TableTopics: Legendary

Today, we’re continuing on the topic of board games — Kristen and I host a board game night every second Saturday; our most recent one was this past weekend, and this time, we played Legendary. Legendary is a deck-building game in which you team up with your fellow players to defeat an evil mastermind.

As a deck-building game, Legendary is similar to games like Dominion. But unlike Dominion, it’s played either cooperatively or as one player vs. all the rest (in the latter setup, the single player takes on the role of the Mastermind). As players of Legendary, you are higher-ups in S.H.I.E.L.D and are recruiting your superhero team. You are going up against a mastermind and trying to stop them from completing their evil scheme. In our game, Blade, Captain America, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Elektra, and Iron Fist were the heroes we could recruit. We were going up against The Kingpin as the Mastermind of our game, who wanted to take over the Daily Bugle, and for some reason, we wanted to stop him.

On each turn, the player whose turn it is flips over a villain card and adds that villain to the city. There can be up to five villains in the city before one of them escapes. Next, the player looks at their hand of six cards, which they can use to either recruit other heroes to join their team or play the heroes they already have to fight against a villain who is in the city. Or, if it is a really good turn and they draw well, players can use their cards to fight against the Mastermind. The heroes you buy can combo off of each other to improve how hard you can hit or how much influence you have for recruiting heroes. These are the basics of game play, and you are constantly adding cards to your deck as you go, trying to make it stronger and better so you can build up enough points to punch the Mastermind.

This is a fun game, albeit one that starts off kind of slow. During your first handful of turns, you spend a lot of time building up your deck. Once you’ve done that, the turns start getting longer, but at that point, players can do a whole lot more per turn. In our case, while we did end up defeating the Mastermind, our cards didn’t combo off of each other all that well, so it took a long time to build up enough cards to make something happen. The slow speed of the game, especially early on, is one of its weaknesses. It is so hard to hit the Mastermind that you feel like you might as well have skipped the first five rounds and just added heroes to your deck.

However, you are playing with superheroes, which is a lot of fun. As someone who has read a lot of recent comic books, I know who so many of the heroes in the game are, and in our case, I noticed that we ended up building a team of heroes who were all somehow related to Hell’s Kitchen (Daredevil’s area of New York and the area that Kingpin often has his hands in), which made our session work well thematically. And all of the friends in the group we played with are as nerdy as we are, so we were able to talk about recent movies and shows featuring the heroes from our game, and got to give some of the group a lesson on characters who were new to them, like Iron Fist.

But even though the game revolves around heroes, the gamemakers missed out on the one thing that could have made the pace of play a non-issue. If they had built in a story element to the game, you wouldn’t even notice that the first few turns are slow. As it is, there is a Mastermind who can do a little bit, but often doesn’t make all that much sense story-wise, and the scheme, while cool, is always the same for a big part of the game. If the Mastermind could change tactics and take different actions, it would feel like you are playing out a comic book story. For example: the group stops the Kingpin at first, but he comes up with a new plan, and they have to stop him again as it builds up to his ultimate scheme. It would be a lot of fun that way, would teach players about some of the bad guys from Marvel, and would make the game more engaging for those who don’t know as much about the characters and how they interact within the world of the comics.

Overall, I really do like this game. It’s built for someone like me, though that means it wouldn’t necessarily be as appealing to a casual player. I love the complexity of the combos and how the heroes interact. However, the combos in this game are more complex than those in Dominion, and while you can help your teammates strategize how best to play their turn, I think that Dominion is more fun overall, and certainly faster to play. But as I said, I really do enjoy this game. I have fun playing it and figuring out how to build the best deck of cards that I can. But there is a definite learning curve and a steep time commitment involved with playing this game. It’s one that’s probably best to play with a group of more serious gamers, or with people who really like games that are built more on logic than on luck.

Overall Grade” B-

Gamer Grade: B+

Casual Grade: D+

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