A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! vs Amazing Heroes

Compare A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! and Amazing Heroes side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine!	Amazing Heroes
Genre	Universal	Superhero, Modern
Tags	Comedy, Cinematic, Rules-Light, Beginner-Friendly, One-Shot Friendly, Theater of the Mind, Pulp Action, Fast-Paced	Beginner-Friendly, Rules-Light, Family-Friendly, Superpowers, Narrative, Fiction-First, Cinematic, Theater of the Mind, One-Shot Friendly, Strong GM Support
Core Mechanic	Roll a pool of d6s equal to one of four Stats (Smarts, Moves, Style, Brawn) rated 1–5, add two extra dice if you have a matching Focus, and sum the total against a Target Number (10 normal, 20 hard, 30 herculean, 40 impossible). Sixes explode and reroll. One die in every pool is the Calamity Die: if the roll fails and the Calamity Die shows a 1, the Director invokes a comedic complication.	Each hero has four traits (an occupation, a body attribute, a personality attribute, and a superpower) assigned a d6, d6, d8, and d10 at creation. When the outcome is uncertain, the player rolls the relevant trait die against a difficulty of 3 (easy), 4 (normal), or 5 (hard), adding +1 if a body or personality attribute fits. Rolls of 1 or 2 on a normal or hard test inflict a condition like 'tired' or 'hurt'; a repeated condition becomes 'really [X]' and imposes a –1 penalty, and a third hurt condition defeats the hero. Defeating a villain requires successes equal to the villain's level times the number of heroes.
Dice	d6 dice pool	d6–d12
Complexity	Very Low	Very Low
Availability	Free core rules	Paid
Runnability	2 of 5 book tools	3 of 5 book tools
License	Standard commercial	Proprietary
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	Not yet researched
Publisher	EN Publishing	Amazing Tales
Year	2021	2021
Languages	English	English
Best For	Groups who want a fast, comedic action movie at the table with minimal prep and the freedom to swap genres between adventures: ghost hunters one night, talking-animal vigilantes the next.	Mixed-age tables wanting a fast, narrative superhero RPG that genuinely works for kids aged 7+ alongside adults: sessions are designed to cram an hour of TV-style action into a single sitting.
Highlights	Character creation runs through six steps on a comic-book ID Card, so a new Hero is table-ready in minutes: a Role (talking ape, druid astronaut, vigilante), four Stats split across 12 points, a Focus per Stat, and a single-word Trait. Karma is one shared currency that buys extra dice, damage reduction, or Flashbacks where the player retroactively establishes a useful item or prepared action, and Karma is refunded when the player leans into their Trait. Heroes never die: at zero Health you are Knocked Out for five minutes and stand back up at 1 Health, keeping the tone slapstick rather than tragic.	Trait dice carry transparent in-fiction meaning at each step (d6 is 'best in your country,' d12 is 'best in the world'), so players and GMs negotiate power level by description rather than parsing stat blocks. Conditions like 'tired' or 'shaken' replace HP entirely and stack into 'really [X]' with a –1 penalty before a third instance defeats the hero, keeping damage in fiction while still tracking toward a losing point. The GM receives plot points equal to the number of players each session and spends them on cinematic moves (villain ambushes, escapes with a planted clue, perfect disguises, 'missing body' recurring foes), encoding superhero-TV pacing as a budgeted resource.
Considerations	The whole rulebook is thirty comic-book-format pages with no advancement track beyond +1 Stat or +1 Focus per adventure, so long campaigns need imported structure. Genre, setting, and bestiary are intentionally a grab bag of one-paragraph Roles and Extras with no published world: published Issues (Spirits of Manhattan, Below Decks, Accidental Anthropomorphic Heroes) carry the setting work. Combat resolves quickly but is mostly damage exchange against flat Defence numbers with no maneuvers, conditions, or positioning rules beyond optional zone-based ranges.	Superpowers have no defined list or mechanical effects beyond a die size, so the GM must adjudicate what each novel use of a power can do on the fly. Advancement caps at d12+1 and amounts to larger dice plus secondary powers branched from a parent power, so long-running heroes don't gain meaningfully different mechanical options from starting ones. Villain fights accumulate flat successes equal to villain level × number of heroes with no incremental damage per hit, which can grind against tougher foes when most attack rolls only mark a single tick of progress.