Marvel Champions: Card/Board Entertainment Guest Review

Today’s card/board entertainment review is a guest offering

My dear friend and fellow author and co-host of the Silmaril Awards, DJ Edwardson has mentioned/recommended this game MARVEL CHAMPIONS to me several times, and so I asked him if he’d be willing to write a review of it as a guest post so that I could get a better feel for what this game is all about and how it’s played, and share it with all of YOU at the same time!

He graciously said, “yes.” And here we are. Now, let me step aside and give DJ the floor.

Marvel Champions: A review
by DJ Edwardson

Choose your Marvel superhero, pick a villain, and take them down before they realize their nefarious scheme, but stay frosty, you'll need your alter-ego identity as well to conquer this cooperative card game—Avengers assemble!

"With great power, there must also come great responsibility." –Stan Lee, Amazing Fantasy #15

Marvel champions is a cooperative living card game from Fantasy Flight Games that lets you take on the role of one of the iconic Marvel superheroes and their alter ego (more on that below). You'll work as a team with your fellow players to kerpow! your enemies into next week and win the game.

The basics

Number of players: 1-4 Average game length: 45-90 min (depending on number of players) Complexity: Medium Recommended ages: 14+ (though smart 12 year-olds should be able to enjoy it) Similar games: Sentinels of the Multiverse, Lord of the Rings Living Card Game.

So what exactly is a living card game?

If you've ever heard of collectible card games (CCGs) like Pokémon or Magic the Gathering it's a little bit like those, i.e. a game with a set of cards that grows over time, but with a few key differences. The most important one, and the only one we'll focus on here, is that there are no random booster packs. In other words, you don't have to keep buying packs of cards hoping you get that one really powerful card from a certain set. Every pack has the same set of cards so you know exactly what you're getting. The base game comes with enough cards to play five heroes (Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and She-Hulk) and three villains to pit them up against (Rhino, The Claw, and Ultron). As of the time of this review, there are more than a dozen additional heroes you can purchase from other expansions and campaign boxes (more on these later) and more than half a dozen villains you can throw into the mix as well.

Game Play Overview

The objective of Marvel Champions is to cut down the villain's health to zero. You actually have to do that twice, though, because like any good video game, once you beat the boss down he comes back for a second round even stronger!

And while you have one way of beating the villain, he'll have two ways to beat you. He can either knock out all the heroes to zero health (which is unlikely if you're playing on normal difficulty and paying attention) or he can complete the main scheme he's working on. The scheme is important because it represents a ticking time bomb of sorts and gives the players another objective they need to focus on, not to actually win the game, but to keep the fight going and buy them enough time to knock out the big baddie.

Heroes are people too

One unique thing about Marvel Champions is that every hero card has two sides, the hero side and the alter ego side. So you're not just playing Spider-man, you're also playing Peter Parker. Because everyday people have their obstacles to face too, right? And there will be times when you need to flip into one mode or the other to either go toe to toe with the villain (hero side), or rest up and plan for your next move (alter ego side). One other aspect of your alter ego identity is a special card that each hero has called an obligation. It might not come out every game, depending on the way the draw pans out, but when it does it will usually put a snag in your plans, forcing you to stop what you're doing and address it. Spider-man's obligation, for example, is overdue rent. Imagine poor Peter having to run back to his apartment in the middle of a tussle with Rhino to make sure he's not evicted!

Interesting aspects

The other unique thing about Marvel Champions is that each hero deck is customizable with four different aspects. The aspects are Aggression, Justice, Leadership, and Protection. Aggression focuses, unsurprisingly, on doing damage. Justice helps you thwart the enemy's schemes. Leadership allows you to recruit ally heroes more easily to come in and help your team, which makes it a sort of Swiss army knife, capable of filling multiple roles. Lastly, protection makes you better at defending yourself and your team, possibly even healing them to get them back in the fight. This might sound more complicated than it is. While the game is hardly Crazy Eights or Old Maid, the core set comes with suggested combos and prebuilt decks that you can play with right out of the box, so new players should be able to jump in from the get-go. Just know that there is a lot of potential for customization for players who want to dive into building their own unique decks.

Modes of play

Speaking of customization, there is a trifecta of game modes for Marvel Champions, adding even more variety into the mix. You can play solo, just you against the villain. Each villain also has expert versions if you're looking for more of a challenge. And lastly, you can buy one of the campaign expansions (there are two out currently) that allow you to play a series of connected games with a story connecting them and even special cards you can add to your deck between games to "level up" your hero slightly.

Why I Love Marvel Champions

There's a lot to take in with this game, especially if you're used to mass-market games like Monopoly, Sorry, or Scrabble. And if you've never played a cooperative game or a card game with this many unique cards and options, you will certainly have a learning curve for your first couple of games. But at its heart, this is a very simple game. Play cards from your hand to beat the bad guy before he beats you. And it can be such a fun ride when everyone is on board with their hero and working together as a team. There are other cooperative games out there, but this one feels more like a team game than most. You can defend for another player out of turn. You can even hold back certain cards to activate out of turn. And you'll need to coordinate your actions or you'll quickly get swamped by the villain. Cooperative games are one some of my favorites and this is one of the best co-op games out there.

There's a hero in all of us

I also love that each hero feels so unique and so much like the Marvel hero the cards represent. So far, I've tried out about half them and my favorites have been Spider-Woman, Dr. Strange, and Ant-Man. These are in no way my favorite heroes in the Marvel universe, but they're so fun to play and each plays completely differently. I also enjoy that you can crank this game out in about an hour if you know what you're doing and you're playing with three or less. I've played it most as a two-player game and that's where it shines, but three is also a lot of fun and four is great, too, if everyone's on equally invested in the game. And then there's the artwork for this game. Leapin' lithographs is it good! It varies a bit in style, but on the whole, it's top of the line stuff. It really helps put you in the Marvel superhero world, and it's one of the things I love about this game.

Things I Didn’t Like

I do think the game needs the right group to shine. You can't be surfing on your phone and expect this game to shine. But that could probably be said of a lot of games. It is also pretty light on story. The campaign expansions remedy that somewhat, but even then it doesn't always feel as thematic as some other games. Honestly, that's more of a nitpick and a personal quibble. Not every game has to tell a dramatic tale (most games don't even attempt to). What this game sets out to do, it does extremely well. It gives you a chance to play as a team and pull off some great feats with your hero. This game is all about strategy and working together and planning out your moves to get the most out of the cards in your hand that turn. Finally, though the team element is one of the strong points of this game, at higher player counts you may find that it can take a while for your turn to come back around. Since you won't always have a way to help another player (and some characters are just better at this than others), the downtime could put off some players.

Ratings (1-5 dragon eggs)

Fun factor

This game is a blast. It showcases the Marvel universe in the best way and lets us sidewalk bystanders get a feel for what it's like to step into the action. Each hero is unique and it's so much fun working with other players to overcome what the villain is throwing at you. I'll take off half a point because I do like a little stronger story in my games, but it still manages to land a 4.5 dragon egg punch for fun.

Production Quality

The production quality is excellent. The cards and various tokens to keep track of things are top shelf and very durable. Of particular note are the dial counters included for keeping track of things. There's nothing to blow your mind away here. It's a card game, after all. But the artwork and graphic design push this category into Stark Tower heights for me, so 5 dragon eggs on this front.

Replayability

With so many heroes available already and more to come, this game soars when it comes to replayability. Throw in the ability to run each hero with a different aspect and there are thousands of different combinations to choose from. 5 hulk-sized dragon eggs for this one. No, Hulk! Don't smash the dragon eggs...oh, dear, I need to choose my metaphors more carefully in the future.

Overall Score — 4.8 Dragon Eggs

What do you think, dear Reader? Are you as intrigued as I am? Have you ever played a Living Card Game before? The only one that I’ve played is SENTINELS OF THE MULTIVERSE, which I’ll be reviewing here soon as I felt that it would be fun to have that one and MARVEL CHAMPIONS near each other in the queue, as they sound very similar.