A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! vs Cortex Prime
Compare A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! and Cortex Prime side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! | Cortex Prime | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Universal | Universal |
| Play Style | Comedy, Cinematic, Rules-Light, Beginner-Friendly, One-Shot Friendly, Theater of the Mind, Pulp Action, Fast-Paced | Narrative, Modular, Collaborative, Toolkit, Roleplay-Heavy, Character-Driven, Tag-Based |
| 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. | Assemble a dice pool from trait sets (attributes, skills, relationships, etc.) rated d4–d12. Roll the pool, keep the two highest for your total vs. opposition, then choose an Effect Die from the remainder to determine magnitude. Plot Points let players add dice, activate abilities, or alter the narrative. Every mechanical element is a swappable mod. |
| Dice | d6 dice pool | d4–d12 dice pool |
| Complexity | Very Low | Medium |
| Accessibility | Very High | High |
| Runnability | Medium | Very High |
| License | Standard commercial | Cortex Creator License |
| Cost | $ | $$ |
| Publisher | EN Publishing | Dire Wolf Digital |
| Year | 2021 | 2020 |
| 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. | GMs who want to build a custom system from modular parts: homebrew designers, genre-mixers, and groups tired of forcing their stories into a pre-built framework. |
| 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. | Highly modular: 18+ mods for core rules alone, clear writing with worked examples, Plot Point economy creates dynamic give-and-take, powered well-known licensed games (Marvel Heroic, Firefly, Leverage) |
| 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. | Not playable out of the box: requires significant GM assembly, steep learning curve to understand which mods fit your game, restricted third-party publishing ecosystem |