There's nothing quite li☂ke adding another set of Funkoverse figure to your collection. The ever-expanding board game has 2 new sets recently released: Wonder Woman and Game of Thrones. While the former is a generally straightforward new box, the latter includes a handful of new systems and mechanics that fundamentally shake up the Funkoverse experience. Some, like companions, are a welcome addition that excites me for the future of the game and new, hilarious character combos. Other changes, like the base color update and the board redesign, feel like version 2.0 changes that dramatically upset the organization and uniformity of the collection. Funkoverse is a game that excels when everything works together and the Game of Thrones set represents the very best and worst of that principle.
Wonder Woman & Cheetah
The new Wonder Woman 2-pack is about as standard as Funkoverse boxes come. Cheetah is a fast, high damage Assassin that can take multiple actions per move and even move inbetween turns. With Quick Swipe, Cheetah can interact and Move 2, making her an excellent jungler-style character for collecting bonus objectives. If she gets caught out, Ferocious Slash is a Challenge 1 that adds the highest number where a point 𓄧marker is on a cooldown track...ANY cooldown track, up to Challenge 5. She isn't the most interesting character mechanically, but she is self-sufficient and fast, making her a strong choice for almost any composition.
Wonder Woman is a bit more involved. She has a Champion Die, not unlike Dr. Ian Malcolm's Chaos Die from the Jurassic Park set, that can be used anytime Wonder Woman or an adjacent ally makes a roll. It has 4 shields and 1 !!!, making it a great defensive die and a high-risk high-reward challenge die. Wonder Woman also has an incredible recovery ability called Divine Resolve that allow🐈s her to stand-up and knock all adjacent rivals 1 square away, meaning she can then use a section action. For this reason, Wonder Woman makes a great tank character. Her Champion Die offers great support, and her Inspire Courage ability allows her to move 2 and do an assist while also moving the Champion die off the cooldown track. Wonder Woman is definitely one of the more powerful characters in the game now and can be the strong center of any team.
The game board for this box is set in Themyscira with a room on each of the 4 corners. It's a great map because of the color contrast makes it very easy to see the obstructions and barriers, someಞthing a l♕ot of other Funkoverse boards struggle with.
Game Of Thrones
While Wonder Woman was fairlജy standard, Game of Thrones is a total game-changer. The set brings Arya Stark, Jon Snow, Danenerys Targaryen, and the Night King to Funkoverse as well as some completely new mechanics and🐽 game modes.
Each of the four characters has an impress𒁏ive amount of thematic acuity. For example, Arya's passive ability allows her to give an Arya's List status card to any rival that challe🤪nges her or her allies. 2 of Arya's abilities, Valar Morghulis and Faceless Assassin, allow Arya to do bonus damage to characters that are on her list. This level of character-specific theming persists through all 4 of the Game of Thrones characters.
The Night King is a ⭕summoner, naturally, and he is able to raise Wight minions by using his Raise The Dead abilit﷽y or any time another character is knocked out. The Wight minions can be moved independently of the Night King and can challenge rivals with weak but frustrating attacks. They can also be used to zone and block opponents, making the Night King an imposing threat anywhere on the board.
Daenerys isn't particularly powerful by herself, but she has full control over the dragon Drogon. The Dracarys abili⛎ty allows her to send Drogon up to 4 squares in a line and do a Challenge 3 to anyone he passes, making Daenerys incredibley strong without needing to put herself in danger.
While Jon Snow is a pretty straightforward character, he comes with Funkoverse's first Companion character, which has the potential to make a huge impact on the game. Rather than giving one of your alliesꦅ a weapon, you can instead choose a companion character like Ghost who acts completely independently of everyone else. Ghost can only move and Bite (Challenge 2) but he has a passive ability called Loyal Protector that allows you to place him adjacent to his attached character if they get knocked down. Using Ghost is like having a 4th character on the board, and I 🐷can't wait to see other Companions get added to the game.
The Downside Of Progress
Game of Thrones adds the first official 4 player game modes to Funkoverse. Rather than play 2v2, the 2 new game modes in this box are designed specifically for 4 player games. While a welcome addition, there's a small readability issue caused by this change. All other Funkoverse bases are either white or black, but the Game of Thrones bases are white, black, red, and yellow. Keeping track of units and teams has a layer of confusion now that won't get resolved u꧅ntil enough red and yellow bases come out for an entire team. For now, you'll have to keep swapping bases between yellow/red and white/black to keep things consistent.
The big problem for the box is the new board shape. While the dimensions are the same, the game board itself folds down much wider than all the other boards. I can't imagine why they would do this, other than to drive me insane. I keep all my Funkoverse boards stacked in a 2-pack box because they fit perfe💛ctly and I can keep them all together. Not this one though! This board only fits in a 4-pack box, which throws a wrench into both organization and the ability to pick a board randomly.
Funkoverse has grown into an im🅷pressive collection of mix-and-match components for a really cool board game, I just hope they can keep things consistไent going forward.