I very much love Marvel, clearly, with doing the 10 Minute Marvel podcast. But I’ve held off on getting Marvel Champions for a little while, mainly because a Living Card Game (LCG) like it is, can end up costing a lot. And because, unlike Arkham Horror LCG, it wasn’t story driven, it’s more just facing off against a single bad guy. And the story was one part that I really have loved about Arkham Horror LCG. But, then, I was sucked in when they announced that Doctor Strange was going to be a character pack being released, and remembering that they are going to do story packs or campaign packs coming up here.

Like I said, Marvel Champions is Living Card Game. It’s something that Fantasy Flight Games has made into a thing, basically, it’s a card game where you can buy expansion packs for the game that progress the story, give you more content, or add in whatever it might be as you continue to play through everything. Marvel Champions is no different. The base game comes with five different heroes and couple of villains which would be enough to keep you going for a long time. However, they are releasing character packs and villain packs, so if you wanted to face off against the Green Goblin, you can buy a pack for that, or maybe you want to add Ms Marvel and Captain America to your team of characters you can play, that’s another two packs that you can add. But the nice thing, unless your a completionist, you don’t need everything or anything more than the base game to play a fun game. There are plenty of combinations, deck set-ups, and villains to keep an interesting game going for a long time.

In terms of game play, I would say that it reminds me a fair amount of Arkham Horror LCG, which it was built upon, just without as much story. Instead of there being a mythos phase, there is a villain phase, and the villain is scheming and putting out additional schemes and minions into play. These LCG games are deck construction games, though, thus far, I have only played with the premade Spider-Man deck against Rhino. On your turn you’re playing down hero cards that might be putting something like the Avengers Mansion into play or doing a crazy web flip kick into Rhino to do him damage, but to do these things, you need to pay for them. There are resources to pay for the cards on the cards themselves, so you have to decide, do you want to play a card for resources or put it into play. It can be tough, because all of the cards are useful in the right situation. After that, and attacking or thwarting the villains schemes, the villain activates and schemes. Then the villain does one of two things, they either scheme some more, or they attack you. This is determined by one of the coolest mechanics in the game (I’ll talk about that in a second). But you win if you can defeat the villain before the villain defeats your hero or completes their scheme.

So, how does the villain determine if they are going to attack you or if they are going to scheme. That depends on if you are the superhero, Spider-Man in this example, or their alter-ego, Peter Parker. Rhino doesn’t know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, so he’s going to scheme assuming that he has previously dealt with Spider-Man, or maybe that Spider-Man is off somewhere else. But then you can flip into Spider-Man form and come in with a swinging web kick out of nowhere. Flipping between the two sides is a balancing act. Sometimes Rhino will have injured you too much so that you need to flip back to Peter Parker side to heal up, while other times Rhino might be so close to getting the scheme completed that you need to flip to Peter Parker side until you can deal with that threat on the scheme. The trick is can you balance it before one of the two loss conditions is triggered.

I also like how expandable the game is, I just got done saying that you don’t need to expand it, but it is an option. If you want to get a certain hero you can, they’ve come out with or announced, Captain America, Ms Marvel, Thor, Doctor Strange, Hulk, and Black Widow. So it’s a wide variety of characters you can play, and while I’ve only played as Spider-Man, I’ve heard that the characters do feel different. For example Iron Man, from the base box, has to build his armor up to get stronger. Black Panther has a lot of gadgets as well that he can use. Captain Marvel is more about punching. I’m sure that the other character packs will feel unique as well. But, I don’t feel the need to get all the packs. I’m not sure that I’ll get Hulk or Black Widow because I don’t know how much I’d play with them, but Doctor Strange and Thor, I’d probably play with a lot. Or Captain America, I might not play with him much, but that’s who my wife would probably pick to play as. So you can tailor it to your group and the same with villains, you can choose which ones you want to fight. This is also a downside for some as there can be a FOMO with the game since you might want to have everything for it.

Thus far, I’ve been enjoying the game a lot. I think it gives you a lot of interesting choices as you try and push your way through and take down the villain. I’ve only played Rhino vs Spider-Man, and even in two games, which I lost both, it seems like it can play differently, and it’s definitely a challenge. I like how I can push for attacking or then lay back and play a bit more defense if I need. I can see how building out and tweaking your own deck for the play style and hero you want against a certain villain would be a lot of fun to do, but that’s down the line for me. It’s definitely a game I can see getting more for, especially Doctor Strange. I was likely to like something Marvel no matter what, though I’m not a big fan of Marvel Legendary, so if I were to play a Marvel card game, Marvel Champions is the one for me.

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