Marvel: Crisis Protocol is a skirmish game of super-hero and super-villain clashes, where small teams of iconic characters brawl across a scenic board. It uses custom eight-sided dice covered in symbols rather than numbers, and pairs them with a resource called power that fuels each character’s superpowers. Characters and rules are updated over time, so treat the specifics below as the durable core rather than exact current wording.
What dice Crisis Protocol uses
All rolls use the same pool of custom d8s, whose faces show four kinds of result:
- Hit — a plain success that contributes to damage.
- Critical — a strong success that usually counts as a hit and lets you roll an extra die (successes can snowball).
- Wild — counts as a hit and, crucially, can trigger special effects printed on a character’s card — throws, stuns, extra abilities and more.
- Blank — a miss.
Because the same die can produce a plain hit, a chained critical or an effect-triggering wild, a single attack roll carries a lot of texture. How many dice you throw comes from the attack’s value on the character’s card; what you do with the wilds and crits is where skill lives.
The attack sequence
An attack resolves as an opposed roll — attacker’s dice against defender’s:
| Step | What you roll |
|---|---|
| 1. Roll attack dice | The attacker throws the dice listed for the attack, counting hits, crits and wilds as successes. Criticals typically let you roll an extra die. |
| 2. Roll defence dice | The target rolls a defence pool (its type depends on the attack — physical, energy or mystic), counting its own successes to cancel incoming ones. |
| 3. Net the result | Subtract the defender’s successes from the attacker’s; what remains becomes damage, tracked toward the target being dazed and then knocked out. |
| 4. Spend wilds | Wilds (and sometimes crits) can be spent to trigger card effects — throwing a character, applying a condition, or activating a special — on top of the damage. |
That last step is the heart of the game’s decision-making: a wild you spend on an effect isn’t adding to damage, so you constantly weigh raw hurt against tactical tricks.
Power, superpowers and positioning
Power is Crisis Protocol’s economy. Characters gain it as they act and take damage, and spend it to fire off superpowers — big attacks, defensive boosts, movement tricks and game-changing abilities. Managing power well — banking it for a decisive turn versus spending it steadily — separates strong players from button-mashers. Positioning matters just as much: line of sight, range, terrain and the threat of being thrown or pushed all shape who can hit whom, and clever placement sets up your best attacks while denying the enemy theirs.
How a game plays out
Players alternate activating one character at a time, so tempo and reaction matter throughout. The game is framed by two decks of cards chosen before the match — a crisis that sets the objectives and a set of tactics cards that grant one-off boosts — and victory is decided on those objectives and on knocking out enemy characters for points, not on wiping the board alone.
Winning and effective strategy
- Play the crisis. Points come from the objective cards. Contest and hold them — a team that scores while trading blows beats one that only fights.
- Manage your power. Don’t dump power the moment you have it. Banking for a decisive superpower turn often wins the game outright.
- Choose wilds wisely. Every wild is a fork: extra damage now, or an effect that sets up a bigger swing. Read the board before you spend.
- Weaponise throws and positioning. Moving enemies with throws, and placing your own models out of the best lines of fire, can matter more than raw dice.
- Match attack type to defence. Physical, energy and mystic attacks hit different defences. Send the attack a target defends worst against.
Beginner tips and common mistakes
- Wilds are a choice, not free value. Spending them on an effect costs you damage. New players either forget to spend them or spend them badly — decide deliberately.
- Crits can snowball. An extra die from a critical can chain into more successes — roll it out fully before comparing.
- Don’t overspend power early. A character with no power is far weaker. Keep enough in the bank for the moment that matters.
- Position first, attack second. Range, line of sight and throw threats are all set by movement. A good position beats an extra attack.
- Cards and characters get updated. Profiles, points and rules change; always confirm current character cards and rules before a competitive game.
Crisis Protocol uses custom dice, but for learning the odds, running proxy games or any quick numbered roll, a physics roller lets you throw a handful at once and read them cleanly.
Need buckets of dice? Dice Drop throws up to twenty physics dice at once in your browser — free, no app.
🎲 Roll dice freeLike custom dice and card-driven warband play? Read our Warhammer Underworlds dice & strategy guide.