A Tired Custom

The great promise of a legacy board game is the way it grows and changes while you play it. But you get that experience over the course of many, many plays that can take weeks or even months. It's only logical that someone would try to condense the same "evolving game" experience into a single-play game. That's Custom Heroes.

Each round of Custom Heroes begins with a shared deck of cards being dealt out evenly to all players. Each player also receives a random supply of transparencies they keep hidden behind a screen. The game comes with clear sleeves for all the cards, so that on your turn, you can pay the costs associated with one of your transparencies to slide it into the sleeve in front of the card, transforming it both visually (adding weapons to a character, for example) and mechanically (changing its number value).

It's a neat idea, but it's in service of a not-terribly-neat game. The game play is essentially identical to a public domain game you can play with a standard 52 card deck: President. (The most well-known published adaptation of that is The Great Dalmuti.) Basically, a "trick" opens with a player playing to the pot any number of cards all with a matching number. Play then proceeds around the table with everyone required to play the exact same total number of cards, while increasing the value played. The first player to run out of cards in hand wins the round; in Custom Heroes, that gives you victory points toward a winning score.

Meanwhile, players who finish the round later get more crafting points and transparencies to alter cards on future rounds -- a way to catch up. But every card you alter to help you in this round stays permanently changed when you reshuffle and redeal the deck for the next round. As the game unfolds over several rounds, an opponent's changed card might show up in your hand, and the mix of cards gets increasingly more diverse.

It's a trivially simple game... and in theory, I understand why. You have to have a simple skeleton for play here, so that altering the cards doesn't make it too complex in later rounds. But that's a tough balance to strike, and I don't think Custom Heroes does it very well. Round one is so straight-forward and without nuance that it simply isn't that fun. Your ability to win the hand is more a factor of luck than it is any strategy you might try to run.

If luck shuns you, though, you quickly wind up with an almost overwhelming number of potential card upgrade transparencies. The screens you use to hide them from the other players is so small that you end up stacking upgrades on top of each other, so you have to thumb through them all and grind the game to a halt every time you want to think about using one. Things can grow and change almost too fast.

And yet, they sort of have to, because the game doesn't actually last more than a couple rounds. This too, I can understand in theory. It's not that engaging a game, and if you were locked into it for, say, an hour or more, you'd get bored of it. (It barely sustains 30 minutes.) I can see the logic behind all the design choices here... yet I still find myself wishing that the game started with a "higher floor," unfolded a bit more slowly, and concluded with a "lower ceiling."

What I really wish is that it wasn't just so much random chaos. If you're a "serious gamer" who's ever played Fluxx with "less serious gamers," this experience will feel familiar. You don't play Custom Heroes so much as it plays you. There is a little bit more agency here than in Fluxx, I'd argue, so I'd certainly choose Custom Heroes to play (if forced to play one). Still, it all feels to me like a gimmick I hope someone else figures out how to use better somewhere else.

I'd give Custom Heroes a C-. It's short enough that I'd probably agree to another game of it, if that's what everyone else was keen to play. But it's not very satisfying, so I certainly wouldn't want it to be the only (or last) game of the night.