Review Details

Legendary: Marvel Deck Building Game

Product Review (submitted on October 14, 2015):

In a market flooded with deck building games that have popped up in the wake of Dominion's success, Legendary: Marvel scratches the superhero theme itch with an engaging gameplay experience. It is fairly thematic, in that most of the cards' actions/abilities "make sense" in the context of the Marvel universe. In theory, it is "semi"-cooperative, with all players working collectively to defeat a mastermind, but scoring points along the way and adding them up at the end to reveal an overall winner. In my experience, this point-scoring aspect is pretty much ignored and the game is played fully cooperatively, but that's going to depend on your gaming group.

As others have noted, the base game by itself, while fully playable, has a couple of downsides: the artwork for each complete set of superhero cards is the same (despite there being 4 different cards per superhero) and the masterminds just aren't very tough to beat once you understand how the game works. Both of these issues are corrected in the expansions, with Dark City being the default recommendation for adding a lot of content and also difficulty to the base game. One other thing to be aware of is that Legendary: Marvel is notorious for arriving with misprints or with some cards duplicated and others missing entirely. Not to worry: just contact UpperDeck's customer service and they'll send out replacements (although it can take some time). Hopefully they've resolved this matter altogether in more recent printings, but make sure to check the contents carefully when you first unbox the game.

Despite these couple of issues, I highly recommend this game. Even people who aren't Marvel fans tend to enjoy it, and for those who are it's an even better experience!