A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! vs Genesys

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

	A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine!	Genesys
Genre	Universal	Universal
Play Style	Comedy, Cinematic, Rules-Light, Beginner-Friendly, One-Shot Friendly, Theater of the Mind, Pulp Action, Fast-Paced	Toolkit, Narrative, Career-Based, Social Combat, Modular, Hackable, Character Building
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 pool of custom narrative dice: positive dice (Boost, Ability, Proficiency) from character ability and skill, negative dice (Setback, Difficulty, Challenge) from task difficulty and circumstances. Roll all dice and cancel opposing symbols: Success vs. Failure determines if the task succeeds, Advantage vs. Threat determines beneficial or harmful side effects, and Triumph/Despair trigger powerful narrative outcomes. All three axes resolve independently, so a check can succeed with complications or fail with a silver lining.
Dice	d6 dice pool	Custom dice
Complexity	Very Low	Medium
Accessibility	Very High	Medium
Runnability	Medium	Very High
License	Standard commercial	Genesys Foundry (community content program)
Cost	$	$$
Publisher	EN Publishing	Fantasy Flight Games
Year	2021	2017
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.	Groups who want a genre-flexible system where every dice roll generates narrative texture beyond pass/fail, and who enjoy interpreting results collaboratively at the table.
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.	Every roll produces multiple axes of outcome, creating layered narrative results beyond binary success/failure. Full social encounter rules give non-combat interactions the same mechanical depth as combat. The GM Toolkit provides structured guidance for creating custom settings, species, talents, and gear. Six example settings (fantasy, steampunk, weird war, modern, sci-fi, space opera) included in the core book.
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.	Requires proprietary narrative dice or the Genesys Dice App: standard polyhedral dice cannot be used without conversion charts. Interpreting multiple symbol types on every roll can slow play for groups unfamiliar with the system. No free quickstart or SRD available.