A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! vs Savage Worlds
Compare A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! and Savage Worlds side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! | Savage Worlds | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Universal | Universal |
| Play Style | Comedy, Cinematic, Rules-Light, Beginner-Friendly, One-Shot Friendly, Theater of the Mind, Pulp Action, Fast-Paced | Cinematic, Fast-Paced, Tactical, Pulp Action, Combat-Heavy, Heroic, Miniatures |
| 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. | Roll trait die + wild die (d6), keep the highest. Target number 4. Raises every +4. |
| Dice | d6 dice pool | d4–d12 |
| Complexity | Very Low | Medium |
| Accessibility | Medium | Medium |
| Runnability | Medium | High |
| License | Standard commercial | Savage Worlds Adventurer's Guild |
| Cost | $ | $$ |
| Publisher | EN Publishing | Pinnacle Entertainment |
| Year | 2021 | 2018 |
| 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. | Fast-paced pulp action across any genre. Great for large groups and mass combat. |
| Highlights | Character creation runs through six steps on a comic-book ID Card — Role (talking ape, druid astronaut, vigilante), four Stats split across 12 points, a Focus per Stat, and a single-word Trait — so a new Hero is table-ready in minutes. 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. | Fast resolution, genre-flexible, handles large groups well |
| 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. | Exploding dice can produce extreme variance in outcomes, setting books vary in depth — some provide minimal mechanical content beyond a genre frame |