Marvel Champions: The Card Game

I came to this one late, honestly, a couple years after everybody at the shop had already picked their favorite hero and moved on. I’m a Spider-Man guy, mostly, though She-Hulk grew on me once I understood what she’s actually doing. The core loop is simple enough to teach in ten minutes, you build a deck around your hero’s identity, you fight a villain who escalates through a scheme, and somewhere around turn four you either have an engine running or you’re getting buried under minions. What sold me wasn’t the theme, though the theme is genuinely good, it was the first time a deck I’d built actually clicked, that holy cow moment where the combo you’d been chasing for three plays finally fires and you go from barely surviving to steamrolling in one turn.

App integration is where I get cranky. There isn’t a companion app forcing itself into your session, which I appreciate, but the sheer number of expansion boxes now means tracking which villain uses which module without a spreadsheet is basically impossible. I keep a little card index now, villain name, which expansions it needs, aspect recommendations. That’s a me problem more than a game problem, but it’s real.

The villain phase can drag. Some scenarios feel like the designers needed forty cards to fill an expansion box and about ten of them are pure filler, encounter cards that don’t change your decisions, just tax your health total. When it’s tight, when a scheme is actually threatening and your hero has real choices to make, this is as good as cooperative card games get. When it isn’t, you’re just flipping cards and taking damage until the story catches up. Four stars, would’ve been five if every villain hit as hard as the good ones do.