Sonic Roll – What’s Eric Playing?

Base price: $50.
1 – 4 players.
play time: 30 – 60 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Sonic Roll was provided by Kess games.

God, I love licensed games. I’m really glad that we’ve mostly passed that era where licensed games (board games and video games) were almost universally reviled. Like, you pick up Superman 64 or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Showdown: Bebop & Rocksteady Madness, and you’re going to get a game that’s not just terrible; it’s boring. But some licensed games are doing quite well, these days. I mean, hell, Dorfromantik: The Board game won the Spiel des Jahres last year, which was super exciting. It’s a good game, granted, but it’s still an impressive achievement for licensed games writ large. Will there always be {INSERT NAME OF LICENSED game TYPE OR JUST LEAVE IT BLANK TO AVOID CONTROVERSY}? Absolutely. But there’s always going to be progress, too, so that’s fun. WIth that in mind, let’s check out a Sonic game: Sonic Roll!

In Sonic Roll, bring yourself back to the Sega Genesis and foil the schemes of Doctor Eggman! Robotnik? I’m never 100% sure which is accurate. Gerald is neither of them. I’m not as read up on Sonic Lore as Idris Elba, but, who is? You’ll take on four stages, Metal Sonic, and a bunch of Badniks as you try to grab the Chaos Emeralds and not die in the process! That said, just because you’re working together doesn’t mean there won’t necessarily be an overall winner. Can you be the one who wins the day?

Contents

Setup

There’s a fair bit of setup, for this one. First, you’re going to choose a location (Green Hill, Lava Reef, Stardust Speedway, Chemical Plant), and grab the Act Board for that zone:

Next, grab and shuffle the Zone cards for that Zone:

Set out 8 / 9 / 10 Route cards in a deck for 1 and 2 / 3 / 4 players. Next, have each player take a character and any relevant tokens (Knuckles’s Secret Passage or Sonic’s token):

The Boss Attack card that matches should be set aside, along with the Boss Pattern Deck:

Now, place three Zone cards face-up next to the Act Board. Shuffle the Badniks, as well:

Set the various tokens aside. You’ll want 7 Time Tokens, and each player gets 3 Life Tokens and 1 Boost Token:

The Power-Up Deck should be shuffled and set nearby.

Prep the Bonus Tiles by shuffling them and making a 4×4 grid:

Shuffle the Chaos Emerald cards and set them near the grid:

Set aside the Boss Pattern cards, next to the Boss for the given Zone:

Choose a player to go first!

Gameplay

Gameplay isn’t too simple, either, but once you get the flow of it the game comes together nicely. Your goal is to get to the end of the Act and defeat the boss! How you do that depends on your dice.

Each turn, you’ll go through a few phases. Let’s get into them.

Roll Action

To start your turn, choose a Roll Action and get the dice indicated. You’ll roll those dice to create a Dice Pool. Note that you may be rolling dice more than once and adding some of those resulting dice to the Dice Pool. It is possible to end up with 0 dice, but that’s pretty tough?

Spend Dice

Next, you can spend dice in your Dice Pool. After spending a die, you must Reroll (except for Blue Dice).

When you spend a die, you can spend it to place it on a Zone card (going from left to right, and you cannot go on both parts of a split path). You can spend dice to Avoid a Badnik or Defeat it, and Defeating it gets you a Small Animal. Red Dice are particularly helpful for Defeating Badniks, but every time you spend a Yellow Die, you gain a Ring!

Completing a Zone can get you a variety of Bonuses, like saving your Rings (to score later), gaining extra Rings, or getting to flip over a tile in the Bonus Zone! If you find a Chaos Emerald, you get to keep it! When you complete a Zone, keep the Zone card and replace it with a new one.

If you run out of dice, your turn is over! Otherwise, you can Reroll or Discard the remaining dice. If you do the latter, spend one Time Token.

Reroll Dice

When you Reroll Dice, you’re pushing your luck! If your results match a value on one of your Badnik cards, you take Damage! Additionally, if you cannot immediately spend a die from your new Dice Pool, you take Damage! When you take Damage, you lose all of your held Rings, and if you don’t have any held Rings, you lose a Life Token! Note that if you take Damage, you cannot take Damage again until you spend a die or end your turn.

If you have Boost Tokens, you may spend them to immediately Reroll your dice again. This can let you dodge Badnik Attacks or get out of a situation where you can’t spend any dice.

End of Turn

As mentioned, if you have any dice left at the end of your turn, discard them and spend a Time Token.

Boss Battle

Once you’ve completed enough Zone cards that you can’t draw a new one, it’s time to fight the Boss! Discard the remaining Zone cards and flip the Act Board over to the Boss Side. Reveal Boss Pattern cards to create new Routes (the number of Boss Pattern cards per row is on the bottom of the Act Board), and show the Boss Attack card!

play continues as normal, but now you have to complete Boss Pattern cards to get a shot at hitting the Boss! If you do damage, you push him closer to being defeated!

End of game

If you manage to defeat the Boss, you win! Otherwise, if any player runs out of Life Tokens, everyone loses!

Player Count Differences

I’d generally recommend Sonic Roll at lower player counts. With more players, you have more lives across the crew and more folks doing damage and making progress, but you’re really going to feel those gaps between turns. There’s a lot to do every turn and a lot of players means a lot of things can get done, but if you add in the semi-cooperative elements that means there can also be a lot more players trying to bring you down when you’re starting to get out in front of the pack. Not my favorite. With two players, you’re kind of riding the lightning and doing the best you can (not to mention getting rocked by Badniks fairly regularly), so you gotta focus up and work together to win, which is pretty fun. Three wasn’t too time-intensive, but the game definitely takes longer with more players.

Strategy

• It’s not a bad idea to make progress on the Zone cards. I mean, you kind of need to in order to get to the boss and win, so, you know, do what makes you win the game. But more seriously, there can be a temptation to take out all of the Badniks or focus on other cards, but sometimes the best thing you can do is forge ahead on the cards you have.
• Be careful not to get swarmed by the Badniks. Having a lot of them can mean you have no safe dice on Rerolls that won’t cause you to take damage. That’s obviously not ideal, but also, their various abilities can be pretty restrictive, too. it’s like any other game; don’t get overwhelmed by the various enemies in front of you.
• Power-Ups and the various Bonus Tiles are also always wise things to pursue. These can really help you out! Though some Power-Ups give you Badniks, which kind of sucks? They can’t all be good, I suppose (I do not suppose that; I’m surprised they added a bad power-up in there).
• Each player has some skills that they can utilize to their advantage; lean into those. They’re generally about dice and value manipulation, save for Knuckles, who can just dig through a Secret Passage, which is fun. The various manipulations can help you make specific dice targets (like on Bumpers) or take out Badniks, and the Secret Passage just gives you a backup place to play when you’re having trouble otherwise making progress. They’re all good, so make sure you’re using your abilities!
• Having a bunch of dice is cool, but it sets you up to take damage on rerolls. The more dice you roll, the more likely at least one of them is going to be a number that gives you damage from a Badnik or the boss. There’s probability math to that, but I’m out of college and no longer burdened to show my work, so you can just trust me. This is all to say that sometimes removing dice from your pool is pretty good! Plus, if you have an empty Dice Pool, you don’t lose any Time Tokens.
• If you’re playing semi-cooperatively, try not to screw your co-players over too much; otherwise you’ll lose the game. This is a common issue in semi-cooperative games (particularly Marvel Legendary); if you focus too much on winning, you’ll lose by your co-player getting overrun. Here, you can dole out Badniks, yes, but if one player is consistently losing lives, you’re going to lose the game. Try to keep that in mind.
• No particular die type is better than another; they’re just situationally useful. They have various perks and situational advantages, so choose your roll based on what you feel like you need. Each character has access to each die type; don’t just do the same roll every time.
• Also, try to leave yourself and your co-players plenty of options for where you can place dice on subsequent turns. You don’t want a turn where you need to roll six 5s; that’s not going to happen. Try to keep that in mind as you’re playing and rerolling dice; again, you can’t win the game if everyone loses.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• Hell yeah, more Sonic games. I really have a lot of nostalgia for the classic Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, so, every Sonic game brings me joy (except for the Crash Course one but that’s for a different, vague reason). It seems a lot more places are getting to embrace Classic Sonic, which wasn’t what I grew up with but is still a welcome addition to the larger canon.
• There’s a wide variety of characters, difficulty levels, and things to do! The game is pretty expansive, to the point that you could have convinced me it was crowdfunded. It has some of the same bulky issues that come with that (more on that later), but it was just published straight. Clearly made by someone who loves the Sonic games, though.
• I appreciate the commitment to using art from the old Sonic games. Maybe not 1:1 but at least fashioning things and styling them like the old Sonic games. It makes me happy to see.
• The high-energy dice-rolling is always good and fun. You’re often rolling a bunch of dice and rerolling them for various effects, and in my expert opinion, people really like rolling dice. So there’s always that.
• While annoying, I do like that you lose all of your rings when you get hit. It’s authentic, I say through gritted teeth, but there are also plenty of ways to mitigate and avoid that. I’m just glad there aren’t any spikes in this game.
• I appreciate that the dice have different utilities and abilities. It adds some nice layers of strategy rather than just incentivizing players to do the One Good Thing over and over until they win. It speaks to smart design.
• Are there secrets? It’s possible. Would it be a Sonic game without secrets? I heard some rumors about an armadillo and a flying squirrel hanging out somewhere around the game, but I couldn’t possibly say more than that.

Mehs

• The Route cards being slightly too large is a bit frustrating. I kind of assumed they’d line up next to the Zone card, but they overhang a bit, which is odd. It makes the lines not line up properly, which aggravates some of my more type-A tendencies.
• There are a few overloaded terms like “AVOID” that don’t quite always make sense. AVOID kind of just means “do this”, which is odd, since it makes me think that certain actions can’t be used at certain times when that’s quite clearly not the case. There are also some terms around, say, dice matching that aren’t always consistent (sometimes it’s color + number, other times it’s just number). Clarifications would help, but I suppose that’s what the BGG Forums are for. To their credit, the publisher seems pretty active on there answering questions, so that’s always nice to see.
• I understand why he’s not here, but I miss my favorite edgelord (Shadow). He’s getting added to Generations in the Fall! So I’ll get my fix between that and the Sonic 3 movie. Still can’t believe they got Keanu for it.

Cons

• Semi-cooperative games always frustrate me a bit. I usually just want to play cooperative games or purely competitive games; I find the balancing act to be frustrating, as it often leads to “feels bad” moments for some players who only want to have a cooperative experience. If that’s the case for you, just ignore the scoring.
• The rulebook can be a bit messy. Kind of the nature of the beast with a 30+ page rulebook, but it’s not exactly skimmable and it can be difficult to know where to find the information you want. The symbol guide on the back is pretty helpful, though.
• There’s also a lot of moving parts that happen in response to various events and actions; it can be a lot to keep track of for players. The reroll effects can, in particular, be challenging, especially if you still have some Badniks on you when you’re fighting the Boss, since the Boss Attack card is in one place and the Badniks are in the other; players are likely to forget. Also, players often forget to check for damage on Boost Tokens (assuming that they forego them). Like I said, it’s a game with some complexity, so if you’re looking for a lighter Sonic game, this may not be it. If you’re excited to engage with a more in-depth Sonic game, though, you’ll definitely get that, here.

Overall: 8 / 10

Overall, I think Sonic Roll is great! I mean, at the core of it all, it’s just fun. It gets what it needs to do to be fun. There’s entertaining strategy, fun choices, and varied play for everyone, and the cooperative elements mesh together quite nicely. Whether or not that causes consternation when you add up scores and see who “won” is a bit more group-dependent, so just ignore that for pure cooperative play, is my recommendation. That said, this is easily the most complicated Sonic game that’s been released, and it shows: the rulebook is pretty dense, there are a ton of components, and there’s even a full campaign across four levels! Lots to do. There might even be components you don’t know about! Who’s to say? It does seem like Sonic is having a bit of a renaissance (some of the recent games have been good, as opposed to the Terrible Ones [Sonic and the Secret Rings, Sonic ’05, … others]), and I’m glad to see that the quality has extended over to the board game space. The game is good enough that I’m largely happy to overlook the more frustrating rough edges (the rulebook and some of the clunkier mid-play things) just because they really seem to have gotten the ethos of the Sonic games down. I mean, there are already fan expansions on BGG, so I don’t seem to be the only person who thinks so. Maybe we’ll get a Shadow expansion. If you’re a big Sonic fan, you enjoy dice-rolling cooperative games, or you just want to blow up some of Eggman’s robots, you’ll probably enjoy Sonic Roll! It’s a fun experience.

If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!