Year: 2025 | Players: 1-4 | Min: 45+ | Ages: 14+
This Super Squad High review was made after playing the game five times. The publisher sent us a copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.
What is Super Squad High?
Super Squad High is a cooperative, crime-fighting, worker placement game in which you play as teen superheroes who need to unmask and fight a villain, who happens to be one of your classmates.
Super Squad High was designed by Michael Addison and published by Nerdy Pup Games.
Rules Overview
In Super Squad High, you play as teen superheroes balancing high school life with crime-fighting. Your mission? Unmask the secret villain hiding among your classmates and stop their scheme before it’s too late.
Each player has a hero board, which tracks their health, grades, and available actions throughout the game. You’ll also have costume cards, representing gear and abilities that help you fight crime and overcome dangers. Your student ID and power card grant unique abilities, while memory cubes help you keep track of classmate traits.
How a Day Works
Each day is split into three phases—Morning, Afternoon, and Night—and each player has six actions total (two per phase).
1. Face New Crimes – The current Leader draws crime cards at the start of the day, revealing them when they match the time of day. Crimes appear in different city locations and must be stopped before they do too much damage to the city.
2. Take Actions – On your turn, you can:
- Visit a Location – Locations help you gain costume cards, complete schoolwork (which keeps your grades up and earns Marks to activate your hero’s ability), and heal damage, among other benefits.
- Fight Crime – Place an action token on a crime card, roll danger dice, and use costume cards and powers to defeat threats. Any threats that aren’t stopped cause damage to the city, the heroes, or classmates.
- Chat – Peek at a classmate’s hidden trait to gather clues. You’ll need this knowledge when performing the Meetup action.
- Meetup – Attempt to form a relationship (Besties or Sweethearts, depending on the bonus you want) by answering prompts about a classmate’s traits. Success moves you closer to unmasking the villain and gives you a new bonus action that you can use when meeting up with that classmate.
- Patrol – Recover used costume cards from your discard pile (Laundry). You can now also help anyone who fights crime in the location where you’re patrolling.
3. End of Day – After all actions, you check grades (failing means game over), refresh costume cards based on your current grade, and reset the city for the next day.
Unmasking the Villain
To reveal the identity of the villain, you need to uncover three clues—Villain, Scheme, and Motive—earned by forming relationships with classmates.
Once all clues are revealed, the villain is unmasked, and you move to the final battle.
Winning and Losing
You’ll win by defeating the villain in the Villain Fight, which is similar to the Fight Crime action.
You’ll lose if the crime deck runs out (meaning no new crimes appear at the start of a day), if the city takes too much damage, or if any hero ends a day with an F grade.
Alternative Ways to Play
- Group Chat Mode – Removes memory-based mechanics, making it easier for players to track classmate traits openly.
- Multiverse Mode – Requires two copies of the game and introduces parallel universes where heroes must stop interconnected crimes across dimensions.
- Bonus Content – Villain Powers give the villains unique abilities, Crisis Mode reduces the city’s durability, and Dilemmas give each hero personal obstacles to overcome.
- Yearbook Mode – Uses all of the Bonus Content and lets you play a four-game campaign where choices carry over as your heroes progress through high school.
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Pros and Cons
Pros
- Super Squad High has a nice flow to it once you’re used to the rules. You just take one action at a time and most of the actions take a couple of seconds to perform, so there’s very little downtime in this game.
- I’m a huge fan of the Meetup action, which actually surprised me since I’m usually terrible at memory games. The memory game part is fun, and there’s a little bit of fun role-playing to it when you reply to the prompts.
- I like how the dice are used to represent the enemies’ random attacks. It keeps the game from being predictable and forces you to get a variety of costume cards to fight crime.
- There’s plenty of cooperation in this game. You can play cards to help other players fight crimes when you’re in their location, and you can use your character’s ability on anyone’s turn. You also need to communicate throughout to make sure you’re moving closer to revealing the villain while also taking care of your homework and getting new costume cards in your hands.
- Another cool thing is how card recovery works. Instead of drawing randomly from a shuffled deck, you either take actions to gain new cards, take actions to recover cards from your discard pile, or strategically choose which cards to return to your hand at the start of a round. It gives you more control over your options.
- The base difficulty level is on point. All five of my games were close finishes, so it’s pretty obvious that this game was playtested a lot.
- I haven’t tested out any of the other game modes, but it’s great that they’re there once we’ve played the game enough. None of the modes are overly complex, so it should be easy to add them in. Chances are we’ll use the Villain Powers from now on, but I’m also looking forward to testing out the campaign mode.
Cons
- I enjoy the memory component, but I know it’s not for everyone. Forgetting a classmate’s trait during a Meetup can be frustrating, especially since every action is valuable and wasting one can set the team back. It’s great that the game offers an option to remove the memory aspect entirely, but what about groups where only one player prefers not to use it while the rest do? It’s not a huge problem, but it could be something that lowers the fun factor for some players.
- The final showdown with the villain is usually just as fun as the rest of the game, but it can feel anticlimactic if you already have the right cards and powers lined up. When that happens (it did in our last game), the danger dice don’t add much tension, making the battle feel more routine than dramatic.
- The rulebook could be better. It’s pretty wordy, making it hard to quickly find rules in your first few games.
Final Thoughts
Super Squad High has been a surprise hit for my group. I expected to like it, but not this much.
It nails the theme of balancing crime-fighting and student life, it’s a challenging puzzle, it seems to have high replay value, and it plays well at all player counts. It feels familiar and innovative at the same time, which is what I’m looking for from new co-ops these days.
I’m confident that most co-op fans will enjoy Super Squad High, especially if you like its memory component. However, if you dislike memory mechanics or prefer lighter cooperative board games, this one might not be for you.
Super Squad High is absolutely staying in my collection
Super Squad High Links
BGG | Nerdy Pup Games
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