Power Rangers Heroes of the Grid: five in the box
Heroes of the Grid is a competent cooperative skirmish game wearing a licence that does most of the selling. Buy it if you want the Mighty Morphin roster on the table and a 45-minute co-op that resolves with dice; be aware before you order that the core box contains five Rangers, and the sixth one that half the audience is actually shopping for is not among them.
What is actually in the box
Renegade Game Studios lists 32 miniatures. Five are Rangers: Red, Blue, Yellow, Black and Pink. Four are monsters, named as Pudgy Pig, Madame Woe, Knasty Knight and Bones. One is Rita Repulsa, who occupies her own category as the master. The remaining 24 are foot soldiers, split evenly into 12 Putty Patrollers and 12 Super Putty Patrollers.
The card count is 140, and the breakdown is more informative than the total: 50 Ranger Combat, 32 Monster, 20 Foot Soldier, 20 Location Deployment, 8 Master, 6 Zord, 5 Ranger Character, and 5 Monsters and Master Deployment.
Everything else is tokens and boards. Twelve action markers, twenty-plus damage tokens, fifteen energy tokens, four panic tokens, four location boards, one command center board, a level up track with its marker, a lead ranger token, a Megazord token, six custom damage dice and the rulebook.
It plays 2 to 5, runs 45 to 60 minutes, and is rated 14 and up. Jonathan Ying designed it; Dan Mora did the art. That last credit matters more than it usually would, because Mora’s Power Rangers work is the reason a lot of these boxes left shelves.
Five Rangers is the thing to know before buying
The team most people picture when they hear “Mighty Morphin” is six, because Tommy is the character the show was built around from the moment he showed up. The core box is five. There is no Green Ranger miniature and no Green Ranger character card in the component list.
He is available, sold separately, and that is the commercial model the whole game runs on. It is a defensible one, since Power Rangers has an absurd number of teams across three decades and no single box could hold them, but it means the base purchase is the start of a spend rather than a complete product. If Tommy is the reason you are buying a Power Rangers game, the core box alone will disappoint you, and nothing in the marketing makes that especially loud.
That is the clearest criticism to level at Heroes of the Grid, and it is a business-model criticism rather than a design one. The game in the box works. It just is not the game a lot of buyers think they are getting.
The enemy tiers are legible from the card counts
Three separate enemy categories get three separate card decks, and the sizes tell you how much attention each one receives. Twenty Foot Soldier cards cover 24 miniatures, a thin deck for the most numerous enemy, which is what you want from chaff. Thirty-two Monster cards cover four miniatures, so each monster gets a substantial behaviour deck of its own. Eight Master cards cover Rita alone.
That ratio is the game’s structure in miniature. The putties are volume, resolved quickly and repetitively. The monsters are the actual encounters, each with enough cards to play differently from the others. Rita is a short, sharp deck sitting above both.
It also sets the replayability ceiling honestly. Four monsters is four distinct fights. A group that plays weekly will see all of them inside a couple of months, and at that point the expansions stop being optional extras and start being the only source of new content. Twenty Location Deployment cards and five Monsters and Master Deployment cards vary where things arrive, which stretches the four fights further than four fights should stretch, but variety of placement is not the same as variety of opponent.
Cards resolved with dice
Fifty Ranger Combat cards serve five Ranger Character cards. Six custom damage dice ship alongside them.
The dice are worth pausing on, because a lot of coverage describes this as a card game and stops there. It is a card game whose outcomes go through a dice roll, which is a meaningfully different experience: you commit a card, then find out how well it worked. For a licence aimed partly at families and teenagers, that is the right call. Pure card-driven combat rewards the player who has memorised the deck, and in a cooperative game that player ends up running everyone else’s turn. Randomised resolution keeps a table of five people all genuinely playing.
The cost is the usual one. A carefully built assault can evaporate on bad rolls, and a co-op that can be lost to variance rather than to error frustrates the exact strategic player who would otherwise be its strongest advocate. Where the game sits on that trade-off depends on how swingy the six dice are in practice, and that is a question for the rulebook rather than the component list.
Worth separating too: the five Ranger Character cards are not the same thing as the 50 Ranger Combat cards. One set defines who a Ranger is, the other defines what they can do in a fight, and keeping those on different cards is how a game like this supports a Green Ranger pack later without reprinting anything. Twelve action markers, spread across five possible players, suggest a turn where you are choosing between a small fixed set of things rather than reading a menu, which is the correct amount of decision for an hour-long box aimed at fourteen-year-olds.
Four locations and a command center
Four location boards, one command center board, 20 Location Deployment cards and four panic tokens make up the geography, and it is a deliberately small map. Four places is not a sprawl; it is enough space for the team to have to split up and not enough for anyone to get lost in movement rules, which is the right size for the running time.
The 20 deployment cards doing the work of populating those four boards is where the replay value actually lives. Four monsters is a modest roster, but four monsters arriving in twenty different configurations across four locations is a meaningfully larger space than four fights. It is variety of situation rather than variety of opponent, and situation is the cheaper of the two to manufacture, but it is not nothing.
Zords and the level up track
Six Zord cards, a level up track, a level up marker and a Megazord token add up to an in-game progression system, and Renegade’s own pitch for the game is that you gain experience to call your Zords into action.
This is the single most sensible piece of licence-to-mechanic translation in the box. The show’s structure was always the same: the Rangers fight, things go badly, the monster grows, the Zords arrive and combine. A game that makes the Zords a thing you earn partway through a session rather than a thing you start with is reproducing that arc rather than just borrowing the artwork. Most licensed games get this backwards and hand you the most iconic asset on turn one.
Energy
Fifteen energy tokens is the whole supply, for a game that scales from two players to five. That number not moving with the player count is the most interesting thing on the component list, and it is also where I will stop, because the box contents establish that energy is a constrained resource without establishing how it is distributed or spent. Anyone telling you confidently how the energy economy plays out at five players is reading a rulebook you should read too.
Who should buy it
Buy it if the Mighty Morphin roster is a genuine draw and you want a co-op that finishes inside an hour. Sixty minutes is short for a miniatures co-op, and short is a feature here: this is a game that fits on a weeknight, which is more than can be said for most boxes with 32 minis in them.
Buy it if you have a table with mixed experience. The dice resolution and the hour-long footprint make it forgiving in a way that heavier cooperative games are not. If your group wants something with more teeth and a longer commitment, Gloomhaven is at the other end of that scale entirely.
Skip it if you are indifferent to Power Rangers. Stripped of the licence this is a solid, unremarkable cooperative skirmish game, and there are better ones at the price. Marvel United: Multiverse covers similar ground with a different superhero licence and a different card system, and is the direct comparison worth making before committing.
Skip it, for now, if the Green Ranger is the point. Work out what the core box plus his pack costs together and judge the purchase on that number, because that is the real price of the game you want.
Verdict
Eight out of ten, and the two missing points are about what is not in the box rather than what is. Four monsters is a modest amount of content for the shelf space, and the roster arrives in pieces sold separately. Against that, the Zord progression is a genuinely good piece of design, the art is the best in the licence, and an hour-long co-op that a mixed-age table can actually finish is a harder thing to build than it looks. For a group with any affection for the source material, that is worth owning. For anyone else, the licence is doing work the game cannot do on its own.
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