The fine souls at GamingReport.com just posted a short video that shows just how the pop-dice in Marvel Heroes Battle Dice work. The pop-die they show in the video is one of the early prototypes, but it works just like the final ones will. You just squeeze two sides and the top (which shows the number 6) springs open.

In the game, you put your prepainted figures into your pop-dice and roll them. When it’s time for a battle die to enter battle, you open the die and take out the figure. A label on the bottom of the figure gives you the figure’s stats and tells you if any of its powers activate during this battle. It’s all smooth, easy, and cool. Each game takes about 10 to 15 minutes, so you can play best-of-three in well under an hour.

At Gen Con, we handed out a few of these pop-dice to distributors and the press (like GamingReport.com) as samples. During these talks, people just couldn’t keep their hands off the pop-dice. They’re just fun to play with all by themselves. Add in the figures and the game, and you’re really cooking.

I know, the web is full of people reporting back on their experiences at Gen Con last week, and I’m going to get to that too. I’ve been up against a hard deadline since I got back, though, so most of what I posted yesterday was stuff that had been waiting in the queue. To hold you over, I point you to an article at GamingReport.com which gives some details on the Marvel Heroes Battle Dice game I’m working on for Playmates Toys. I spend most of my Friday at the convention helping show the game to various distributors and reporters, and they all claimed to love it. (Hey, at least they’re kind to my face.)

Some have wondered if MHBD is anything like Dragon Dice, Diceland, Star Trek: Red Alert, or Chaos Progenitus or any other collectible dice game we’ve seen to date. Really, no. Those games featured dice with different symbols on their faces. The pop-dice in a Battle Dice game are hollow and pop open like a treasure chest, and you stick your figures inside them before you roll. The faces of the dice feature the numbers 1 through 6, just like normal. There’s something cool on the inside of the pop-die’s lid, though: a label that acts as an instant effect you get to use after a figure you put in the pop-die is defeated.

You really have to see one of the pop-dice to understand all this, and GamingReport.com says they’ll post a video soon. The pop-die they have is only a prototype, but it should show you how the final design will work.