LEGENDARY: A MARVEL DECK BUILDING GAME
Upper Deck Entertainment - 2012
picture from BoardGameGeek.com
One way or another, comic books have always been a part of my life. My brothers both read comic books all the time. All kinds of comics ranging from your standard Marvel and DC comics to weird comics like Sandman and Hellblazer, which weren’t necessarily cool at the time. I also remember thinking Milk & Cheese was awesome cause they’d get drunk and puke on everything. Though, if I’m being honest, comics weren’t really my jam. As a little kid, I often had difficulty figuring out which word bubble I was supposed to read first and would often just end up confused. Instead, I was more in to the trading cards. We had binders full of Marvel trading cards which, just like baseball cards, had bios and powers listed for all the different heroes. This was much easier for me to parse, so I mostly just read those instead. My friends and I would also play a game where we’d draw a random card and we’d run around as that hero. When I learned about Legendary I thought, “I need those cards.”
Legendary is also the type of game that announces its genre right in the title - it’s a deck building game! The deck building mechanic is probably the one that gave me the strongest reaction the first time I saw it. I grew up playing Magic: The Gathering and I often found it cost prohibitive to keep up with other players. A new series comes out with counters for old cards or similar powers with less upkeep and the people with the fatter allowance got those cards first. Or they could just buy the most powerful and rare cards and add them to their deck. As a broke kid, this was often a frustrating hurdle so I eventually stopped playing. With Legendary, all the cards you need to play are in the box. There are expansions, but you don’t need them to keep up with everyone else. There is no everyone else! It’s a cooperative game. You and your friends are the heroes who are defending the city from one of a few villains, which all comes packaged in the box.
Joe Donnelly, of course, was almost always with me when I played, as was my friend Bob Walles, both of whom are avid comic fans. One of the funner aspects of the game, for us, was assembling the cards we were going to play with. At the start of the game, you pull out the cards associated with the heroes you’ll use, the villain groups you’ll combat, and the mastermind behind it all. The villain groups are shuffled and placed to the side, the heroes are shuffled together as well and placed on the opposite side. The mastermind has its own spot where it sits, those cards are also shuffled, and the first card is revealed. You also pick the mastermind’s scheme, which will describes what happens when certain events are triggered, usually by a certain villain making it to a certain spot in the city or when a twist card is drawn.
We’d generally start building the game by selecting a mastermind. Masterminds are some of the best known villains in the Marvel Universe. Red Skull, Loki, and Dr. Doom, for example, are some of the masterminds to choose from. We’d then select their scheme, usually trying to select a scheme the villain my actually attempt in the comics. Then, we’d select the villain groups the mastermind may employ. These groups include Hydra, Enemies of Asgard, Doombot Legion, and a bunch more. Finally, we’d select our group of heroes have arrived to save the day. Captain America is there, Thor, Wolverine, and something like 12 others. Each hero has a selection of cards associated with them, all of which are abilities the heroes will use to defeat the scourge. You are almost ready to play at this point, but now you must assemble the deck you start off with, which consists of a few Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Now that everything is selected and in their places, it’s time to start playing. First, you populate S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ with available hero cards for purchase using recruitment points. Then you draw the top card of the Villain deck and place it in the first rectangle of the city. On your turn, you draw 5 cards from your own personal deck that sits before you. All cards have recruitment points, attack power, or both. You play your hand to either spend recruitment to add one or more of the available hero cards to your own deck, spend attack power to defeat a villain in the city, spend attack power to defeat one of the 5 Mastermind cards, or some combination of those actions. Hero cards generally have additional abilities like allowing you to draw an extra card this turn or recruit a hero card under a specific value for free. This is why it’s crucial to recruit as many hero cards as you can, S.H.I.E.L.D. can’t do this alone. In fact, S.H.I.E.L.D. can’t do this at all. As time goes on you’ll get mad at S.H.I.E.L.D. for getting in the way of more important cards. Some cards have the ability to K.O. cards from your own deck. A K.O. removes a card from your deck and out of play for the rest of the game. This is great for cleaning out your deck from those pesky S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents now that you have Captain America and Wolverine available to mix it up with the baddies. But beware, many villains and masterminds also have the ability to K.O., which could come at an inopportune time and may remove important cards from your deck.
Getting insane combos out of your deck is so satisfying. Having a tough fought battle against a mastermind to just barely eke out a victory will always lead to cheers from the players. While I love Legendary a lot, it’s not without its problems. The main problem is that the base game is missing some key elements. Since my friends and I like putting together scenarios that may play out in the comics, it was pretty annoying to find out that Dr. Doom is in the game but Fantastic Four is not. Not a single member of Fantastic Four are in the base game. Instead, Fantastic Four are available to purchase as an addon. As are more Spider-Man characters, Thanos and Guardians of the Galaxy, and more. I also think it’s necessary to purchase the Dark City addon when you buy the game because it just adds so much to the base game and makes for a richer experience. Overabundance of addons is a problem that plagues the video game world. Companies seemingly withhold content so they can charge extra for DLC later. Sometimes, they’ll even include an NPC in the game on release day which will give you a mission to do something that requires the DLC, just to lure you in to buying it. While I love the presence of addons and it’s exciting to see what designers come up with, I do not want this video game experience of predatory DLC spreading to board games. I do not believe this is what happened with Legendary, however. It was known from the start they’d be adding more content over the years and they’ve added a lot of amazing stuff. I just think they missed the mark a bit with the heroes they packaged in the base game.
Another issue I had with the game is the K.O. system. Obviously, you want to be able to clean out your deck once you get a lot of heroes in there, but if you don’t select any cards for the game that have the ability to K.O. you’re just stuck with these useless S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents taking up space. This made it so we’d almost always have Sentinels in our game as one of the villain groups because once you defeat a Sentinel you can K.O. a card from your hand. Since we almost always wanted to have an in-game story that might play out in the comics, sometimes the Sentinels felt very out of place, but they were often necessary. It’s possible we missed something in the rule book that you can choose to K.O. a card of your choice whenever you want, but I doubt that very much. Making sure we had the ability to K.O. became a burden.
Then, once you’re finished with the game, the clean up time is an absolute slog. All the cards need to be separated and organized after each game. It takes forever and if you lost it’s a real punishment. If you won, it actually gives you some times to go through the cards that were played and recall the epic moments. There are a ton of epic moments in the game, especially if someone can chain together abilities to run through their entire deck in a single turn. Or clean out all the villains in the city and still hit the mastermind. Or recruit every hero card in HQ and then some. Between me, Bob, and Joe, we’ve each done all of these numerous times.
Despite all of this, Legendary is one of my favorite games of all time. And yeah, I complained about the number of addons and I how I feel some are necessary purchases, but I still bought them all. With the amount of time we were putting in to the game, getting the addons was a no brainer. I wouldn’t recommend getting all the addons right away (except for Dark City, get at least that one with the base game), but there’s no denying the add a ton of replay value to the game. Legendary already has a ton of replay value in the base game alone. I lost track of how many times Joe and I played just the two of us, let alone the amount of times we played with other people. I have a few games I’ve played only 2 or 3 times, so even though I haven’t played Legendary in a long time, it still tops the list as my most played in my collection.