Designed by: Caleb Grace,Michael Boggs,Nate French
Marvel Champions is a co-operative game where the players work together to defeat a Marvel bad guy. In the introductory game, Spiderman and Captain Marvel take on Rhino.
The game’s central idea is quite simple: each player has a deck of cards that they can utilise in different ways, and on your turn you can play cards from your hand to the table (the cost: other cards from your hand are discarded) making up a tableau of available cards to activate. Needless to say, you can also activate cards! With some, that means discarding them, but others – including Spiderman/Captain Marvel themselves, you simply rotate to their horizontal position to show they can’t be activated again this turn. The heroes in question can also be flipped to and from their alter ego side for certain advantages/disadvantages- when Spiderman is Peter Parker, for instance, he can no longer attack, but he won’t be attacked either, and can recover from attacks.
All the card activation is focused on stopping, in our example, Rhino (-other bad guys are available). He, like the players, has a certain number of hit points and to win the game, these must be reduced to zero before he completes his scheme – more on schemes in a moment. So when you activate cards you are usually attacking him and dealing damage, or reducing the progress of his scheme. Because Rhino isn’t shy, he’ll be dealing damage too, so some cards address or offset that when it occurs…
After you’ve done as many actions as you can/want to, Rhino now activates. He attacks all players in their hero form (your own hit points go down, though there are ways to defend, and even recover hit points) and for every player in alter-ego form, he schemes instead, adding markers to a scheme card to track his progress. Again though, you may have cards that thwart him and can play them reactively. After attacking/scheming, an event is triggered per player, which is basically more violent mischief: trouble for the good guys in the form of extra schemes, extra attacks, minions who attack specific players, and more.
Outside of a few tokens, everything proceeds through the playing and flipping of cards, so there’s a sense of not knowing what’s coming next and hoping you’re well-prepared for it. It’s very much a battle, where the game’s ‘AI’ is pitched against the collective wits of the players. The game comes with a bunch more cards than the three characters described here, and important to note that you can ‘build’ your own decks as well. Publisher Fantasy Flight Games will no doubt be releasing more cards in smaller packs that you can, should you wish, add into the box, which has plenty of room for them.
The players are all in it together, although it's possible someone may be knocked out.
Really depends on how many are playing. The game suits solo play or two best, otherwise although you're peripherally involved there is a fair amount of waiting for your official turn to arrive.
Low-ish. The rules aren't too onerous, and once past the first bamboozling few rounds, players will pick up speed.
There's a fair bit of variety in the box, and the fall of the cards will obviously keep things unpredictable, and occasionally extremely tense. That said, the flavour is always the same, so your feeling about Marvel Champions may come down to whether you love the comics, or the movies (and specifically, the punch-ups)
1-4
Players
10+
Years
60-90
Mins
Sam says
Caveat number one: I'm not the target audience for this game. I enjoy the Marvel movies just fine but I'm by no stretch of the imagination immersed in that world, and in terms of the game's mechanics, it's the kind of straightforward back-and-to of punch/counter-punch that doesn't really excite me, and one that seems to go on for longer than I'd like it to. That said, I concede there are interesting wrinkles around the basic fight; balancing damage dealt with damage taken with stop the scheming and all via the medium of the cards, which need to be played with some shrewd thinking to combine them best. It's nice players can protect each other from attacks too, and if the theme and slightly procedural feel to the game don't thrill me, I appreciate how it engineers critical moments that the players may or may not make it through. Though the schemes are pretty abstract, there is a loose sense of narrative, and you can also tailor each game to be easier or more difficult depending on who's playing. And full transparency - I've only played the game with the basic decks. I'm sure things ramp up with the extra cards. All of which is to say whilst it's an okay game for me, I can fully appreciate it may be much more than that for others.