by Trump
chaosjenkins wrote:
Trump wrote:
Marvel tends to be easy?! You're really going to have to define what you mean there. How is Marvel easy but DC isn't? You are all just trying to accumulate points and have the most when the game ends. With Marvel, you're only gaining points by defeating villains. With DC, you can can gain points like that but you can also gain them by simply buying the right cards for your deck. That would seem to indicate that DC is easier since there are more ways to score. Perhaps you're referring to the fact that the game can win with Marvel, but by saying the game is easy you're implying that it's a co-op game and the point is to beat the game. That's not true at all.
The emphasis added is mine. From the How to Win paragraph on page 1 of the Legendary rule book. "Players must work together to successfully attack the evil Mastermind four times. If they do, then the Mastermind is beaten once and for all, and all the players win the game for the forces of good." It then goes on to explain how the player with the most victory points is the most legendary hero of all. Right there in black and white, it reveals it's primarily a cooperative experience with the players facing off against the game. Sure, you can be as competitive for that individual award as you and your group want. You can do the same thing with Defenders of the Realm and Castle Panic. It doesn't change the fact that those games are co-ops first.
You may believe the game isn't interesting unless you play it competitively, but to decry in blanket terms that it's not co-op at all seems a little foolish given the evidence to the contrary.
Given this, I listed one of my criticisms of Marvel is that it skews a little to the easy side, as far as the challenge of the players defeating the mastermind. It does, unless you get a terribly unfavorable distribution of heroes/villain/mastermind/scheme. I never said it was easier than DC, because the goals of the games are clearly different, even if you infuse Marvel with as much competitiveness as you like.
So you're basing your belief on their marketing? Fair enough if you've never played before, but you have played before and you know they're lying to you. I'm basing my decision on actual game play.
To be fair, you say you've only played with two or three players. It's no wonder you see the co-operative angle as very easy. Unless you get just the right assortment of heroes, villains, and schemes, you're never going to have a challenge there. The only real challenge cooperatively is at four or five player and that's because the game doesn't scale.
You bring up Defenders of the Realm and Castle Panic and compare them to Legendary. Again, if you haven't played before, I can see where you'd make that comparison. But you have. So you know in Defenders that you have to do something to stop those invaders. You can't just wander around having adventures and doing nothing about the invaders and hope to win. You have to cooperate first and, if you want to play for one winner, you have to try to squeeze in a few points here and there when you can. Personally, I don't play with the single winner variant because I like the whole cooperative team effort feeling of victory. Sentinels of the Multiverse is another fine example here. When the main villain is defeated, it is clearly a matter of WE won and not *I* won.
None of that's true in Legendary. You can easily go about your business to maximize your score and pretty much ignore the main threat. There's absolutely no need to cooperate with anyone. And even if you decided you wanted to cooperate... how do you go about that? There are really very few ways you can work together.
Legendary is a deckbuilder. Like every deckbuilder that's gone before it, you are trying to amass the most points to win. All of the business with the Schemes and the Master Strikes are nothing more than random hurdles the game throws out at everyone which just gives you something to consider when deckbuilding.
DC is also just another deckbuilder. It simply doesn't pretend to be anything other than that.