Marvel Champions: Review

So, it's been a while since I've played any card games. Pokemon had been my jam as a kid. While I had gotten into Magic later on, I've found the game to not be something I could really get into. While it was fun, it didn't have the dynamics that I enjoyed so much in Pokemon and, given time away from my friends who were playing it, I stopped playing. I've played about a dozen games of Marvel Champions, lost most of them (horribly) and had a blast doing it!

The core of the game is pretty simple. On your turn you play as many cards and do as much as you can until your options run out. All cards have a number in the top left and a series of icons on the bottom left, called resources, usually one a card. The top number tells you how many resources it takes to play that card. So, in order to play cards, you have to discard cards from you hand. It's fantastic. It's nail-biting. And it creates a game where what some of what you want is almost always available, but not necessarily everything.

And sometimes you really need everything in your hand to get played!

The thing is that you're playing against a villain, who you beat one way: knock him out by removing all his health. The villain can win one of two ways: either by knocking out all the players or by increasing the threat on their scheme, which escalates every turn. You need to, have to, keep that down. But the prevalent way to knock threat down makes you vulnerable to the villain, allowing him to attack you. And defending against attacks can make it harder for you to do things next turn. And it's possible to get one-shotted by the villain, so you have to be careful. What's more, additional villains, called minions, can be summoned, and that makes the threat and damage go up, exponentially at times. And so you have to manage the cards in your hand to utter perfection. So unforgiving!

One of the problems that I kept running into with games like Magic and Pokemon was trying to get people not as technically inclined. They didn't want to build a deck, but playing with them was fun and they were extremely good players! My sister Anna, who was a cunning Pokemon player (she destroyed my Charizards with a Weedle, with a sadistic giggle), wanted nothing to do with deck creation. At all. Every single deck she ever played, I built, and she beat me with them, and handily! With a sadistic giggle. But no deck creation. Nothing. She found that couldn't get into deckbuilding. Genius player! Wanted to nothing to do with deck creation.

I'm pretty sure I could get her to make a deck for this particular game.

It's pretty simple: grab your hero cards (which you have to have in the deck), decide what Aspect you want to play with (Leadership, Protection,  Justice, or Aggression, which is pretty much a thing of taste), and a few neutral cards, which would be pretty easy to have someone else pick for you, and then slam it together into a 40 card deck. There will be more options as time goes on, but I'm still finding some things to fine-tune, even with just the core set.

I'm really happy with this game so far. It's a tense affair, filled with unexpected spikes and valleys, complete with a deck building system that I think I could get anyone to do themselves. It's a really awesome set of mechanics, grafted on top of a great theme that most people know. If you want to do a Living Card Game (which is not made of random packs!) I'd say it's a good jumping on point. I say that as someone who is jumping in myself.

But for criminy's sake, threat is so mean!