Tabletop Game / Smash Up

When you were a kid, did you ever get into an argument with a friend of yours over whether robots or zombies would win in a fight? Dinosaurs or aliens? Superheroes or werewolves?

Imagine somebody made a game based off of that. Now stop imagining it, because somebody did, and this is that game.

Smash-Up is a 2012 Card Game by Alderac Entertainment group, which can be played from 2-4 players. Players each take two different factions with 20 cards each and Smash-Up those factions together. Then they try to put as many powerful minions as possible on one of three to five "base" cards while also using actions and abilities to help themselves and hinder their opponents. When the total power on a base reaches above a certain amount, it breaks, and the players gain Victory Points according to whoever had the most power on it. The first player to earn 15 Victory Points wins the game.

The main draw of the game is being able to combine factions, giving many different playstyles. Each Faction has unique traits and abilities that make them really effective in world domination- Ninja-Pirates will be able to move freely and strike unexpectedly, while Zombie-Robots manufacture massive armies that easily come back from the dead.

The original 8 factions are Aliens, Dinosaurs, Ninjas, Pirates, Robots, Tricksters, Wizards and Zombies. A plethora of expansion packs have come out, with typically four factions each^note the Big Geeky Box has one, Munchkin, Smash Up: Marvel and Smash Up: Disney Edition have eight, It's Your Fault and World Tour: Culture Shock have five:

Expansions

• Awesome Level 9000, with Bear Cavalry, Ghosts, Killer Plants and Steampunks.
• The Obligatory Cthulhu set, with Minions of Cthulhu, Elder Things, Innsmouth, and Miskatonic University.
• Science Fiction Double Feature, with Cyborg Apes, Shapeshifters, Super Spies and Time Travelers.
• Monster Smash, with Vampires, Werewolves, Giant Ants and Mad Scientists.
• The Big Geeky Box, with Geeks (and a big box to hold all the cards released to date, with plenty of room for future expansions).
• Pretty Pretty Smash Up, with Fairies, Kitty Cats, Mythic Horses, and Princesses.
• Munchkin, a crossover with the other gaming franchise with Orcs, Halflings, Elves, Dwarves, Warriors, Clerics, Thieves, and Mages.
• It's Your Fault!, with fan-chosen factions: Sharks, Superheroes, Mythic Greeks, and Dragons. It also comes with Tornadoes, a bonus fifth faction, referred to only as the "Shark Delivery System™."
• Cease and Desist, with factions similar to yet legally distinct from existing franchises: Star Roamers, Astro Knights, Changerbots, and Ignobles.
• What Were We Thinking?, with the admittedly eclectic Teddy Bears, Grandmas, Explorers and Rock Stars.
• All Stars Event Kit, a retailer-only set containing the All Stars promotional faction.
• Big In Japan, featuring factions based on Japanese media: Kaiju, Mega Troopers, Magical Girls and Itty Critters.
• Sheep, a promotional faction.
• That 70s Expansion, with Disco Dancers, Kung Fu Fighters, Truckers and Vigilantes.
• Smash Up TITANS packs (previously included in the TITANS Event Kit), each with titans for 16 factions released before Big in Japan.
• Oops You Did It Again, with fan-chosen factions: Ancient Egyptians, Cowboys, Samurai and Vikings.
• The Bigger Geekier Box, containing re-releases of both Geeks and All Stars in another really big box.
• World Tour: International Incident, with Luchadors, Mounties, Musketeers and Sumo Wrestlers.
• Smash Up Penguins packs, each with Penguins.
• World Tour: Culture Shock, with Anansi Tales, Ancient Incas, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Polynesian Voyagers and Russian Fairy Tales.
• Smash Up: Marvel, exceptionally distributed by The Op Games | usaopoly, with Avengers, Hydra, Kree, Masters of Evil, S.H.I.E.L.D., Sinister Six, Spider-Verse and Ultimates.
• Smash Up Goblins packs, with Goblins.
• Smash Up Knights of the Round Table packs, with the Knights of the Round Table.
• Smash Up: Disney Edition, once again distributed by The Op Games | usaopoly, with Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Big Hero 6, Frozen, Mulan, The Lion King, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Wreck-It Ralph.

Planned expansions include:

• 10th Anniversary, containing Mermaids, Skeletons and World Champs alongside a re-release of Sheep and a to-be-announced number of new titans.

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Smash-Up contains examples of:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: The entire gimmick of the Mega Troopers, most of whom have abilities and actions that trigger during the climax of a battle (right before a base scores), making them very good at pulling the rug out from under your foes.
• Abandon Ship:
  • The ability of the Pirates' First Mate allows him to escape a base after it breaks (normally, minions on a broken base go into the discard pile).
  • The Cyborg Apes' Flying Monkey action grants a one-time use of this power to a minion.
  • The Star Roamers' Port Me Up allows you to get back one of your minions after a base breaks. Combined with a Ship's Engineer, you can make your minion move to another base instead.
  • The Ancient Egyptians' Mummy is a special case since it is buried elsewhere after their base scores and you have to unbury it to reactivate it.
  • The Polynesian Voyagers' Sun Tattoo can be used to move somewhere else after a base scores, but only when played at that moment.
• Action Bomb:
  • The Pirates' Powderkeg turns one of your minions into this, destroying it as well as all minions of lower power on that base.
  • The Robots' Nukebot destroys all enemy minions on the same base as it when it is killed.
  • The Ignobles' aptly-named Red Birthday Party does this from a mechanical standpoint, the actual method of the killing is more... visceral.
• Action Girl:
  • The Ninjas' Tiger Assassin has one of the very rare instances where you can destroy a minion with more than 2 power.
  • The Kung Fu Fighters' Lady Whirlwind has a talent that does the same, though it can only be used if Lady Whirlwind doesn't presently have a +1 power counter on her. Of course, a major focus of the faction is transferring +1 power counters, making it easy to remove the counter on Lady Whirlwind and thus reset her talent.
  • The Explorers' Crypt Looter can be played as an extra minion as soon as a new base is played.
  • Some expansions have factions entirely (or mostly) made of female characters, namely the Princesses, the Grannies and the Magical Girls.
  • Gracie Brones in Action Heroes gains a +1 power counter at the start of your turn if she's your only minion there, then gains +1 power until the end of the turn for each of those counters on her. With the right partner faction, this can build up fast.
• Always Gets His Man: The Mounties faction obviously.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The Geeks' Banned List card allows you to move a specific card in an opponent's hand to the bottom of their deck, but to do this you must be able to name that card exactly as it is written. Acknowledging that it probably isn't easy for new players to know the name of every card they may want to intercept, the rules give you the option to let players describe the card text, art or effect instead.
• Artificial Limbs: The Cyborg Apes faction is full of those.
• Art Shift: Each faction has been illustrated by different artists, with very few returning names. This results in very distinct art styles for certain factions.
• Ascended Meme:
  • Bear Cavalry is an actual faction featured in an expansion. They even have actions called "You're screwed" and "You're pretty much borscht."
  • The Sheep have a card called "Wood for Sheep," a risque meme about Settlers of Catan.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever:
  • Several of the "King Minons" ^note A factions highest power minion, usually with a Power of 5 or higher. fall into this. Of particular note is the Dinosaurs' King Rex, while a real life T-rex is about 20 feet tall, King Rex is depicted as being well over a hundred feet, almost making him a full-blown Kaiju.
  • Big in Japan factions take it a step further with titans, which are physically bigger and thicker cards (actually the dividers), more abilities than the average cards and are tougher to deal with.
  • The TITANS Event Kit introduced titans for 16 pre-Big-in-Japan factions.
• Attack of the Monster Appendage: Some of the Kaiju actions are these.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Ghosts' "Make Contact" action can take control of ANY minion in play, but in order to play it, it has to be the only card you have in hand and you need to have an action play to spend. You might as well just discard it.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Kung Fu Fighters' Everybody Knew Their Part action card and Disco Dancers' Celebration action card.
• Badass Adorable: The factions in Pretty Pretty Smash Up are all "cute" things like Fairies and Kitty Cats, but they can throw down with the best of them.
  • The Teddy Bears from What Were We Thinking are supremely cuddly, as befits a whole faction of plush toys, who are also the absolute kings of the Stone Wall strategy.
• Balance Buff: While AEG has always refused to reprint some of the weaker factions, they released titans that significantly buffed existing factions.
• Base on Wheels: The Magical Girls' Titan, the Walking Castle, which also doubles as a gargantuan Spider Tank.
• Bears Are Bad News: The Bear Cavalry.
  • The Teddy Bears look less aggressive until they start to Cuddle your minions or give you Love Overload.
• Behemoth Battle: Unlike regular cards, titan cards cannot coexist on the same base, so if one titan comes to a base where there's already a titan, they clash.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The Giant Ants faction.
• Bilingual Bonus: The Big in Japan expansion has the actual Japanese name of the game on the box.
  • The Mythic Greeks' Favor of Hades has an actual Greek text written on it.

Της συμβάσεως ταύτης ισχυουσης, ή του Γύρου γνώση ημετέρα εστί, της ψυχής σου οφειλομένης^note Of this covenant, or of the knowledge of yours, your soul is owed

• Breath Weapon: The Orcs' Death Breath and the Kaiju's Radioactive Breath.
• Captain Ersatz: Many examples, lampshaded in "Cease and Desist".
• Capture Balls: The Itty Critter's Phonýmon deck features the card "Critter Cube", as their Pokeball expy. It lets you take one of your opponents weaker minions and shuffle it into your deck.
• Card Cycling: The "Deck" is where cards are drawn from, and cards can only be discarded from the hand:
  • Lose whole hand:
    • And draw 5 new cards:
    • The Wizards have the "Winds of Change" Action Card:

      Shuffle your hand into your deck and draw five cards. You may play an extra action.

    • The Zombie Base, "Evans City Cemetery", when it "scores" a.k.a activates, the owner of the highest power minion on it, "discards his or her hand and draws five cards".
    • The Russian Fairy Tales' Mass Transformation Action:
      Each player places their hand on the bottom of their deck and draws an equal number of cards.
  • The Mages' Scroll Shufflers:
    Discard a card. Draw a card.
• Care-Bear Stare: How the Teddy Bear faction works, naturally.
• Cats Are Mean: Kitty Cats may look cute, but you'll soon realize they tend to kill each other quite repeatedly.
• Chainsaw Good: The Chainsaw of Bloody Dismemberment treasure.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Each faction have distinctive features, namely a different font, a different color for the card names and types, a specific icon and a thematic text frame.
  • Their bases also use the same color as the faction cards, but it's sometimes not that obvious.
• Combat and Support:
  • Most factions are a mix of both, but there are examples that usually fall straight into one:
  • Mainly Combat: Dinosaurs, Robots, Steampunks, Mad Scientists, Vampires, Kitty Cats, Mythic Horses, Dragons, Sharks, Mega Troopers, Kung Fu Fighters, Vigilantes.
  • Mainly Support: Wizards, Tricksters, Time Travelers, Super Spies, Miskatonic University, Fairies.
  • Both: Aliens, Ninjas, Pirates, Zombies, Bear Cavalry, Ghosts, Killer Plants, Elder Things, Minions of Cthulhu, Cyborg Apes, Giant Ants, Werewolves, Geeks, Princesses, Superheroes, Mythic Greeks, Tornadoes.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu:
  • Zig-zagged for the Robots' Microbots. They're easy to spam and have 1 power, but their Fixers passively power them up, and the Alpha gets more powerful for each other minion in play.
  • Inverted by the War Raptors. They have a power of 2 plus 1 for each War Raptor on the base (including self).
  • Enforced by the Elder Thing. It is THE strongest minion in the game, but you have to kill two of your own minions to play it, which typically creates an "exchange two weak things for one strong thing" situation.
  • The Bear Cavalry's Polar Commando has +2 power and cannot be destroyed if it is the only one of your minions on a base.
  • Polynesian Voyagers spread their minions on multiple bases, letting them gradually gain tremendous power as they are left alone.
• Continuity Nod: A ton of references to existing factions exist in the art of several later factions.
• Counter-Attack: Death Wisher of the Vigilantes.
• Creator Cameo: In both the Geeks' and the Smash Up All Stars' Non-Infinite Loop.
• Crossover:
  • They have a crossover with Munchkin known as Smash Up: Munchkin.
  • Their second crossover is with Marvel Comics.
  • Their third crossover is with Creator/Disney, the owner of Marvel.
• Curse: The Clerics have a Curse of Imprisonment and a Curse of Uselessness.
• Cute Kitten: The Kitty Cats faction. They use their cuteness to their advantage by taking control of enemy minions, then destroying them.
• Damsel in Distress:
  • The Mounties action Eh? depicts a Mounty trying to rescue a woman tied to some train tracks, a reference to Dudley Do-Right (along with minions called Dudlee).
  • The Action Heroes action Hostage Rescue depicts Apricot (a parody of Princess Peach) from Princesses tied to a chair.
• Death Is Cheap:
  • The Zombie faction. They have abilities that allow them to draw and even play from their discard pile, where minions go if they are killed. They even have minions that can be played from the discard pile itself!
  • The Magical Girls are able to resuscitate discarded minions, even other players' minions. Most notably, Black Magicat can retrieve Lunar Captain from the discard pile, and Lunar Captain can easily retrieve Black Magicat from the discard pile as well. Lunar Captain specializes in retrieving minions from the discard pile in general; with a second minion on her base, she can easily recur power 2s, making her quite powerful with minions that can destroy themselves to fetch other minions such as Sprouts (Killer Plants) or especially Mild-Mannered Citizens (Superheroes).^note They can destroy themselves at the start of your turn to search for a minion of power 5 or greater, a category which Lunar Captain so conveniently falls into. Using one to fetch her then using her to recur it, it becomes easy to play the rest of the power 5s right out of your deck.
  • The Russian Fairy Tales have The Water of Life, which it says, can revive any discard minion and have The Birch Woman, which turns into a Birch on death, which can then destroy itself to turn back into The Birch Woman.
  • The Skeletons have Revenants, which let you bury them from your discard pile for free (though only one per turn, of course). Many of their actions allow you to bury minions from your discard pile as well, most notably Place 'Em Down.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • The dinosaur's big minion is called King Rex. Rex means "king".
  • There's a Potion of Redundancy Potion in the Munchkin expansion, which gives a minion the talent to use the talent of another minion.
• Determinator: The aptly named "Tenacious Z"; it can be played from the discard pile at no cost, meaning it will not stay dead.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Ghosts. They become stronger by having fewer cards in-hand, running counter to conventional strategy, and being hard to deal with because of it, but they really do gain lots of power through this mechanic.
  • Time Travelers are also this. They have very little base-breaking or minion-altering abilities, instead utilizing their deck and discard pile in unconventional ways, such as placing cards from their discard pile on the bottom of their deck. If played well, however, they are a useful support faction with huge late-game potential.
  • Ignobles are tricky to play well with. You can give control of your minions to your opponents to draw cards or play extra cards among other things, but by doing so you give more power to your opponents and can help them break bases in a better position than you. Fortunately, there are some cards that allow you regain control of the minions you donated or just get rid of them.
  • Anansi Tales have you give your own cards to other players. Which cards are worth giving can be a difficult decision, not to mention that you may want to give them useful cards.
• Discard and Draw: The Wizards have an action that resets your entire hand.
  • A Zombie base also have the winner reset their hand but they still get 5 VPs at the same time.
  • The Mages' power-2 minions have you discard a card and draw a new one.
  • The Russian Fairy Tales' Mass Transformation is a very crippling action that has all players trash their entire hand and draw a whole new hand of cards.
• Ditto Fighter: The Shapeshifter faction. They have minions who can take on the power of the strongest minion in play, minions that can take on the abilities of other minions, minions that can replace themselves with another minion (essentially transforming into them), and action cards that take on the form of other's action cards.
  • The Sheep have ways to replay other players' actions, including a cloning card that can copy any action an opponent just played.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect:
  • The Ninjas' bases score 2-3-2, meaning the second place winner of the base gets the most points.
  • One of the Ignobles' bases score 2-4-1, so the winner gets even less than the second place.
  • The Mega Troopers "Blitzing Sword Attack" action depends upon you being in second place or worse as a base breaks, letting your Titan suddenly kill a single, high power minion.
  • Based on the stereotypical Canadian politeness, one of the Mounties' bases have the second winner score more than the winner with a VP split of 2-3-1
• The Dreaded: The entire stock-in-trade of the Bear Cavalry, being able to frighten other minions off of bases through sheer menace. Rather sensible against most factions, but it enters into outright comedy when a single man astride a bear is able to spook things like King Rex, Nukebot or the Elder Thing just by showing up.
• Dumb Muscle: The Dinosaurs faction specializes in high-power minions and increasing that power even higher, but they can't really do much besides the odd minion destruction. Epitomized in King Rex, who has a power of 7 (most factions strongest is usually 5), but is one of, if not the only minion in the game with no Effect or Talent.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Elder Things. The Minions of Cthulhu also contains one, and Innsmouth is a whole town full of human-abomination hybrids.
• Escape Battle Technique: The Elves have two actions that allow them to flee a base before the victory points are awarded.
• Everything's Better with Samurai: The Samurai faction.
• Exact Words: Just like most card games, you have to apply the effects exactly as they are worded. This opens itself to an Outside-the-Box Tactic when you realize that the use or absence of certain words can be exploited, such as the abilities of certain minions not mentioning their own base means they can be applied anywhere!
• Extra Turn:
  • The Wizard faction's main ability is to easily draw multiple cards and play more actions per turn. A decent chain of cards from them can effectively result in a whole second or even third turns worth of activity.
  • The Time Traveler's have a card "Time Walk", which allows the player to draw two cards and play an extra minion and an extra action, essentially giving the player an extra turn. One of their bases gives the winner an actual extra turn.
• Extranormal Institute: The Miskatonic University faction, which can also double as an Academy of Evil depending upon who they get paired up with, specializing in controlling and removing Madness cards.
• Extrinsic Go-First Rule: Each set has its own rule to determine who goes first. The Bigger Geekier Box consolidated rulebook gives a Long List of highly unlikely circumstances to be applied in priority order (the player most recently abducted by an alien, or shanghaied by a pirate, or bitten by a vampire, or...); if nobody meets any of the conditions, you'll just have to figure out for yourselves who should go first.
• The Fair Folk: The Trickster faction is comprised of small fey including gnomes, brownies and leprechauns. In line with this trope, they are completely credible threats. The same applies to the Fairies faction.
• Flavor Text: Nearly all factions have a flavor text in the rules giving some background to the faction or thematic ties to the faction's main mechanics.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Astroknights, Cowboys and Magical Girls made an appearance in the It's Your Fault! expansion way before they became full-fledged factions.
  • Ancient Incas were also referenced in the What Were We Thinking? expansion more than two years before their own set.
  • Several 70s pop culture references were made before an actual 70s expansion was released.
• Frankenstein's Monster: The Mad Scientists' "The Monster" minion.
• Fur Against Fang: A definite possibility thanks to Monster Smash, which includes both Werewolves and Vampires as factions. Though there's nothing stopping you from teaming them up as your selections, and the two aren't a bad combo.
• Gender Bender: Some of the Astroknight minions have their gender changed from their original counterparts.
• Giant Robot:
  • In direct contrast to their supporting Microbots, the Nukebot of the Robots is depicted as being similar in scale to King Rex, described under Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever above. Their Warbots are of a similarly gigantic proportions.
  • The Mega Troopers' Combining Mecha Titan: Megabot.
  • The Changerbots have an action depicting a giant robot called Mergacon. They later made it into an actual titan.
• Giant Spider: Anansi the Spider is a human-sized half-human half-spider hybrid.
• Glass Cannon: Changerbots have a highly-destructive card in Change into a Gun, where one of your minions changes into a gun (duh) and can destroy a strong minion, but your minion becomes quite weak in the process.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: One specialty of the Pirate faction. They have actions that kill off groups of weak minions - great for stopping a Microbot/Innsmouth horde before it gets too strong.
  • Sharks also have this element, possessing an action that destroys all power 2 minions on a base in a blood-fueled "feeding frenzy".
  • Kaiju can easily squash clusters of small minions by stomping on them.
• Herr Doktor: The Mad Scientists' king Minion is one, and is called by exactly this name. He can place +1 power counters on other minions as a talent.
• Hobbits: The Halflings faction.
• Horse of a Different Color: The Bear Cavalry are riding... well, bears. The Mounties are riding mechanized moose.
  • The Tiger Steed treasure card.
• The Immune: The Elder Thing. If 10 power didn't already put it out of range of most cards, it is also completely immune to all other players' cards.
  • Geeks have the Game Gurus who apparently know the rules so well your cards have no effect on them.
• Instant Awesome: Just Add Mecha!: The Warbot and the Nukebot. The Dinosaur and Cyborg Ape factions also count, being cybernetic versions of their respective animals. The whole Changerbot faction features mechas and with the TITANS Event Kit, they can now summon the giant mecha Mergacon. The Mega Troopers can summon the titanesque Megabot.
• Instant Plunder, Just Add Pirates: The Pirate faction.
• Kaiju: They are featured on the actions and the titan of the Kaiju faction.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: The Orcs are all about overpowering underpowered opponents.
• Kill Steal:
  • A Ninja tactic. Ninjas do last-minute plays right when a base breaks, which can mean either gaining some points on a base where they previously had no minions, or even allowing them to take the lead on that base.
  • Spies, another espionage-based faction, has a few cards that allow special shenanigans as a base breaks to steal the victory.
  • Mega Troopers also specialize in doing this, not just by suddenly bringing in more minions, but by gaining power upon a base breaking and even having an action that lets them destroy hostile minions before it scores, provided they're not winning.
• King Mook: Most factions have one minion that's unique and has more power than the others (typically 5) along with an ability that's generally among the most powerful of the deck, serving as the faction's "leader".
• Life Drain: The Vampire faction is based on destroying minions to power up your own.
  • The Sharks faction does this as well.
• Little Green Men: The Aliens and the Science Officer of the Star Roamers.
• Lovecraft Lite: How else could you describe a game where Minions of Cthulhu are balanced against Teddy Bears?
• Mad Scientist: The Mad Scientist faction.
• Madness Tropes: The Obligatory Cthulhu Set runs into many of these, having an entire madness deck (30 cards named 'Madness'), and being themed around source material that often involves people losing their minds.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The Microbot Alpha. It initially has 1 power, even weaker than the weakest minions of other factions. However, when it's in play, it makes all the player's units considered Microbots (even those that aren't robots) and then gets 1 power for each Microbot in play. Considering that the Robot faction uses Zerg Rush tactics, this makes it even more powerful than their "King" unit, the Nukebot.
  • The Killer Plants faction is based on this, with minions/actions that do powerful things at the start of their controller's turn (ie: before they've played anything, including those minions/actions), but often doing nothing special on the turn they are played. One minion's ability is that it loses power on the turn it is played.
  • The Superheroes have Mild Mannered Citizens who can turn into big powerful superheroes with incredible abilities.
  • Certain talents are like this as well; talents are normally once-per-turn abilities, but if a talent is used a few turns in a row the effects can add up quickly.
  • The Mad Scientists have Über-Serums, which make a minion indestructible and slowly gain power on each of their turns.
• Man-Eating Plant: The Killer Plants as a whole, but more specifically the Venus Man Trap.
• Massive Race Selection: At the start of the game each player must choose a combination of two factions among a whole bunch of weird folks, including sneaky ninjas, Russians riding bears, knitting grandmas, a flock of sheep, gigantic Kaiju monsters, a Star Trek rip-off, cute Princesses,... and the possibilities keep increasing with each released expansion.
• Mechanical Horse: Super Future Space Armor Power!
• Mechanically Unusual Class:
  • The Ghost faction is the only faction with abilities reliant on the player's hand size as well as with cards that allow the player to discard cards without some immediate trade-off.
  • The Kaiju faction is the only faction with Action cards that put power on bases. Rather than rely on minions to break bases, they rely on their titan's Actions to bust them.
  • The Geek faction's Banned List cards are the only ones that require the player to call out a specific card name, and therefore the only card that requires foreknowledge of the game. This shouldn't be a problem for any geeky player.
  • The Ignobles, Elves and Anansi Tales all have mechanics about helping others to help yourself. Ignobles have you give your minions to other players, Elves provide card draws and power boost to other players and Anansi Tales put your cards into other players' hands.
• Mighty Glacier: The Dinosaurs specialize in high-power minions, but are almost unique in that they have absolutely no cards that allow them to play additional minions or actions. Without a potent support faction to team up with, this makes them play incredibly slowly.
• Mind Control: An ability of the Ghosts allows the player to permanently take control of one of their opponents' minions.
  • Super Spies have a Special action that can take control of a minion at the last second.
  • This is the Kitty Cats' MO. They can temporarily take control of other players' minions, and in many cases destroy them to gain bonuses for themselves.
  • Elves have their three-copy minions able to exchange control with another player's minion.
  • Partially inverted by the Ignobles as you willingly give control of your minions to other players, and if you have the right cards, you can take back control of minions you gave.
• Mindless Sheep: The Sheep faction is mechanically themed around moving to bases that other minions move to, and repeating other minions' actions.
• Mobile Menace:
  • The Pirate faction has abilities and actions based around quick movement from bases.
  • The Steampunk faction can also do this, albeit to a lesser extent than Pirates.
  • The Bear Cavalry inverts this; it forces other player's minions to move around with the intent of weakening them.
  • The Princesses can move a lot of minions; both their own and other players'.
  • The Tornadoes do this better than any other faction, specializing wholly in blowing into bases and throwing other factions around the table.
  • The Sharks have several cards that can move their minions to other bases and destroy a weaker minion on arrival.
  • The Changerbots can transform into vehicles and roll out.
  • Some Star Roamer cards can change a "return a minion" effect into a "move a minion" effect, and they have a LOT of "return a minion" effects.
  • The Mega Troopers are built around moving or playing minions (and their Titan) onto bases right as they break and gaining sudden, massive surges of power from these maneuvers.
  • The Burst from the Superhero faction can move to any base after a minion has been played there, making him one of the most mobile minions in the game.
  • The Sheep move in herds, allowing other minions to follow a minion that has moved to another base.
  • The Polynesian Voyagers have a lot of movement, though usually limited to bases where they don't already have minions, but they can build up a ton of power doing so.
• The Mole: The Super Spies have a minion named after this. They also have ability that lets them control an opponent's minion, retroactively meaning that that minion was a mole.
  • The Ignobles can also pull this if they aren't capable of recovering cards they've given to other players. Their Betrothed minion is perhaps the most straightforward of the bunch, awarding their owner bonus VP for letting another player win the base.
  • Anansi Tales have Collecting Stories that allow you to reclaim and play a card you own that might be in another player's hand, while giving you peek at their other cards.
• Mummy: The Ancient Egyptians's weakest minion, but it repeatedly comes back from the dead after its base is scored.
• Nerf: AEG has always refused to reprint the cards, so they resorted to publish an errata that alters the effects of several cards.
• Never Mess with Granny: The Grannies faction, naturally, specializing in manipulating their own deck. Even better, one of their Minions is actually called Granny, and she's depicted with a very matronly shotgun.
• Nigh-Invulnerable:
  • Certain minions, such as the Warbot, cannot be destroyed at all. General Ivan from Bear Cavalry and Awesome Guy from Superheroes make all of your minions invincible.
  • The Birch Woman can be a pain to deal with. If its base scores or if it's destroyed, it will turn into a small weak Birch. But at the start of that player's next turn, The Birch turns back into The Birch Woman! That cycle can potentially continue like that until the game ends if the other players don't figure out a way to stop it.
• Ninja Looting:
  • A Ninja tactic. Ninjas do last-minute plays right when a base breaks, which can mean either gaining some points on a base where they previously had no minions, or even allowing them to take the lead on that base.
  • Thieves also specialize in this to an extent, albeit mainly focused on snatching Play On Minion actions from their foes. They do have one action that literally takes one of the winner's Victory Points and gives it to them instead.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Literally the premise of the game. Players must take two different factions and combine them. The base set even includes Ninjas, Pirates, Zombies, and Robots, and was even called PNZR ("Pirate Ninja Zombie Robot") during development.
• One-Hit Kill: Applied to bases of all things; the Plants, Werewolves and Vigilantes have a card that reduces a base's breakpoint to zero. Taken a step further with Dragons, Kaiju, Tornados and Polynesian Voyagers, who can just straight up destroy a base.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: Many abilities amount to "do X to a minion". A whole world of possibilities open up when players realize that they can do these things to their own minions (including killing their own minions to activate on-death effects, and placing their minions back into their hands so they can replay them). A potentially game-breaking example is in the Aliens faction, which contain many cards that force a minion to be returned to its owners hand, as well as an Invader minion that grants 1 VP upon playing. There's nothing that says the returned minion has to be someone else's, so if the Invader can be drawn early in the game, one can easily use it to farm VPs without ever breaking a base.
• Pegasus: Rainbow of the Mythic Horses.
• Planet of Hats: Has its own page.
• Power at a Price:
  • Madness Cards. You can either return them to the Madness deck (which costs an action), or use them to draw extra cards (something just about every faction benefits from). The catch: every two Madness cards you have at the end of the game deducts one Victory Point from you!
  • This is the hat of the Minions of Cthulhu. They have powerful and varied abilities, but often force the player to draw madness cards, or destroy their own minions.
  • The Elder Thing is the minion with the strongest base power in the game at a whopping 10, and it can't be affected by opponents' cards. The catch is that you have to sacrifice two minions to play it or else return it to the bottom of your deck.
• Power Nullifier: The Superheroes have Mind Lady and My Only Weakness that can cancel any minion's ability.
  • The Potion of Paralysis treasure card.
  • Clerics have two "curse" cards that can make minions useless.
• The Power of Friendship:
  • The Mythic Horses' hat, in perhaps a Shout-Out to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Many of their actions and minions gain benefits for having one or more minions on the same base.
  • The Magical Girls faction runs along similar lines, restoring and powering up friendly minions, as well as having abilities and actions that get more and more powerful the more friendly minions are on a base.
  • The Mounties like being on the same base as other players' minions. Though the other players may not exactly see you as a friend.
• Power Tattoo: Polynesian Voyagers have tattoo cards that grant them extra power and mobility.
• Pretty Princess Powerhouse: The Princess faction. They might look girly, but they are all quite powerful.
• Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage:
  • The playmats aren't that great, especially in games with factions that can add bases beyond the normal number of bases. The pins don't add anything to the game.
  • Inverted by the different promo packs that add very functional factions or titans to the game, which are far from being garbage.
• Punny Name: Most of the cards. The Cease and Desist expansion is particularly full of it.
• Quantity vs. Quality: Some factions (Robots, Innsmouth, Mythic Horses, to a lesser extent Zombies) represent quantity, being able to put lots of minions in play. Opinions vary on what a 'quality' minion is, but high power (Dinosaurs, Elder Things, Cyborg Apes, Bear Cavalry, Princesses) and useful abilities (Minions of Cthulhu, Tricksters, Aliens, Elder Things) certainly come to mind.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking:
  • Typically, the strongest minion in a given faction will be unique, and something in their name will identify them as the 'leader' of their faction (including King Rex, General Ivan, Zombie Lord, Microbot Alpha, etc.). The Elder Thing is a slight variant: instead of having a title to identify it as the leader, the faction is named after it.
  • There's also the Princesses, who have only one copy of each minion, but they're all 5 power, the same power as virtually every other leader.
  • Subverted (or not) by the Vigilantes, who are all 4 power, so they aren't really on the same level as power-5 "king" minions, but they can kick ass real hard.
• Raptor Attack: The War Raptors, who all gain an extra power per raptor on a base (including themselves).
• Red Shirt: The Star Roamers' Ensigns are an obvious reference to this. They can even jump in and take damage instead of the minion your opponent was targeting.
• Rule of Cool: This game takes the concept and runs with it.
• Russian Reversal: Bear Rides You!
• Sadistic Choice: Some of the Elder Things minion give other players the choice between drawing a Madness card (therefore losing VPs at the end of the game if they don't get rid of it) and another bad choice.
• Sailor Senshi Send-Up: The Magical Girl faction has expies of Sailor Moon (Lunar Captain, a young blonde woman in Sailor Fuku with a moon motif) and Tuxedo Mask (Fancy Suit Lad, a young darkhaired man wearing...you know) and two magical cats.
• Second Place Is for Winners: Some bases award more points or abilities to the player with the second-highest total power when the base breaks.
  • The Wintersquashed base from Cease and Desist allows you to give minions to other players so they get first place when the base breaks.
• Shapeshifter:
  • The Shapeshifter faction.
  • The Russian Fairy Tales can also transform minions into random ones. ANY minions.
• Shark Man: All the minions of the Sharks faction are basically muscular humans with shark heads.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page here.
• Single-Use Shield: Dinosaurs and Tricksters have one-time protection cards.
• Situational Damage Attack: Cowboys, Ancient Egyptians, Luchadors and Sumo Wrestlers have actions that buff a minion by a certain amount, but that amount changes if the faction's main mechanic is in use at the time the action is played.
• Status Buff: Many cards give power bonuses to minions. Monster Smash introduced +1 Power Tokens, which give permanent boosts to minions and can sometimes be moved to other minions.
• Stock Animal Diet: The Cyborg Apes eat loads of bananas and the background of their cards often picture bunches of bananas.
• Strong Ants: The Giant Ants faction, whose weakest minions are able to lift cars with ease and specialize in pumping up themselves and their allies with +1 counters.
• Switch-Out Move:
  • The Tornados faction specializes in this, being able to move both their minions as well as their opponents' minions.
  • The Aliens and Time Travelers are good at this, being able to remove their minions from play and replay them.
  • The Shapeshifters, Killer Plants, and Superheroes can swap their minions in play with minions from their deck, and Ninjas and Star Roamers can swap their minions in play with other minions from their hand.
• Take Me Instead: Ensigns take the place of your other minions if other players target those.
• Threatening Shark: The Shark faction will hunt down and kill low-power minions and gain power from doing so.
• The Trickster: Surprisingly, not the Trickster faction, which is more about restraining players than tricking them. The Ninjas fit this trope though, being based around surprising moves and come-from-behind victories. The Super Spies also qualify, as their theme is facilitating plans on the part of their player and disrupting the plans of other players.
• T. Rexpy: The "King Rex" of the Dinosaurs highly resembles a 100 ft tall Tyrannosaurus.
• Unskilled, but Strong: The Dinosaur faction is based around having large-powered minions while sacrificing most opportunities to do anything tricky. They have the strongest single minion in the original set (King Rex), which is also the only minion without any special rules at all. Only one minion is stronger, (the Elder Thing) and that has a major drawback.
• Vampiric Draining: Surprisingly, not the Vampires, but the Kung Fu Fighters are able to drain +1 power counters from any minions, including those of other players' minions.
• Vanilla Unit: The Dinosaur faction's King Rex has a huge 7 power compared to most other factions' strongest units having 5, but is the only unit with no Effects or Talents at all.
• Visual Pun: All over the place. A particular standout is the Giant Ants' "We Will Rock You", which depicts a Worker about to flatten some unfortunate cops with a huge rock.
• Volcano Lair: The Super Spies have a base there.
• Waxing Lyrical:
  • All of the action cards (and the king minion card) of the Giant Ants faction are named after Queen songs. ^note  “Killer Queen,” “A Kind of Magic,” “Gimme the Prize,” “Headlong,” “The Show Must Go On,” “Under Pressure,” “We Are the Champions,” “We Will Rock You” and “Who Wants To Live Forever?”. They also later got a Titan card called “Death on Six Legs.” Singing card names when you play them is entirely optional.
  • Most of the Kaiju action cards are lyrics from the song "Godzilla" by Blue Öyster Cult.
  • The name of all the action cards of the Disco Dancers are titles of famous disco songs.
  • The name of all the action cards of the Kung Fu Fighter are lyrics of the song Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting.
• Weak, but Skilled:
  • The Wizards' minions have decreased power, but they have many abilities that allow the player to draw extra cards and play extra actions.
  • The Robot faction has multiple 1-power minions, but which can buff each other up or summon even more minions. Sometimes both.
  • Innsmouth has literally no minions with anything other than 2 power (which is usually the lowest power in a given deck), but their ability makes it easy to play lots and lots of them, and they have many actions that empower weak minions.
• Weaponized Animal:
  • The Dinosaur faction consists of dinosaurs equipped with hi-tech armor and lasers.
  • There's also the Cyborg Ape faction.
  • The Mounties ride moose with missiles and machine guns instead of antlers.
• Wicked Witch: Baba Yaga is part of the Russian Fairy Tales faction and other players will avoid playing their good minions on her base.
• You Wanna Get Sued?: The whole point of the "Cease and Desist" set, having factions that are blatantly obvious references to famous franchises but with the names changed (Astroknights — Star Wars, Changerbots — Transformers, Ignobles — Game of Thrones, Star Roamers — Star Trek).
• Zerg Rush:
  • The Robot faction's strategy. They're the only faction to have 18 minion and 2 action cards ^note (Most other factions have 10 of each), and many of their minions' abilities let their controller play extra minions, but they're also the only faction with minions of 1 power.
  • Innsmouth plays with this trope; they focus on drawing lots of weak minions rather than playing them.
  • The Zombie faction's ability to play cards from the discard pile also lends itself to this.
  • Mythic Horses are also good at playing a ton of minions on one turn.
  • Halflings can drop a lot of weak minions too.
  • Rock Stars garner Groupies and drop them all at once.