags though. Enter another “expansion idea.” At one point, Justin Cohen had evangelized a mechanic in which enemies put negative cubes into players’ bags. 

In those early versions, they dealt a flat one damage when drawn, which kept things simple, but meant the gameplay wasn’t quite dynamic enough to be worth the complexity and components. But with expansion space to play in, it felt like there was room to make them a bit more complicated.

The result: Falter Cubes. Villains and some other nefarious effects will put these green and decidedly mean cubes into your bags throughout the game. When you draw one – you guessed it – you’ll take damage equal to the highest villain attack value in your zone. They’ll then go to your Dropped area – because yeah, they’re going right back into the bag at the end of the round.

Various villains will burden you with Falter Cubes, allowing them to wallop you during Hero Phase. But they can also be gained from other cards… sometimes as part of an enticing risk/reward combo!

But don’t worry the good guys aren’t totally helpless, because Falter Cubes let us bring back another fallen mechanic: Weaken. Weaken is a status effect heroes can put on enemies, reducing how much damage they deal. If enemies are only dealing damage once per round in the villain phase, Weaken is functional, but unimpressive, acting like a lame cousin of Thwart or healing. But when a villain is threatening to wallop you every time you Falter? Suddenly weakening them can feel very powerful indeed.

Baddies like Vidor can be really nasty with Falter Cubes in play, but with Weaken tokens, he’ll pack a lot less of a punch. With two on his card, each hit would deal 1 damage per hit instead of 3.

Don’t Look Back

Of course, none of these mechanics work the same now as they did initially – and all of them are better now than they would have been if we’d left them in the base game. We learned a lot of new things about the game while working on this expansion, after all, and had lots of new ideas for how to do things. Some of those ideas made it into the expansion. And others? Well, it never hurts to have some expansion ideas on hand.

That’s all we’ve got time for today, but far from all the cool new stuff in the expansion. Next time we’ll take a look at the new Heroes you can expect to save the day with!

Invincible: The Hero-Building Game, Season 2 will be debuting at Gen Con 2026, along with a pre-order period on our website for the US the week before. If you pick it up from our booth during the biggest weekend in board gaming or pre-order it from our website, you’ll also get the Power Burst promo card free with purchase!