Games Corner: The Marvel Tabletop Universe

 Marvel Champions: The Card Game is a cooperative Living Card Game from FFG. It’s cooperative, so assemble a group of your family, friends, or frienemies each playing a Marvel character, with the goal of the game to beat up the big bad.

The core set includes five playable characters, Spider-Man, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, She-Hulk, and Iron Man, and enough cards to build five standard decks. You can then face off against three villains in three scenarios, Rhino, Klaw, and Ultron.

The goal of the game as we said is to beat up the big bad, but as you are trying to do this, the villain is trying to accomplish some goal: blow up the thing, steal the thing, do the bad thing — you get it. So while you are trying to Attack and put damage on the big bad, you’re also trying to Thwart his Schemes (actual game terms) before they come to fruition.

But the Villain is also fighting back, sending out minor villains (Minions), all of which you have to fight off or defend against or defend your fellow Heroes against. So most games include conversations about balancing these things: how do we stop the villain from accomplishing his scheme, while also fighting them and their minions, while not — ya know, dying.

You can feel the distant lineage of Magic: The Gathering, of having your personal deck you may have built, having cards that happen instantly (Events) and cards that go into play and stick around (Supports and Upgrades), plus special guests to support you in fighting or thwarting (Allies), but also being turned on its head into a cooperative game.

The pace is quick, and instead of generating resources, you have to instead discard cards to generate resources to put cards in play. So you’re forced to make decisions about keeping cards between rounds, but having fewer resources, or discarding a card you want — maybe even need — to put something into play you need more. You end up cycling through your deck once or twice a game, so often you see most of your cards, but there are often penalties for having the game go long, and the tension ratchets up.

Furthermore, the game comes with pre-constructed decks which are actually great. I meet tons of players who largely play just with the pre-cons. But for those who like deck-building, it splits the difference between granular choices and actually getting to playing.

You can include 3 copies of each card (except allies you can only have one, cmon, there’s only one Spider-Man, right?), and there are four Spheres (Aggression, Justice, Protection, Leadership), of which you pick one then can only pick cards from that Sphere, which gears your hero toward a particular style of play.

Plus, once you pick which character you are choosing, you have fifteen cards chosen for you that are specific to that hero. Spider-Man has web shooters and Aunt May in tow, and Captain Marvel has her helmet and energy powers — so you build a deck of 40-50 cards, but only need to choose 25 — and some of those are duplicates and triplicates.

Living Card Games is a trademarked term that effectively means “will have a lot of expansions and updates”. The fun of this is regularly getting new and refreshed content. When the game first came out, Ms. Marvel and Captain America were released immediately. Now, several years on, there are tons of your favorite characters from Marvel, including X-Men, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers, Spider-People, and tons more, with tons of campaigns and single missions for you to check out.

In some ways, I like to think about Living Card Games like this like mega-lifestyle-board games. If you’ve ever played a board game and thought “I like this game so much I sort of wish it would never end” this is the kind of game for you. You can pick up an LCG and it (almost) never will.

Marvel Champions is a super streamlined game, meant to not overburden you with a campaign but to jump right to the action with streamlined play. But not everyone wants that. Some people want to think, of dense play, in which decisions you make in one, which affect you in multiple games. For that, we have Arkham Horror LCG, a dense game of Lovecraftian horror, and next month for Halloween, Pablo will be tackling it. Look for it!