Luchador! The exclamation mark is not optional. Mexican wrestling! Rolling dice! Drop kicking your friends (figuratively) in the face. What’s not to like?
Well, quite a lot as it happens. Like the wrestling it draws its inspiration from it’s bright, colourful and full of character, but yank off the mask and you’re just left with a fat man in fancy dress. The game hinges on both players rolling four special dice into the ring, with the result indicating how many hits each player has scored and whether they have the chance to attempt to pin their opponent. Successful hits let a player roll a second dice to see how much damage they have caused, with the faces representing low-scoring chops and smashes up to a much more mighty table slam. Alternatively they can trade in a couple of hits to (yes, you’ve guessed it) roll a super Luchador! dice, which allows for even more powerful special moves themed to their individual wrestler. Pow! Lose all your strength points and you are knocked out and lose the match, or get too low and you can be pinned by your opponent and counted out by the referee. In reality the game’s more likely to finish simply because you gave up and decided to play something better.
The game is fast, frenetic and entirely reliant on players getting into the spirit of the theme and ignoring the lack of any kind of strategy or exciting mechanics. Strip away the colour and noise and the base game is almost entirely based on luck. OK, you need to roll your dice within the ring or they don’t count, you can hold onto a ‘block’ roll on a dice to save for next turn if you’re being badly beaten, and you can tag another player in during two vs two tag team. That’s it. The wrestling characters each player chooses at the start of the game look amazing, and there’s so much potential for individual special moves to alter the dynamic of the game, but the ones detailed on each card are just the same spread of strengths with different flavour text. Any fun in this game comes from being noisy, abusing your opponent and taking pleasure from rolling dice, but if that’s not your cup of tea then neither is Luchador! I’m afraid. It’s certainly not mine.
Designers Backspindle Games were kind enough to send me a copy to promote their Kickstarter for the second edition last year, which absolutely smashed its $16,000 target. The new edition promises more wrestler identities and advanced rules to give them individual strengths and weaknesses, but an enormous overhaul of the system this ain’t. The game won the Best Family Board Game Award at last year’s UK Games Expo, and Backspindle know their market is wrestling fans and the younger end of the 8+ recommend age range. Just as well, as we won’t be taking this out of the game cupboard again.
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