Cuphead the Fast Rolling Dice Game Review

When you think of Cuphead, you think of brutal boss fights and fact paced combat with an incredible retro art style. How does the board game version of this franchise handle this? With a Whallop!

In Cuphead, each player is given a player board and 6 dice. The box has 8 total Boss Decks which act as the stage that you are playing. Once you get the boss set up, the game begins. Collectively as a group you decide to play rounds of 10, 15, or 20 seconds (there is a companion app that helps with this. More on that later). This essentially repeats until either you run out of HP or the boss does. After that, you are given a grade based on how well you played the round and you can buy items from the shop to make your rolls even more powerful. Then you can either try the same boss or start a new deck or save your game with the provided scoresheet and try again later.

The Good: The timer adds a really frantic element to the game. Matching symbols and re-rolling to try and not get hit and do damage at the same time is intense. I played with 20 seconds and it felt like no time had passed in some rounds. The grading system at the end also adds an interesting amount of replayability. I finished my first game with a C- and I knew I could do better. I'm going to wait until I have better equipment first.

The Okay: Some of the boss fights felt nearly impossible to get through without getting a time token. A time token is how you are penalized for having to re-shuffle the boss deck. Time tokens will effect your grade at the end of the game. The Whallop cards do an okay job at mitigating this but they still did not come out nearly enough and it's still based on luck if it's usable for the round.

The Not so Good: I wish that there was more variability in the boss decks as far as the art goes. All of the boss cards had the exact same image. I just think it would have been nice to see some variety.

Final Score: 7.5/10

Overall, I really enjoyed this game. It's a nice one to play on a Tuesday night after a long day. It's not something that you're going to totally rack your brain by playing but it'll keep you focused enough to want to finish the fight. The legacy/campaign aspect of the game is really nice with the rolling over of money and weapons/charms. I'd love to see even more of the bosses from the video game implemented into the game.

If you'd like to check this one out for yourself click here.