When we look back at the entire history of games, I think it’s fair to say that licensed board games have gotten an even worse rap than licensed video games, and that’s saying something. I blame the dirge of low-effort rethemes of all the best-selling, most boring board games for this. As a kid my board game closet was filled with games like Lord of the Rings Risk, The Game of Life: Simpsons Edition, and at least a dozen different versions of Monopoly, all just as terrible as the original one.
If your family ever trapped you in a game ofMonopoly: The Big Bang Theory Edition, you may be entitled to financial compensation.
But just as licensed video games have matured from low-budget movie tie-ins made in just a few months into beloved titles like Alien: Isolation, Mad Max, and (hopefully) this year’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, licensed board games have been on a similar upwards trajectory. The now-defunct Funko Games has half a decade of bangers likeThe Rocketeer: Fate of the FutureandFast & Furious: Highway Heist,while Ravensburger has been delivering hit after hit withDisney, Star Wars, and Marvel Villainousas wellChronicles of Light: Darkness Falls. Most recently, toy and game company Kess has been on a Nostalgia hot streak, releasing games based on Contra, Mega Man, and a pair of Sonic the Hedgehog games: Sonic Speed Battle and Sonic Roll.
While Sonic Speed Battle is a casual card game for Sonic Adventure 2 fans based on War (or Battle for the Brits), Sonic Roll is a meaty, 1-4 player adventure across Sonic’s most iconic Genesis-era levels. This is a big box game with tons of components designed for a fairly lengthy session (30-60 minutes if you know what you’re doing, longer if you’re playing Campaign mode) yet moves so much faster than any other co-op strategy game I’ve played before.
The best-licensed board games do more than slap an IP on some cards and tokens. They figure out how to translate the experience of whatever it is they’re adapting into the board game format. Sonic Roll is a great example of that. Playing it actually feels like playing classic Sonic - in as much as rolling dice and drawing cards can. A lot of time it comes down to the little touches and details that sell the experience, but Sonic Roll works as a Sonic game on pretty much every level.
It makes a fantastic first impression with its art, which all comes from Genesis-era Sonic games. From the levels (Green Hill Zone, Chemical Plant, Stardust Speedway, Lava Reef) to powerups, the rings, and the life token, everything that comes in the box is quintessentially Sonic, right down to the Badniks you fight and the cute little animals that pop out of them when they’re defeated. You even get to go to the Bonus Stage. I can’t wait to tell you more about the bonus stage.
When you start the game you choose one of the four zones and lay out a series of cards from the zone deck that create a complete level with all of its branching paths. Once built, the game board resembles the full map of one Sonic level, with all of its intricate, interconnected paths.
The goal is to get to the end of the level by moving from left to right across the zone just as you would in the video game, and you do that by rolling dice and matching them to the numbers stamped into each space on the cards.
At the start of your turn you choose one move from your character’s card and build a dice pool that you’ll use to complete challenges and progress through the zone. Amy’s Hammer Rush is great for making a lot of progress quickly across the board, while her Hammer Throw is better for fighting off Badniks. You get to reevaluate the board state every turn and decide how to best help the team progress.
The most interesting element of Sonic Roll is the risk/reward of spending your dice to complete challenges. Every time you spend a die you have to reroll your entire pool, which may have negative consequences if you aren’t able to roll the particular numbers you need to progress, or if you roll a number that matches an attacking Badnik. When the dice are rolling your way and you’re cruising through each challenge, it feels just like those moments playing Sonic where you’re building momentum and flying through a level, dodging every enemy and obstacle along the way. On the other hand, you’ll have turns where the dice roll wrong and it feels like you may’t get anything going, which is how I feel every time I play Labyrinth Zone in the original Sonic the Hedgehog.
Building momentum is the key to winning Sonic Roll, and there’s no better example of that than the Bonus Stage. If you amass at least five rings without taking damage and complete a challenge where there’s a checkpoint, you can take your character to the Bonus Stage: a four-by-four grind of round blue ball tiles that imitate the original Bonus Stage. You flip over one tile revealing a prize and either a red ball, which ends the stage, a white bumper, which lets you flip over another tile, or a Chaos Emerald, which unlocks a one-time-use powerful ability.
Once you’ve cleared Act 1, you flip over the act board and reveal Act 2, where you’ll find that zone’s boss. Things get faster and more intense here as Badniks spawn and the boss creates hazards to avoid. While each player is free to make choices about which dice to use and how to spend them on their turn, I found that my group really focused in and worked together to ensure we were making the optimal choices once we entered the boss fight. There’s a great sense of progression throughout the game that leads to a surprisingly exciting finale.
I’ve never been a huge fan of dice games. I want my keen sense of strategy or lack thereof to determine whether I win or lose a game, but dice add a factor of randomness that can make losing feel really bad. Sonic Roll balances the randomness with a lot of opportunities to make choices with your dice and plenty of ways to reroll when things don’t go your way. I found there were enough outs to make the dice rolling feel both satisfying and impactful. Even when I whiffed, I enjoyed setting up my turns and taking a gamble on a big play. It felt like the odds were in my favor more often than they weren’t, which isn’t something I usually find in dice games.
While there are a lot of complex rules and pieces to manage, knowing a lot about Sonic made so much about how the game works feel intuitive. When you take damage you lose all of your rings, and when you take damage without rings you lose a life - unless you have a blue shield power-up that can absorb the damage. Everything you know about Sonic is translated perfectly into Sonic Roll, which is not only a mark of a good board game adaptation, but also, as it turns out, just the recipe for a great board game. Turns out Sonic is a blast to play no matter what form you play it in, and Kess did a fantastic job taking what you love about classic Sonic and bringing it to the game night.
