• At San Diego Comic-Con 2023 in mid-July, Skybound Entertainment announced a co-production with Dire Wolf from designer Kevin Spak that will debut in 2024 — Invincible: The Hero-Building Game, which is based on Robert Kirkman’s Invincible comic series and its adaptation by Amazon Video:
In Invincible: The Hero-Building Game, you step into the shoes of Atom Eve, Rex Splode, Robot, and Invincible to work together to protect Earth. A fusion of bag-building and tableau-building allows you to customize your hero each game. Press your luck and risk crashing to deal with the numerous threats at once, while trying to rescue civilians and your fellow heroes.
Campaign-based gameplay takes you through the key events of Invincible’s story in Season 1 of the series.
• Along similar lines, at SDCC 2023 Solis Game Studio announced a deal with Image Comics to use Brian McKay’s Pocket Paragons game system to create a card game based on Image’s Massive-Verse.
The four lead heroes in the Massive-Verse — Radiant Black, Rogue Sun, Inferno Girl Red, and The Dead Lucky — and their main rivals — <001>, Cataclysm, The Griffin, and Pyre — will each have an individual character deck in the Pocket Paragons system, allowing you to have any two of them square off or to pit one of them against another character in that game line.
Mock-up from Solis Game Studio
The Massive-Verse Fighting Card Game set will be crowdfunded in 2023 for released in mid-2024.
• In June 2023, Mantic Games and Team17 Digital announced a partnership to bring its Worms video game series to tabletop play as — drumroll, please — Worms: The Board Game.
Aside from the promotional image above and a project listing on Kickstarter that invites you to “grab your friends and unleash classic weapons, sneaky tactics, and all-out multiplayer mayhem”, I know almost zip about the game. The crowdfunding campaign is scheduled to launch in August 2023 for a release in 2024 ahead of the Worms series’ thirtieth anniversary in 2025.
I had never heard of Worms prior to this announcement, but to be fair Worms has never heard of me, so we’re even.
• To circle back where we started, in Q3 2023 Mantic Games will release The Walking Dead: The Dice Game and Invincible: The Dice Game, both apparently press-your-luck games along the lines of the already released Hellboy: The Dice Game from designers Rob Burman and Matt Gilbert.
