High school can be transformative and horrific at the same time. It’s a feature in entertainment aimed at younger kids from Galaxy High School in 1986 to DC Super Hero Girls and the revamp as well as shows that reflect on the nostalgia (or horror) of those years in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Super Squad High is a cooperative game with non-IP based heroes getting their Jersey Shore on with BSL (battling crime, school, laundry) across a vibrant cityscape.
Gameplay Overview:
There’s a lot going on in this game so I won’t be able to cover all the details in the rules, but this overview should be able to give you a decent idea how the game plays.
Super Squad High is a hand management and worker placement game where only certain locations are available at certain times of the day, much like Rock Hard 1977 but without illicit drug references.
At the start of each day, a pair of crime cards are drawn and any that would take effect in the morning are put into play. Heroes will usually have two actions in each of the morning, afternoon, and night phases of the game. The actions heroes can take can be academic, where they either remove a token from their board representing their schooling, turning it into a checkmark which can power abilities, or drawing costume cards that will be useful in fighting crime. Because, what’s the point if you don’t look the part, right?
And by costume, I’m also including baseball bats because heroes should really accessorize their totes adorb shoes with blunt force trauma inducing weapons. Character’s powers are also activated by spending a second currency: social media-esque likes.
Heroes can chat or meet up with classmates. Chatting allows them to peek at one of their three trait tokens. Meetups have other players reading cards matching the classmate style like trendy, geeky, edgy, or artsy, and if you answer all three traits questions correctly, you can become either a bestie or a sweetheart, which nets you a like or healing a bruise, respectively. It also unlocks the power of friendship, which in this game uses their helper power.
As you unlock besties and sweethearts, you’ll start to uncover the villain you’ll need to defeat who’s one of your classmates. Maybe even your bestie.
To fight crime, and battle the villain, you roll dice and get to play cards to cancel the negative effects rolled. You can use your various powers and abilities and even those of other heroes in the neighborhood. Each card used to match the icon on the test or die rolled can be used to cancel one effect. Any leftover faces do things like hurt your hero, damage buildings, hurt classmates, or take time (workers to place) away from you.
Damage to the buildings and classmates is represented by the five tokens in the supply that running out of becomes a lose condition. Other lose conditions include running out of crime cards and not doing enough homework so that you earn an F in school.
Once the villain is unmasked, you’ll fight them at the end of that day, and if you defeat the big bad you win.
Game Experience:
To start, one of the strengths of the game is the flexibility built into the system. If you want the villains to have superpowers or don’t want to memorize traits, there are variants for those. There’s a lot going on in Super Squad High and, unfortunately, the gears don’t always mesh cleanly.
This flexibility doesn’t help my main issue with the game: the battling crime mechanic makes the game overly-punishing. Drawing as many cards as players means that 1/3 of your actions each day will be battling crime, which means your other actions are either getting gear or doing laundry. And if you draw two crimes in the first morning at two players, it’s likely going to cost you the game as you won’t have the costume pieces or abilities to counter the 14+ die faces coming at you in back-to-back turns. The rulebook says you “must” battle crime but then also informs you of the penalty of one town marker being moved for each un-completed task—meaning ignoring the crime might be less impactful than battling it unprepared.
Even if the crimes are spread out, you can lose actions which can have major impacts. And with the town only able to absorb five mistakes, the game can end on the second or third crime card if you roll poorly like me.
Having to choose between getting costume pieces or removing schoolwork tokens on your player board was a cool decision point. Both make fighting crime easier, but completing schoolwork gives you checkmarks which can trigger powerful character abilities and allows you to refresh more costume pieces.
The only way to find the villain is to establish relationships. While the system to narrow down the big bad is clever, the actual end game is an underwhelming bigger dice battle (six dice per location instead of three to four). At two players, sometimes there’s not the right class cards to expose traits, which forces you to pivot until you can discover if that Edgy girl is really all about violins.
And with the study hall cards that fill the daytime portion of the board being single use only, I always felt nervous to use those early on. And while the game suggests guessing (because you get the answer even if you’re wrong) you still need to spend another meet up action to become besties or sweethearts. The illusion of choice grinds my gears as the result is the same regardless of which actions I took. I could guess to save an action, but having a 12.5% chance is a wild guess and not a strategic choice.
I like when games allow me to feel clever because I could create combos or puzzle out a solution, and that’s lacking here outside of choosing to spend resources to trigger abilities or using costume cards. But even those choices are often situationally made for you.
Making the hero out of two cards is neat and will make for some very interesting combinations, and using their banner color to dictate starting equipment was a simple and clever idea.
Earlier, I compared Super Squad High to Rock Hard 1977 and the latter does worker placement better because when you’re fighting for that one record deal slot, you feel like you have agency in selecting nighttime actions which impact the next day. Here, you just drag yourself to school for the next day’s random beatdown.
It’s not uncommon in crisis management games like this and Pandemic that you must deal with more issues than players and it creates tension as you try to stay ahead of the end game conditions. I don’t think there’s a lot of meaningful decision spaces here as most of my actions felt scripted.
One of my favorite high school teachers used to say “less is more” and that’s what was needed here. I’d prefer fewer mechanics that allowed for impactful game choices instead of forcing me down punishing paths with minimal decision space or luck mitigation.
Final Thoughts:
I want to like this game and Super Squad High has potential but, for me, it tripped on its own shoelaces with an awkward collection of variants and a kitchen sink of mechanisms that felt like they needed more time in development to coalesce. The worker placement mechanic works well and could be a strong part of the game, but the randomness of the crime cards and punishment to reward imbalance makes the game frustratingly difficult to win with some bad draws and dice rolls. If you like the theme, use house rules and/or don’t mind punishing co-ops, it’s worth a look, but for me I’m just going to blast some Alice Cooper as the outro music.
Final Score: 2 Stars – Super Squad High is still in its awkward phase with signs of potential peeking through piles of homework and laundry
Hits:
• School aged hero theme shines
• Fun Costume and abilities
• Lots of variants
Misses:
• Crime is punishing, especially early on
• Players can lose in Turn 1 with bad draws/dice rolls
• In trying to be flexible, adds too many pieces
• Minimal luck mitigation and decision space
