Review Details

Legendary: Marvel Deck Building Game

Legendary: Marvel Deck Building Game

Product Review (submitted on October 10, 2015):
This is an incredibly fun game. Starring the Avengers and a handful of other favorites from the Marvel Universe (read as: Deadpool, Spider-Man, the A-list X-men), this game does a very good job of turning character traits into gameplay. Wolverine draws cards and heals. Gambit manipulates the deck (get it?!). Black Widow rescues bystanders, etc. Being a deck-builder, the game never feels the same twice. The cards you're recruiting to your deck can form synergies based on character, team affiliation, and attack type. There are a number of different schemes that give variable win/loss conditions and really change up the gameplay. The biggest strength here is the replay-ability--that, and it's fun game engine.

However...

This game has a ton of set-up and tear-down. Take the villain deck, for instance. In a two-player game, it consists of five Master Strike cards, two villain groups sets (eight cards each) somewhere around eight scheme twists, a henchmen group (ten cards) and two bystanders. That's a lot of disparate things to try and get evenly distributed. This goes up pretty quickly as you add more players, so at the end of the day it doesn't matter how well you shuffled, the deck doesn't feel shuffled. The hero deck is similarly problematic.

Then there's the quality. These cards start to scuff and wear very quickly. Yeah, I know, you can sleeve them, but deck-builders aren't fun to play with sleeved cards. There's too much shuffling to be done. And given the $45 price point, cheap cards makes you feel a little ripped off.

Finally, and this is me nitpicking pretty fiercely, it's a little haphazard. There's nothing in the game to facilitate randomization (although there are a number of apps available). The amount of variability means you can have very uneven experiences from one game to the next. The game almost never feels balanced in its single-player mode. And you really can't put together a story that feels canonical. You need two villain groups, but none of them seem to go together. Why, indeed, would Hydra being working with Spider-foes and Sentinels?

Still, if you like deck-builders, it's a fun one. If nothing else, there's a colossal game engine working under the hood.
Keep your eyes open for our special Back to School items and save A LOT!