Goku vs. Superman

One of my favourite game systems from the last few years is the DC UNIVERSE MINIATURE GAME from Knight Models. It's a "beer & pretzels" tabletop game about superheroes duking it out with big punches and laser beams. But the reason I really like it, is that the system itself is flexible enough to write a lot of homebrew or house-rules. For example, bringing anime characters in to fight the Western superheroes.

Originally the name of the game was MARVEL UNIVERSE MINIATURE GAME and it started out as a side project to Knight Models' popular BATMAN MINIATURE GAME. Where BMG game was about carefully planning, moving through the shadows and securing objectives, the UNIVERSE game was about the Hulk throwing busses at Wolverine.

Knight Models however soon lost the Marvel licence and re-tooled the game to now be called the DC UNIVERSE MINIATURES GAME. And since they already had a lot of DC heroes and villians on the market via their BATMAN game, chances where if you played one thing, you already had a decent collection for the other.

Now I could talk at lenght about how KM completely dropped the ball on supporting their games and communicating with their customers, but this blog is supposed to be mostly positive, so I'll spare you the details.

The game uses a simple points system for configuring your teams, D8s for combat and skill rolls and scenarios that are more focused on specific goals like holding territory and not just beating the crap out of everyone. It's certainly a big part though.

A regular character card looks like this:

Source: Knight Models

The Power Value are action points you use to pay for Movement, Attacks and Powers. The colored squares indicate the frequency how often you can use Attacks and Powers. The box on the left are Skills and you need to consult a list of special rules for those.

Now one of the things I like the most about this system are the Defense Values and Attack Natures/Types like Fire, Blades, Dark Magic etc.. When you make an Attack, you need to roll 2D8s and add the Attack Attribute to beat the target's Defense value for what the Attack's Nature is. Take this Superman for example. He has an average Physical/Energy Defense value of 15 and a lower score for Magic Defense of 13.

Source: Knight Models

He also as the Resistance Skill, which in this case means you reduce every Physical and Energy Damage he would receive by 2. Which means that Joker up there couldn't even hurt him with his base attacks, only with his one-use-per-game Red Attacks. And that's an idea I really like. Superman doesn't care about regular blades or bullets. But you can hurt him with Magic or Psychic attacks, by exploiting his Weakness to Kryptonite or with special rules that ignore Resistances, like Wolverine's claws.

Which brings me to the house rules. The game had a very active community for house rules a few years ago. Not so many these days, but we're still having fun. At one point someone in that group posted homebrew rules for characters from Dragon Ball Z and showed me a source for collectible miniatures from Japan that had about the right size.

Tokusentai! Tokusentai!

Now I don't want to start the old debate about who is canonically stronger, Goku or Superman. But while writing my own DBZ characters for the DCUMG, I tried to keep the main Saiyans roughly at Supermans level. Which means a high Resistance to Physical and Energy Attacks, base DMG of at least 3 per attack and so on.

Stuff like this can always be very unbalanced. And I don't play this game nearly often enough to really write something that's completely balanced. Then again, I'm writing rules so Cloud Strife can fight the Ninja Turtles, balancing is not high on my list of priorities.

Last year I finally got around to test some of my rules and pitted the Avengers against the forces of Frieza. Unfortunately I lost most of the pictures, so you'll just have to believe me when I say it was a pretty good trial run.

If you want to get into the DCUMG, I reccommend looking around in the Facebook Group, you'll find our Customs Group from there. It's a neat system and I stuck with it instead of switching to the new and shiny Marvel Crisis Protocol mostly because I already have a whole bunch of 32mm superhero miniatures and I don't want to start collecting another scale.

And that's how can settle the age-old debate of Goku vs. Superman on the tabletop. But the really important question is: Could Monkey D. Luffy beat the Juggernaut?