Marvel vs. DC: A Tale of Two Deck Builders

Today I attended the monthly Saturday board game meet up at a local church, BoardGamers of Michiana.  Anymore, this is where I go to play new boardgames, I more or less consider it a proving ground for games I'd be interested in acquiring.  In the last couple of years I've had to adjust my priorities in what I want in a board from "I think I want that" to "do I like it and will my wife play it with me".  So I've been getting leaner games and honestly I'm perfectly fine with that.  I had been champing at the bit to play both of the deck builders based on the popular comic book publishers and there was a guy there that had both and I got to play them.  Score.

I'll tackle DC first.  My previous experience in deck builders has mostly been Dominion, the Ascension iOS app, and Quarriors (it's my blog so I'm going to say it qualifies).  DC's game favors Dominion, but has shades of Ascension.   Like Ascension, the cards available to buy are laid out on the table and as they are picked up, they are replaced by new cards from the common deck.  Also like Ascension, you aren't limited in the number of cards you can buy and play.  Ok, it has more in common with Ascension than I thought at first blush.  It favors Dominion in the sense that there is only one resource, Power.  Power allows you to buy Heroes, Super Powers, Equipment, and Locations, as well as defeat Villains and Super Villains.

In typical deck building fashion buying/defeating a card lets you put it in your discard pile for future use.  They have more advanced levels of Power as well as provide the game with the rules exceptions that you'd expect from a game like this.

Each player comes into the game with their Hero.  This isn't a card that you shuffle into your deck, it's an over sized card that you set off to the side that grants you your own rules exception for the game.

Game pacing is determined by the stack of Super Villains.  There is always a Super Villain available to be defeated along with anything from the queue of cards from the common stack.  When a new Super Villain is revealed it executes its power against every player in the game, from that point on he just sits there waiting to be defeated.  Once defeated he'll go into the victorious player's discard pile like anything else.  When played their effects tend to be very worth the effort of defeating him.  Once the pile of Super Villains is cleared the game is over.  Every card has a point value from Weaknesses (giving its owner a -1 to their final score) to Super Villains (which tend to be around 5 points).

Something that was pointed out to me during play was that the backs of these cards do not indicate that they are a DC game.  They are a stylized rendering of the game publisher's logo, Cryptozoic.  This leads me to believe that, while I'm sure they could come out with box after box of DC expansions for this game, they plan on capitalizing on other properties.  They do have the current license for the WoW TCG and I wouldn't be surprised if they were working on other properties as well.

I'm not typically a huge fan of kitchen sink games, but a game where Batman is running around wielding Frostmourne?  Yeah, I'm gonna be the guy that falls for that.

Marvel Legendary had a little bit more going on in it.  Unlike DC, where you're all playing to win against each other, it is entirely possible for the game to beat the players in Legendary.  Assuming the players win, there is still a final point tally to see which of the players is the winner (although in a more care bear environment I can see that particular post-game procedure being left out).  The players all lose if the Villain achieves their scheme.  Our Villain was Magneto and his scheme was to acquire the Cosmic Cube (schemes are chosen by randomized cards and aren't necessarily thematically appropriate to the Villain).

In Legendary the conceit is that you're part of S.H.I.E.L.D. and you're trying to draft heroes to the cause of defeating the Villain.  There are two types of resources that, in lieu of their technical terms, I'll call combat power and buying power.  When prepping the game Heroes are chosen at random to form the Hero deck.  When a Hero is chosen for the Hero deck all of that character's power cards are shuffled in with all of the other Heroes' power cards.  At the beginning of the game the tableau of Hero cards is filled, waiting to be bought by the players.  After a player takes his turn, the tableau is restocked.

There is a track immediately above the tableau for the Hero cards that gets filled with villains.  The Villain deck is built similarly to the Hero deck, but instead of being a list of powers specific to the Villain (as the Hero cards are), a stack of Villain cards is done by theme of affiliation.  So there won't be a powerset for the Juggernaut, but there will be a set of cards for the Brotherhood where you'll find Juggernaut, Mystique, Sabertooth, and all of the usual suspects.

So when a player begins his turn he places a Villain card on the first available space on the villain track and then proceeds to buy assets with his buying resource and defeating villains with his combat resource.

Like I said, Legendary has a lot more little moving parts than DC does.  And one play through certainly isn't enough to provide a detailed review of how the game plays.  I'm not doing the game justice.  So if this makes no sense to you, I apologize.  And I realize that this whole thing was written assuming that the reader has the context of Dominion or Ascension in mind.

If you were to ask me point blank which one was better, I'd have to say Legendary.  The game is more thematic than DC (which honestly feels like an abstract with pretty DC pictures) and there's more game there to consider.  I'm more of a Marvel fan than DC in general, but if the mechanics of the two games were reversed I wouldn't feel like Marvel got shafted.  They're both good, just service a different complexity of deck-builder.

Bah!  This is turning into a mess so I'll just leave you with this...

Excelsior!