Marvel-less

I recently got to try Legendary, the Marvel branded deck building game from Upper Deck. As with the raft of deck building games that have been popping up since the runaway success of the progenitor, Dominion, this one tweaks a few things here and there in pursuit of the perfect experience.

The approach here is to have a pseudo-cooperative game. Players are all working together to try to defeat a villain (chosen for each playthrough from a larger selection), and if the villain meets his victory condition, all the players lose. But players also maintain their own separate scores; so long as the villain is defeated, there will be a single winner. This isn't the first cooperative game I've seen try to have its cake and eat it too, but it just doesn't seem to be effective here. There really just aren't any mechanisms in place that let players work together. Moreover (at least in the game I played), the villain seemed no threat to win, putting no pressure on the players to table their competition with each other for any "greater good."

The thematic structure of the game is even more ill-considered. In a Marvel game, the natural thing for a fan to want is to be a superhero, or to at least play superheroes. Here, you do neither. The cards you acquire for your deck don't represent the heroes themselves, but actions taken by the heroes, who seemingly swoop in for a moment in your deck, only to swoop in a moment later in someone else's deck. As one of my friends put it, you aren't the superhero in this game, you're the paper pusher who tells the superhero where to go.

Ordinarily, that sort of abstraction in a game's theme doesn't bother me one bit. But here, it's tied up in a very bad art choice on the cards themselves. Individual heroes from the Marvel universe are each represented on suites of 5 different cards. But each of the cards for a given hero are illustrated by the same picture. You don't get five different takes of, say, Spider-man in action -- you get one picture of him, on cards with five different names. This certainly saved on their art budget for the game (which was already low, because I think this art may have been reused from Upper Deck's earlier trading card game, VS.), but it makes the game very hard to play. Whenever a new card is turned over and becomes available for player acquisition, you can't tell what the card is at a glance, because it could be any of five different possibilities.

This inability to recognize cards at a distance magnifies one of the big problems of most deck building games: you don't tend to care much what the other players are doing on their turns. It's common among deck building games just to focus on planning your own circus-like shenanigans, which can often get so convoluted that other players lose interest as it is. Add to that normal inclination the fact that you really can't see what cards your opponent is playing thanks to this art issue, and the wait for your own turn feels even longer. And it feels long. Legendary can be played with up to five players (which is how I experienced it), which amounts to a lot of down time. It took me only a few turns to grow rather frustrated with all the waiting between my turns.

I suppose in fairness, I should say that Legendary didn't really feel all that much less satisfying to me than the other big names in the deck building genre -- Dominion and Ascension. I find the genre to be an interesting idea in principle that I think hasn't quite been executed well in practice. Legendary is no exception in this regard. (Though I suppose there are a plethora of other deck building games out there. Maybe I just haven't played the one for me yet.) I would give Legendary a D+.