[Editor's note: This article was written back in May, but do to technical and health problems, its publication date had to be pushed back, and has been updated since then]
Power Rangers has been around for about 30 years now. I would wager most of you reading this have been a fan of them at some point in your life. Be it the mighty morphin' crew from the 90's, the Beast Morphers from last year, or anybody in between. The show is older than most of our audience, and its influence is still growing. But its been more than just the cheesy tv show we all love. Its been movies, video games, and even a very successful comic line. But today we're going to be talking about a board game.
Power Rangers Heroes Of The Grid! Published by Renegade Games in August of 2019, developed by the amazing Jonathan Ying. The publisher's description is as follows
We here at CATV have had a chance to sit down and play this game. The rules seem pretty complex at first, but once you play it a round or two, it is a lot easier to understand than it seems. It does an amazing job of letting you FEEL like a power ranger. Be it the OG 5 with the base game, or any of the expansions (There are a lot of expansions, so prepare your wallet if you're a collector), you can mix and match Rangers from any generations with foes from just as many points of time. Every ranger has a special ability and a unique deck that makes them feel different from every other character, despite them all doing very similar things at the end of the day.
Personally, I've been a HUGE power rangers fan most of my life. Even if their were times when I wouldn't admit it. (And I'm still calling you out, JDF! My arm is ready to wrestle!) The game Renegade has published here is the perfect thing to feed that life long enjoyment. You get to relieve the years of pretending to fight puddies in your back yard, while playing a game deep and complex enough for adults. There's even an entire expansion about Lord Drakkon and the Hyperforce rangers for those of us who like it when the Rangers have a little edge to them.
I found that that a full game takes about 45 minutes to an hour if you're not trying to rush through it, so its not a huge time commitment. Its fully cooperative, it encourages working together against the baddies as a team, so its perfect for game night with the family, and it can be full of tension and laughs when playing with your friends. However, set up and clean up can be a little time consuming, so remember that when planning for your next round.
Not all villains are created equal. Some bosses are MUCH harder than others. I like this little bit of option. Not only does it give the game a lot replay-ability and unpredictability, it gives you a chance to ease your newbie Rangers into it before you throw them into the deep with the harder bosses.
The game pieces are unpainted plastic models. The good guys are color coded, and the bad guys are all standard grey. But the detail and quality of the models is fantastic. If you're somebody that enjoys painting miniatures, then these pieces are amazing for that.
All in all, even though the base game is somewhere around $90, and the expansions vary in price depending on the size and content, I would say you can easily get your money's worth out of it once you allow yourself to sink into this surprisingly deep and immersive game.
The company publishes special scenarios every month, which are special rule variations to change up how you play. All of these have been pretty fun, with my personal favorite being Super Mega Goldar. There is a huge amount of room for your own homebrew rules too. I've been toying around with making a boss rush mode myself, mostly so I can torture my coworkers here at the CATV office with it.
I even had the chance to sit and talk with creator Jonathan Ying for a brief interview about the game! Here is the important parts of that interview below:
What inspired you to make Heroes Of The Grid?
The opportunity happened to fall into my lap and I couldn’t be more thrilled. I’m a freelance game designer and I have a lot of experience in licensed games. I’ve worked on Star Wars: Imperial Assault, the DOOM 2016 board game, and Game of Thrones before, so when Renegade Games acquired the Power Rangers license and was looking for someone to take a crack at the design, I was a natural fit.
Have you always been a Power Rangers fan? Are you also a fan of Super Sentai?
So one of the first questions Scott asked me when we met for lunch to discuss possible projects was whether I knew anything about Power Rangers. Little did he know I’ve been a PR fan since the beginning. I remember being in kindergarten and running around the playground with my friends doing the morphin’ call and pretending to fight putties. It wasn’t until I was a bit older that I discovered Super Sentai when my family took a trip to Taiwan and I saw Denji Sentai Megaranger which I would later see adapted into Power Rangers in Space. I’m definitely more familiar with the Saban version than the original show but I do love Super Sentai a lot!
How do you feel about the fan community that popped up around your game?
It’s been a pretty wild experience. I wasn’t as plugged into the communities that existed around my previous games. Many of them are split across multiple sites like Reddit and BoardGameGeek. I admit that as big a Power Rangers fan that I was, I had never gotten a chance to go to conventions or interact with the PR community until this game. We demoed Heroes of the Grid for the first time at Power Morphicon, it was still in development at the time, but folks would come back every day to play it again and again. That’s about when I realized that the game really did have legs!
Who is your favorite Ranger to play as? How about your favorite monster to fight?
I think my personal favorite would probably be either of the Adam Parks. Mighty Morphin Black or Zeo Green. Adam Park is my favorite Ranger and I’m a huge fan of Johnny Yong Bosch, so it’s sort of an indulgence that I made sure to give that character mechanics that I personally really enjoy playing with.
When it comes to the bad guys I think the Evil Green Ranger is really exciting since he rolls dice instead of dealing flat amounts of damage. This is designed to make him feel more like a Ranger, but it also means that his fights can be a lot more unpredictable!
Are there any characters, Ranger or Monster/boss that you are particularly proud of from a design aspect?
We did a whole pack focused on the various Ranger forms of Tommy Oliver and I wanted to give him some mechanical themes that recurred and got remixed over the course of the various characters. He was very fun to do and his designs in particular helped me map out where I could go with the system mechanically. When it comes to the Bosses/Monsters I think that Lord Drakkon has one of the cleanest flavor-to-mechanics translations I’ve managed to accomplish. The idea where he studies and steals powers from the Rangers to make himself more powerful is related very cleanly in his Stolen Power passive which ramps up the strength of all of his cards as the Rangers use their own powers.
If the cards lined up right, how would you feel about a video game adaptation?
Haha, I like your turn of phrase there. I think it would be really cool to see the game in a digital format but there’s a lot of rights issues at play there. In some ways the game was definitely designed for the tabletop and certain things would need to be addressed. The game’s timing structure is somewhat loose to facilitate ease of play but when you’re adapting it to a digital medium you have to hard-code each of the triggers and it can become a big hassle. I’m not sure how well it would translate, but I do think there’s some cool mechanics that we could do online that wouldn’t be possible in physical media. You can see that sort of design in games like Hearthstone and Duelyst.
What season of Power Rangers was your favorite?
It feels a bit like low-hanging fruit but I’ll always love the campiness of the original Mighty Morphin’ series. I do love what they did to mix up the formula in S.P.D., Dino Thunder, and RPM though.
Have you seen the homebrew rules and scenarios people have been making? Have you and your team had time to play any of them?
Several of our playtesters have definitely been fooling around with the homebrew stuff but honestly I haven’t really had the time or bandwidth to pay them much attention. I think it’s super cool that people are making their own designs for other IPs though it can sometimes step into some legal gray area when the homebrewers start making content that we might intend to do ourselves later. We don’t want anyone to be confused whether a card is Official or Fan-Made, since that has the potential to reflect badly on us to the licensor if fans become confused as to what content is “real”.
Still, I know that we probably won’t get to every single character in the series. (But it’s not impossible.) I hope that the fans are excited to see what we’ve got coming down the pipe! Just wait!
So what are you waiting on rangers? Angel Grove needs your help! Good luck Rangers, and may the Power protect you!
Buy Power Rangers Heroes Of The Grid here!
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