by Pat Dolan
After stopping by the Crytozoic booth repeatedly, I finally got to play this on Saturday when they opened up a second table to demo this game.Long story short; I didn't think it was a very good game. It felt like Ascension, but with fewer interesting decisions to make, less strategic choices, and less personality.
Basically, you choose a Hero card, who has a special ability (I was the Flash, who gets to start the game, and gets to draw an extra card the first time you use an effect to draw a card on your turn), and get a deck of "Punch" and "Vulnerability" cards. Punches are worth Power, Vulnerabilities are useless.
There is a center row of 6 cards; they can be Powers, Locations, Equipment Heroes or Villains. A separate deck of "Super" Villains is also present.
On your turn, you play any or all cards from your hand and use any Power that you generate to buy cards from the center row, or from the Super Villain deck. When you buy a Super Villain, the next Super Villain is revealed, and 'attacks' everyone in the game. Once all the Super Villains are purchased, the game ends and whoever has the most Victory Points worth of cards in their deck, wins.
My main problems with the game are;
- I really dislike the fact that you start the game with cards that provide absolutely no use to you whatsoever, and no easy way to get rid of them.
- The use of a single resource means that there aren't nearly as many interesting decisions to make. It also means that players who jump ahead early tend to stay ahead, as they have more power to buy more cards to trigger bigger effects, generating more power, etc.
- The fact that everything you spend resources on goes into your deck means that I never felt like I was actually defeating anything, just buying stuff. It also felt weird that not only could other players buy my characters powers, sidekicks, and even my character himself, but they could buy villains that would then trigger effects when played from their deck.
- Some powers seemed extremly out of balance with each other. For instance, Flash's power only works if you get a card in your hand that lets you draw a card, and only once per turn. Aquaman's power, on the other hand, allowed him to 'float' cards to the top of his deck after buying them, as long as they were under a certain value, which not only gave him a tremendous amount of hand control, but was consistently useful.
- And lastly, the combination of mix & match powers, villains, heroes & locations, coupled with way that villains are just another card to buy, really made me feel like I was just playing an overly long drafting session, I never felt like I was building up a hero (or team), and taking down bad guys. I was just buying an assortment of triggers and abilities to make it easier to buy more.
I never got particularly excited about accomplishing anything, I never felt like I was able to plan ahead and execute any sort of strategy, or make any decisions that would help me adapt to a change in the game state. Granted, some of this is likely due to the fact that we played a five player game, but I suspect that these are simply core flaws that are magnified with more players, not the result of more players participating.
I'm a big comic book fan and I like what Crytozoic has been doing lately, so I was really looking forward to this game. Unfortunately the combination of bare bones mechanics, coupled with an overall lack of 'superheroic' gameplay means that I'm not particularly inclined to pick this one up. Hopefully the Marvel DCG turns out better.