Heroes Wanted: Extra, Extra Expansion Review

There have been many mostly futile attempts to create a game that truly captures the feeling of what people imagine a superhero game should be. Unfortunately, while people agree that there should be tights and super powers, that seems to be the end of the consensus. Some people want Marvel’s licensed characters, some want those from the Distinguished Competition, some want indie characters, some want "adventuring", some want a "beat-em-up" style, and a lot of people don't really know what they want other than they want it to feel like being a super hero.

Because of this, what has happened is that all the games have tried to be all things to all people, and they have mostly sucked. To my great surprise and delight, Heroes Wanted doesn't seem to have cared what 'The People' want, they made the game the way they wanted to, and this game absolutely rocks; I’m finding that I enjoy it more every time I play it.

What they managed to do was come up with a system of delivering thousands of unique heroes and hundreds of unique villains to players, all randomly, and they've designed a system that is so flexible that it works almost perfectly in delivering a game that is very enjoyable, thoughtful, balanced, and that delivers a truly different experience than anything I've played before. There is a deck-building aspect to it of a sort, but mostly, it's an objective-driven story-forward game that starts you out each time as some random meta-human character who derives its powers from one of four categories of sources. What really blows my mind is that it feels much more like something that should include fistfuls of custom-engraved battle dice and hundreds of chiseled-chin miniatures, but in reality, it's a very refined, sharply edited, hybrid American/European style game that has both meeples and cubes, and not a pip can be found on the latter.

I’ve gotten two expansions for Heroes Wanted, “Extra! Extra!” and “Masterminds and Champions”, and I’m going to write about the former first. It almost seamlessly integrates into the game, bumping up the difficulty significantly and adding a true co-op mode. In my experience, there’s only two kinds of expansions: One that adds more content of the same kind, and one that either fixes mistakes or adds new features, but at the cost of making the base game more complex in a sometimes very unequal equation. Champions and Masterminds is the latter, but without adding many more rules, which I believe is an excellent thing because it strikes an almost perfect balance. It only comes with a rules sheet and eight cards, but it adds a surprising amount of divergence from the base game. It’s almost like playing a different game because it amounts to playing as a counterfeit “Justice League of America” against a sinister super-villain who is far more powerful than any of the random baddies that you normally face.

The rules and scenarios included in the base game don’t change, so the expansion doesn’t really change much, except moving to a co-operative game from a competitive one. It’s really a matter of difficulty, and this expansion really does bump that up a couple of notches. The most pronounced change is that you don’t randomly create new heroes and villains, but rather, you use the full-size hero and villain cards to choose from. Other than that change, there are only minor changes with regard to co-operative success and failure.

The second expansion, “Extra Extra”, is far more of a “more of the same” expansion than the aforementioned. It includes 54 cards, all of which are hero sections, villain sections, and quirks, and none of them change the game in any meaningful way, aside from adding variety to the mix of characters and villains that are available. That said, a lot of the quirks are really funny and interesting, and the price point is low enough that it’s worth buying and integrating the expansion into the base game once you’ve played it quite a bit and start seeing the same hero or villain sections.

Interestingly, you can’t fully integrate the two expansions at the same time, since the Champions and Masterminds expansion does away with hero and villain sections. Both Heroes Wanted expansions are worth owning for fans of the base game. But the Champions and Masterminds expansion has far more utility because it changes things quite a bit, whereas the Extra Extra expansion is just more of the same.