When this game was announced, we could hardly contain our enthusiasm for an LCG game set in the Marvel Universe. After multiple plays, its time to share with our readers our Review of Marvel Champions. Is it a good addition to your collection?
There will be some minor spoilers in this review, so if you want to go into the game with no prior knowledge, I would suggest skipping to our Final Verdict.
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Game Name: Marvel Champions
Year Published: 2019
Player Count: 1-4
Play Time: 30 minutes per player
Description (From Publisher): Iron Man and Black Panther team up to stop Rhino from rampaging through the streets of New York. Captain Marvel and Spider-Man battle Ultron as he threatens global annihilation. Do you have what it takes to join the ranks of these legendary heroes and become a champion?
Marvel Champions is the latest offering from Fantasy Flight Games in their LCG lineup. For those unfamiliar with an LCG or Living Card Game, the contents of the box are complete with all cards needed to play the game. Unlike a traditional trading card game where random booster packs are purchased. In our review, we will cover strictly the core box for Marvel Champions. The purpose of this review is not to teach you how to play, but give you enough of an understanding to determine whether it is a good fit for you and your gaming group. Below you will find a learn to play, from our good friend over at Wossy Plays.
This is the first time in FFG’s history of the LCG format that they have truly put together a single core box experience. I will attach a small asterisk to that statement and circle back on it here in a bit. Inside the Core Box, you will find one of each hero and their dedicated cards. Additionally, there will be one set of cards for each villain, side mission, and nemesis villain. There are four aspects that the heroes may play with: Justice, Aggression, Leadership, and Protection. The Core box contains one set in a complete playset of each of these aspects.
Additionally, the core box comes with four copies of each neutral card. Enough to provide each player with one copy a piece. Herein, lies the issue if your gaming group is similar to mine and has 4 people that want to play. Each player has to agree to one aspect and then “build” a deck from those cards. The core set offers a limited selection of deckbuilding opportunities. As a deck brewer, I look forward to the opportunity to truly differentiate the aspects with new and additional content. With a limited selection and with my core group wanting to double up on certain aspects, I bit the bullet and purchased a second core set. Your mileage on this may vary and it is definitely not necessary to the experience.
While this review will not teach you how to play the game, there are some fundamentals that can describe the basic gameplay experience. Each player, on their turn, will have the opportunity to flip their hero card from either the alter-ego form to their hero form, or vice versa. Then play as many cards as they like. Each card in their hand will have a cost listed in the upper left-hand corner. On the bottom left-hand corner, there will be icons that represent that card’s resource value. Each card’s resource value will have icons that represent, physical, energy, mental, or wild. These resource icons do not matter for strictly playing cards, although some card abilities will have specific resource requirements, which means you have to discard a card or cards with those icons in order to trigger the effect.
Many of the different cards that are in play will have the term Action: listed on the card. These cards require the player on their turn to take a specific action and meet the requirements in order to resolve the effect. In some cases the card may say Hero Action: Hero actions require your hero card to be in the hero form, and if a card indicates Alter-Ego Action: then the hero card must be in its alter-ego form. This system provides a very fun and thematic balance to the overall system.
Allies are the companions that each aspect brings to the game. They are optional and can be removed as part of your deck build. Allies are powerful for a variety of reasons. Many of the allies have relevant response effects, that can be important to the overall progress against the villain. An ally card can be used to defend attacks from the villain, or from one of his minions. They can even block for one of your friendly hero’s that are engaged with another minion or the villain itself.
Ally’s health is printed on the Ally card in the middle of the card on the right-hand side. Whenever an ally has enough damage done to it, then it is placed in the player’s discard pile. Ally cards are not intended to be sticky and remain in play indefinitely, and as a balancing mechanic, when an Ally attack or thwarts it takes consequential damage. Which simply means that if you use your ally proactively to deal damage to the villain or one of its minions, or to remove the threat from the schemes, the ally will be closer to being KO’d.
Allies much like action cards are just fantastic additions that further enrich the theme of this game. They are also game capped at 3 ally’s per hero, and additionally, when a player has a neutral ally in play, the other hero players are unable to play an ally with that name.
Supports are played into a separate zone, and a player can have an unlimited number of supports in play. They provide the player with significant value. Cards such as Avengers Mansion or Helicarrier offer a great advantage in drawing more cards or reducing the resource costs of cards they intend to play.
Due to the cooperative nature of the game. Players are also able to share their supports with other players to help them reduce costs or draw more cards. This action is handled by the players whose turn it currently is, asking another player for assistance. This really does bring out the team nature of the game and feels like Spiderman is asking Tony Stark for help!
Marvel Champions wouldn’t be cooperative and interesting without taking on some villains! The core set comes with three different villains. Rhino, Klaw, and Ultron. Each villain offers a unique challenge and twist on the core game.
Each villain has a main mission they are trying to succeed at completing. They do this by Scheming and gaining threat on the main mission. Once the threat has equaled a certain level, usually the base scheme value times the number of players, the villain completes the scheme and either, move on to the next stage of their dastardly plan, or ends the game for our heroes.
Part of the trick to beating a villain is understanding how often to go toe to toe with the villain or flip your hero back to alter ego mode, which allows the villain to progress the main mission. In Marvel Champions these action items are called attacking or scheming.
Only the heroes can adequately manage this, and it’s rarely great to have all heroes in the same mode. This requires some careful consideration of what is best and understanding that sometimes heroes will have not a choice but to fall back to alter ego, to prevent getting KO’d by another attack from the main villain itself or one of its minions.
To add greater depth to the game and fighting of each villain, the game comes with a number of side missions. These side missions are determined by the players when setting up the game and can have wild impacts on the difficulty of the scenario being played. Fantasy Flight provides some suggestions for your first side missions when encountering Rhino, Klaw, and Ultron, but the combination of side missions and villains truly creates a ton of replayability.
Nemesis Side Missions start outside of the game and are revealed by the villain’s encounter deck. They drastically change up the game, as all of a sudden you are facing down an additional minion that is very powerful and built to specifically give fits to the hero being targeted by their Nemesis. While the Nemesis doesn’t show up often, when they do, they can really put a monkey wrench into the plans of the team.
Marvel Champions does an excellent job of capturing the unique moments that we’ve fallen in love with over the years, whether that be through the MCU or the traditional comic route. Over the course of our plays we found many times where the player interactions built a narrative that was on point and on theme with how we’d see these encounters playing out on screen or on the page.
Despite all of these great thematic issues, Marvel Champions is not without a few issues. When playing the game as a 4 player experience, the time between your turns can be especially lengthy. The average time to complete each game was roughly 30 minutes per player. Ultimately, for many, a two-hour card game experience may just be too much. When we played at 3 players, the game felt faster and more engaging. That being said, bringing four heroes to the table was pretty awesome and watch each player go from elation, to fear of getting KO’d, back to elation when something cool happened really did add to the overall enjoyment of the game.
This game does suffer from a player elimination issue. In one game, fighting Klaw, our Iron Man player was knocked out of the game around the 2nd villain turn. If we would have continued our fight, he would have been left watching instead of playing, which is never a great solution. In that particular game, we just reset and tried again.
While my experience with Cooperative LCG’s is limited, I’ve only played the Lord of the Rings LCG once, I was not expecting a whole lot. I felt that the LoTR game was so difficult and punishing that it leads to an experience that was more disheartening overall. While Marvel Champions certainly has its share of moments where all feels lost, it seems easier to recover from those moments and has led to a majority of our games resulting in victories over losses.
The base core set provides an enormous amount of replayability. For a game that will be continuing to churn out content at a good clip, the Core set can easily keep a group entertained for 9 – 10 hours. We played through all of the main villains once on normal, and all but Ultron on Expert in about 10 hours. This was also in mostly four-player groups.
With a rich theme, beautiful illustrations, and compelling gameplay Marvel Champions will be a mainstay in our gaming group for a long time to come.