Invincible: The Hero-Building Game Design Diary 4 – With Ultimate Power…

June 19, 2024

Now available for Pre-Order

You should stop. You know you should stop.

You’re running on fumes, lucky to still be in the air. If you keep fighting, you’re liable to make a critical mistake that gets you injured if not killed. But your friends are in trouble. And you think that if you try, you might have one last burst of strength that can save them all. You’ve got to try… right?

Invincible: The Hero-Building Game is a push-your luck game that challenges you to build a new and different tableau of power cards every game. So today we’re going to talk about the most potent powers you can learn – and how they drive that push-your-luck dynamic. Say hello to ultimate powers.

Worth Pushing For

If you read our first preview article, you know that to do anything in this game you need to draw cubes from your bag and assign them to your powers – but that every time you do so, you’ll risk drawing black cubes. Black cubes are helpful in that they’re wild, but harmful in that if you draw five in a round you crash and risk taking a ton of damage.

It’s a classic push-your-luck setup. And when you build a system like that, you’re hoping for drama. We wanted players to be desperately tempted to go deep in their bags. We wanted the whole table to hold its breath as a hero made a dangerous pull with the game on the line, ready to erupt in cheers if it worked out.

There’s just one issue: If all powers were equally accessible, players would always fill their best ones first, meaning that by the time they were in a position to make that kind of fateful pull, they often wouldn’t have anything exciting left to tempt them.

Enter: Ultimate Powers.

Ultimate powers offer players some of the strongest effects in the game, but they’re a little harder to use. Each ultimate power needs to be positioned below a Super power card of the same color. To use the Ultimate, you have to first use the super above it in the same round.

In this simple example, Savage Smash offers you a whopping 5 damage for only three cubes – but first you’ve got to Gutpunch somebody.

And doing that requires enough yellow and/or black cubes that it isn’t guaranteed to happen before you crash. You can probably make it happen if you devote all your black cubes to it… but odds are there’s at least one other power that’s really important to you this round too. And by the time you hit the late game and have several Ultimate powers available? Well, odds are pretty good you’ll have something really tempting on board when the going gets tough, promising you tremendous power if you have the guts to reach for it.

Ultimate Potential

Ultimate powers also add another layer of depth to the hero-building process, as pairing the right Ultimates with the right Supers can be crucial.

A simple power like Lightning Blast might not look like much, but since it only costs one cube, it’s a great way to reach a powerful Ultimate quickly.

There are also loads of combos to discover. On its own, Overclock is a decent tool for powering out higher-cost powers, since it gives 4 confidence for just two cubes… but if it’s ramping you to Uncanny Focus, it can suddenly provide a ton of damage as well:

As Uncanny Focus demonstrates, many Ultimate Powers require two different colors of cubes. That means they can be paired with a power of either color, giving you even more flexibility in how you build your hero. Eve will always be happy to use Miracle Grow with her Lightning Symbol starting power so that it’ll get a second activation…

…But it’s even better if she can pair it with Super Charge, which will give it +1 damage for every one of its activations.

And if you’ve got a board full of Lightning Powers? Well, you’re going to want to use them all first to really charge it up. And you might just draw some black cubes while you do. But look at the potential! That’s worth risking a little damage for… right?

Of course, this is just a small glimpse of what’s possible with Ultimate Powers. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this, along with our previous sneak peaks. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to see everything for yourselves! Head on over to the Direwolf Digital and order the game, or talk to your friendly local game store. Sure, you might not miss out if you wait for it to hit shelves… but in this case, risking it is certainly not worth your while.