CMON came out swinging with a huge Kickstarter in the first wave of Marvel United. Focusing on everything not X-Men related in a beautiful chibi style they are known for. They also had a bunch of Kickstarter exclusive FOMO pieces to go along with a larger price tag that let me pass up on it as a lot of hype and nothing more.
I was wrong. The base game showed up on retailer shelves and I bought a copy not expecting much but extremely curious. This game is solid, with simple mechanics that are simple to understand and play. The game quickly becomes a puzzle as you are trying to accomplish your goals, thwart the big bad guy, and not run out of cards.
Get your own copy of Marvel United and support your Meeples.
How to play Marvel United
Crack open that box, grab the villain you want to hurt/be hurt by. This includes the villain dashboard, miniature, threat cards, and master plan cards.
Pick 6 of the location cards at random, set them in a circle around the villain dash board. Place one of the threat cards on each location in the place marked for it..
Pick your hero and take the mini and cards for that hero. Set the mini on the location opposite the villain, and shuffle your cards drawing 4 cards.
Tokens out and set next to the board. Fill in the locations with civilians/thugs per the location.
Villain reveals a master plan first, read the card top to bottom and do as it says.
On your turn you draw a card and play a card. You get the icons on the card you played and the card played right before it to use to accomplish things.
You have 3 action types: Move to a new location, Hit someone or something, or do a Heroic Act by saving a civilian or clearing threats.
You have to accomplish two goals before you can hit the villain directly, these are either saving 9 civilians, punching 9 thugs, or clearing 4 threats.
You win by killing the villain. If one person can’t draw a card when they need to, or the villain accomplishes his master plan, you lose.
What Phil & Heather Think
This is a good cooperative game as it has a lot of variability in villains (not so much in the base), in the heroes, and in how the cards come out that it will take a while to play all the combinations. Once it gets easy, you have different levels of difficulty you can scale through to create the epic showdown you see in the comics.
This game has a level of strategy I wasn’t expecting. It is a puzzle that requires you to manage your cards well to solve as a team.
Phillip, a pleasantly surprised gamer.
Table for Two did a full playthrough of Marvel United at a 2 player count!
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Phil is an avid gamer who not only loves board games (he has played 100’s) but is one part of the “Table for Two” board game YouTube series and has designed several of his own board games. In addition to gaming he is all about the DIY life for creating gaming shelves or additional pieces and has a luck with dice that is mathematically infuriating to everyone else at the table most of the time.