Sudden Conflict Review
Dnd dice rolling + Moba Teamfighting in a small box.
Grab 3 characters, and fight to death against your opponent’s 3 characters? With plenty of dice rolling, asymmetrical characters, and cool positioning, this tactical skirmisher is 60-90 minutes, only 2 player. Expandable with additional boxes, this review will primarily cover the Galactic Throne box.
Video published March 5th, 2024
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Pick 3 characters, and fight to the death!
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Each character has 5 unique abilities!
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Combine with different boxes to craft your perfect team.
Story
We’ve played plenty of TTRPGs and MOBA’s, and now that’s in a board game for us to play! There are 3 sets for Sudden Conflict: Galactic Throne, Ukyo, and Valora. Each have their own 6 fighters and buff/debuffs introduced. This review will mostly cover Galactic Throne.
Galactic Throne: 3 plays
Ukyo: 1 Play.
Need to learn how to play? Or want more reasoning for our points? Our review video’s got you!
This is a sponsored review. Prototype shown.
Component Pros
1 Mini for each character (6 in box)
Die have easy to see hit symbols
Easy to get hyped for rolls
Accessibility Pros
Easy to setup: take to board & deal out 3 character sheets, that’s it!
Spawning characters is beginning of the game
Easy learning: Just pick a character to activate, do 2 actions, and keep in mind 3 major stats for each character
Good rulebook with lots of diagrams, examples, glossary
Worldbuilding Pros
Flavor text for all characters
Rulebook and player board’s have different text
Teams have their own backstory
Maps have flavor text
Gameplay Pros — Elegant Positioning
Easy to move: just move 4-5 spaces, diagonal is ok
Fast movement makes action happen immediately
Board is full of barriers to position around
Use as cover vs. ranged attacks
Corners of barriers are fun to play around to get out of opponents’ line of sight
Push into walls to do damage
Careful of having your back to a wall
Characters block line of sight of each other
Prevent clumping up for area of effect melee attacks from opponent
Sometimes want to be adjacent to get bonuses
1 of the 2 maps has hazardous terrain to walk around
If start turn on them, take damage
Can push people into them
Gameplay Pros — Character Designs & Asymmetry for Team Bad (Empire of Melar)
Empress Melar: Their leader
Can literally walk through walls
Melee attack that pushes for 2x damage
Ranged disintegration beam that sometimes cannot be blocked
Arlax-Jorl: Meathead minion
Melee swing to roll 5 dice, but debuffs him afterwards (Reluctant Strike)
Passive can redirect damage to him (Enslaved Spirit)
Can slowly heal himself and get rid of debuffs (Purifying Aura)
Contessa Bly: Acolyte
Can give opponents Anguish AND Hexes (nerfs die rolls & limits their action pool
Gameplay Pros — Character Designs & Asymmetry for Team Good (Galactic Resistance)
Heather Sing: Space Ranger Leader
If moves 3+ space in a straight line, gets free momentum die
Hypersonic raygun to attack multiple enemies from afar AND hex them
Baron Holloway: Support dude
Gets momentum die for allies in line of sight
Takes off debuffs from allies if lands ranged attack
He moves EVERY character he can see with “Shifting Realities”
Ula: Tank Healer
If does damage can heal herself
Can heal every ally in her line of sight
Gameplay Pros — Momentum Die
Makes missing attacks not feel as bad (raincheck)
More thinking to each die roll if use or not
Satisfying to unload them on big attacks
e.g. +3 die to roll 5 dice total
Different use with each character
e.g. Buffing Arlax-Jorl’s 5 dice will easily get you to 8 dice rolled
e.g. Contessa Bly gets back all momentum die that miss her attack
Replayability Pros
2 Maps, hazardous terrain matters
Choosing where to spawn lets you experiment with different openings
Characters’ nuance with 5 abilities allows for creativity
Especially if combine with other boxes
Maybe prioritize abilities differently, ignoring some
Each character soft-counters enemies with rock paper scissors dynamic as attacks all target certain stats
Component Cons (Prototype shown)
Minis are a bit brittle, very skinny legs
Minis broke in Ukyo set
Cardboard pieces feel cheap
Rough edges, some splitting
Visual Cons
Splash arts insanely dark
Defeated tokens pop more with their blood
Unpainted minis look very similar on board
Most are humanoid in some way
POTENTIAL FIX: team color you snap onto the bottom (e.g. Blood Rage)
Character abilities not consistently placed
Movement can be on the top, then in the middle for others
Eyes have to keep scanning for abilities
3 stats (i.e. Body, Mind, Soul) could have color to help distinguish
Constantly looking at opponent’s to see how to attack them
Caladorian Homeworld map is WAY too bright
Supposed to be vibrant, but jarring with unpainted minis
Inconsistent to look at dull black player boards to bright central board
Gameplay Cons — Initiative feels bad to lose
No way to improve odds of this
except 1 Galactic Resistance Character, so this hurts Empire harder
Incumbent favor, because incumbents win ties
Little variance on D6, because they’re all 50% hits, so most players get 2-3 successes
POSSIBLE FIX: Allow Momentum die to be used for this
It is the RNG balance throughout the game, going 1st end game is really important to close out the game
POSSIBLE FIX: If lose initiative roll 3 times, get 2 momentum die as raincheck instead of 1
Gameplay Cons — Aggression not rewarded enough & Turtling not penalized enough
Game can run longer than 90 minutes if too much turtling
Each team has a way to heal
Designers wanted to reward aggression in their designer diaries
POSSIBLE FIX: give characters a bonus for attacking in succession
POSSIBLE FIX: If character does damage X amount of times, unlock a second part of one ability
Ideas just lifted from fighting games and MOBAs
POSSIBLE FIX: Make momentum die even stronger for attacking, weaker for defending
Gameplay Cons — Heather Sing too good
Each of her abilities has extra bonus
Ranged attack targets multiple enemies AND debuffs
Passive gives glory tokens (more dice rolls to allies), if they’re 1+ damage (easy to do )
If move 3+ spaces, get momentum die (very easy to do)
When downed, she can still do things and gain momentum die
Empress Melar by comparison has to spend momentum die to do actions
POSSIBLE Houserule: Take out her passive
Mixing & Matching Concerns
Ukyo characters are at or above Heather’s level
Very hard to mix cleanly with Galactic Throne
e.g. when downed, Badger crawls around and still shoots
e.g. Otter can revive himself when downed
With 3 characters per team, maybe some crazy team comp that works against another crazy team comp
Up to you to experiment and house rule for balance
Tentative Score — 7/10 Good
While a little rough around the edges with visuals, balance, and RNG mitigation… Sudden Conflict still screams: Board game with DND dice checks with MOBA team fighting! This is a very to the point, focused game: get your 3 cool characters, position well, manage dice roll, and hope you roll good.
The way the rulebook presents characters reminds us a LOT of mobas, and rolling for initiative well… I’m sure you’ve heard about that in TTRPGs. Sudden Conflict packs a good punch for how accessible it is, which would be even easier if if they fix those inconsistent player boards. After all, at the beginning of rounds you have 13-15 actions to choose from between 3 boards, and if your characters are hexed, you can sacrifice actions to take those off, which is more decision making!
If we compare to Unmatched, where you’re also fighting on a small map with asymmetrical characters, with some terrain ideas. Sudden Conflict doesn’t restrict you with cards for attacks, and grants great decision making from the beginning of every game, but you have to be totally a-ok with dice rolling for everything. There’s just way more output randomness and upfront information with Sudden Conflict, but the 3v3 play enables more positioning, teamwork, and matchup-counterplay.
I have to stress: your enjoyment of this game lives and dies off how much you like dice rolling! Attacking, buffing your allies, determining who goes first, and defending is dice rolling. The only action you can ‘do’ without dice rolling is moving your character, so be prepared to get your wrists jangling. The highlight mechanic of momentum dice is failing a random check now… to roll more of the same dice later!
You can still play Sudden Conflict fairly casually, like you could take this meat head and just run down people, roll for 5 dice, and just bask in the sci-fi universe that’s spun up here. Then if you want to go more serious, there’s plenty of depth with 5 abilities per character if you want to theory craft new strategies or team comps, and maybe the other boxes might be for you!
For the other boxes, they not only have 6 unique characters, but focus on a type of buff or debuff. So Ukyo adds really strong downed abilities, then providing or denying momentum die. Valrona is very bless or curse heavy (lets you re-roll momentum dice). But we’re only comfortable having this tentative score cover Galactic Throne, which is the easiest to jump into with the simplest characters, and is totally worth buying by itself.
