How To Play Marvel Snap

Marvel Snap is a combination of two different things. It is deck construction and then lane battling. In a lot of ways, it is as much of a board game as it is an app game. We’ll talk about the app features and if they are worth it later.

In this game you create a deck of heroes ranging from 1 to 6 energy cost to play with. Then you take that into battle against other players. You try and gain majority of power, each character has a power, at two of the three locations out there. Many of the locations offer specific powers that bolster or hurt characters at the location, or change up how you can play characters. At the end of six rounds, gaining an additional energy per round, the person who controls the most locations wins.

The Heroes

Let’s start out by talking about the heroes in this game. I didn’t mention it, but a lot of the heroes have powers. For example, Quicksilver, a 1 cost card, always starts in your hand, because he is fast. Scarlet Witch swaps out a location after a specific round. Hulk just has a ton of power so he smashes.

I think that Marvel Snap does a good job with the characters. They all make sense with their powers, and some of them just don’t have special abilities. Generally if you have a power your cost and power are at a 1 to 1 ration or worse. If you don’t have a special ability you have more power. Hulk, for example, costs 6 and has 12 power.

Now, not all special abilities are created equal, though, those that aren’t tend to be more powerful. Some characters, Rocket, Star Lord, Gamora, all gain attack based off of the other player playing a card at their location. But not just at the location, but at the location the turn that character comes out. Others, like Captain America, give more generic on going abilities, like +1 power for each other card at his location.

The Locations

The other important factor in the game are the locations. I like them a lot in the game because it changes up each battle. Some of them are simple, every hero here gets +5, that’s not really anything special. Another, when it’s flipped, gives you a copy of another players card. Of course, they get a copy of one of yours.

One thing that is interesting is how the locations reveal throughout the game. On turn one, only the first location is known. Then turn two the next one flips and the final one on turn three. Yo can play blind to them, but it might mess up your plans if you aren’t careful. Or you might sneak a 1 cost card onto a location that only can have four or higher cost cards. There is a risk to placing it down blind, but sometimes that risk is worth it.

The Deck Construction

Deck Construction is a very important part of this game. You have a limited number of cards to put in a deck and a limited number of them that you can see. It is like Magic: The Gathering, in that you want enough low cost cards to get them them out early game, but not too many that you never draw your bigger more powerful cards. It is about find that balance.

The app makes deck construction fairly easy. But it does fall into an issue I have with digital Magic: The Gathering. When you are on an app, you can’t see all your cards as easily. Granted, with Magic, I used their database and a site you can build decks in conjunction with each other when I had decks for it. But with the digital deck building, it is a bit trickier.

It offers ways to search and filter cards. But until there is a nice built up database with search features, deck construction is going to be a bit slow. It isn’t bad early in the game when you don’t have many characters, but you add in characters quickly as you go.

The App

So, Marvel Snap, is an app game. That means it is going to do a few things. Firstly, it’s going to try and sell you stuff. Right now, there are not ads that pop up for other things. I doubt there ever will be. But there are adds to get people to buy in game things. The most notable is a season pass. It isn’t a bad price and does offer more unlocks and new characters. But if you don’t do it, it means that you likely are falling behind a little bit in collecting characters.

One important question I have is how those characters then will be released. In an app game I play a lot, Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, characters can be bought before they become farmable. What is that time table for Marvel Snap? If I miss out on Miles Morales now, do I need to wait a year to get him later? Or is it that I’m getting him a month earlier with the season pass? There is a balancing act for the company to get people to buy, but also not turn people off from the game.

And finally the unlocks or upgrades to characters. One of the ways you push up in the game and get more and new things is upgrading your characters. But are you really? Your character doesn’t get better, it just gets more “rare”. It’s an artificial thing in the game that only matters if you want fancier artwork, it is cool. But mechanically it doesn’t matter, it mainly just unlocks more things as you go.

Final Thoughts on Marvel Snap

Now, I say final thoughts, this probably more initial impressions. Why, because I wasn’t in the beta and the app just released yesterday. But I do have some concerns with the app. It is a game about getting characters you want and then deck construction. Most likely some characters, especially early on characters will lose value over time to play with. And the whole, unlock a 3D picture of what is already solid artwork isn’t reason enough to play with them.

I also really want to know the cadence of how characters are released. I bought the initial Season Pass, but I doubt I will buy anymore. It is a situation where I was curious about it to start and I wanted to know for coverage. But I try not to spend much if any money on app games. So now that Miles Morales or the next season pass character, when can I see them. Or are they always kept behind that season pass? If they are, that’ll kill the game.

But my concerns are more app based and how the company wants to make it’s money. The game play itself is a lot of fun. I liken it to Smash Up, but I think that other things, Land, Air, and Sea, for example are also good examples of a lane battler. It just has some of the randomness in powers that Smash Up has. But I like it much better than Smash Up, because I curate my deck.

The final thought is that I’m glad it is an app game not a physical game, but I wish it was a physical game. As an app game, I can most likely free to play eventually get most everything. But I’d love to get this to a physical table. I’d love to have the cards and build the decks. It’d just cost me more money because, well, it’d be a TCG (Trading Card Game) and buying blind packs would cost me money.

Have you tried Marvel Snap? Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below or over on Twitter.

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Mansions of Madness is a story based game where you are investigators in a Lovecraftian world, trying to figure out different scenarios, solve puzzles, and search for clues. The investigators have been called to look into weird things that are going at on this mansions and exploring through the rooms, meeting the Butler, and trying to track down the cultists who are working on bringing through one of the elder gods. Things aren’t that easy though, and the monsters that show up and cultists that are running around are definitely trying to hurt you or drive you insane.

So, this game seems like there should be a ton of set-up that you need to do throughout the game. You are placing where the clue tokens are, you are setting up the rooms and there are monsters to be placed. That’s one of the cool features of the 2nd Edition of Mansions of Madness, it comes with an app.This app tells you what to set-up, where you need to set it up, and what you are seeing. You aren’t just placing a few clue tokens onto a board to investigate, you are getting a description that there is a family portrait on the wall, and that’s what you’re investigating, or the pile of mail that is sitting in the foyer, or maybe papers on the office desk.

There are other cool features to the app as well, it gives you story pieces, in fact it’s voice acted as you get the information for the case when you start. And it fills in the details as to what you find, so no flipping through a book, you just pick the clue you investigated (and it even tells you how to investigate it), you can then find the clue and information. It allows Mansions of Madness to feel like an RPG but without having someone run the game. And it allows them to do puzzles. Maybe you are very smart, then you can take more turns trying to figure out a puzzle, but they might be worse at combat. Finally, it makes the board different for you, we played the same scenario twice, and the board and clues came up differently.

The app is definitely the big selling point to this game. There are other fun features as well. The fact that each character is unique and has a unique power is great. Along with that, it’s an annoying thing, but also a fun thing, when you get more wounds than you can take, you get a permanent wound, so you don’t die right away, but now instead of being able to hold a lot of items, now you can only hold two. The same thing happens with sanity, you are going more and more insane, and if you reach your insanity threshold then you go insane, and if you reach it again you die. But, like wounds, going insane means something, for example, when I went insane in the game that we barely won, I had to have a slashing weapon (I think that’s what it was called), and be in the same spot as the other player otherwise, I think the other player would have won, but I wouldn’t have. Now, what I was doing with that knife, never explained, but now I had to do weird stuff in order to be able to win.

Overall, this is a fun game and the app makes this game accessible to people who aren’t gamers. That said, I do think that this is more of a gamers game, and while it is cooperative, someone who is less of a gamer might just be doing what someone else says for them to do, versus playing the game as much themselves. However, and I think this is how it should be, if you are playing Mansions of Madness with someone who isn’t as much of a gamer, let them play, and it’s not super difficult to learn and once they do, they are going to enjoy it more.

Overall Grade: A

Gamer Grade: B+

Casual Grade: B-

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