That said, I really, really wanted to like the City of Heroes card game, and I have some liking for it in spite of some of the downsides the game has. City of Heroes is a CCG produced by AEG and based on NCSoft's famous MMORPG by the same name. Dave Williams is the lead designer on the project.
In City of Heroes, each player plays a single super character pitted in battle against his opponent's character. Like the COH online game, the super has two power suites to select his powers from. Each player chooses which powers the super has, but the power suites the super has to choose from are printed right on the card representing the super himself. So, deck building is a two step process where you first choose the type of super you are going to play ranging from Blasters (imagine Cyclops in the comics), Controllers (imagine Puppet Master), Defenders (healers and team players), Scrappers (imagine Wolverine), and Tankers (imagine the Hulk). Next you select powers from the two suites listed on your character card.
See http://www.cohccg.com/archives/information/archetypes/ for list of Archetypes and their Power Suites.
Other types of cards include Sidekicks (so your hero doesn't have to fight alone), Edges (temporary tactical advantages), and Enhancements (permanent boosts to your hero's powers).
Each of the cards in the game other than your main character also has an Inspiration Icon on it. Consider Inspirations as secondary backup usages for a card in case you don't want or need the card's primary effect. They include minor temporary bonuses to attack and defend, ways to draw more cards, minor healing, etc.
Game play is, for the most part, simple. Two 8.5" x 11" rules pages explain the whole game. In general, each turn a player gets one and only one action, for example, to draw 2 cards, to play a card, or to use a power he has in play.
Attackers have a "to hit" value, and defenders have a "defense" value. If the "to hit" value is equal or greater than the "defense" value, the attack hits and does X hit points of damage. Characters have a hit point total that gets reduced by attacks, and you lose when your character gets to 0 hit points.
When you use powers, most of them fall into two categories: Toggle Powers turn themselves either on or off and stay that way, and normal powers that have a Recharge requirement. Rechargeable powers are used and then rotated 90, 180, or 270 degrees. They cannot be used again until they return to their original 0 degree original rotation. Every time you take a Recharge action, you rotate all your non-Toggle powers 90 degrees closer to 0 degrees (upright). This is an attempt to simulate certain aspects of endurance from the online game. It is a very novel mechanic, but unlike the online game where you can almost always use a minor power over and over again many times, this mechanic requires you to Recharge your powers regularly. Each hero has a built-in Innate Power on his character card which doesn't usually have a recharge rate, and that's the only thing you can regularly use without Recharging. The net result of this mechanic is that you have to literally spend more time putting powers into play, enhancing them, temporarily modifying them, and Recharging them, than you do actively using your powers. This is a major downer for I and all my friends who have played the game, and detracts from the game.
What this game really could have used would have been an endurance mechanic similar to the original Star Wars CCG Force mechanic, where a certain number of cards are set aside off the top of your deck at the start of the hand into a special pile and you use up this endurance to activate your powers and to play cards. Another idea would have been to allow you to Recharge any or all of your powers one click as a free action once per turn. Either of these would have been ways to allow you to keep the action happening instead of stalling or fiddling with cards instead of fighting. Unfortunately, while both of these are easy house rules to implement, the game is not really setup for these rules, and instead has the clunky feel of play a power, enhance a power, use the power, Recharge, Recharge, Recharge, use the power, meaning that you may, for some powers, use them only once every 3 or so turns. Since some powers require you to discard cards to activate them, you will have to spend some turns drawing cards, and so, for some powers you may actually end up using them only once every 4 or 5 turns, and you will use your minor powers, at best once every two turns, and more often than not, once every 3 turns or so.
If the game FELT faster it would have a much better superhero feel. There are so many non-attack, non-defense actions, that the game is perceived to be slower than it actually is. As is, it is sort of clunky, but does have a fantastically better superhero feel than the Vs. system which, aside from having superhero art, feels nothing like a supers game.
The Dave Williams' credit, the game is a tinkerer's dream. It's easy to come up with house rules, multi-player rules, etc. In fact, I think that the game will probably see a lot of multi-player team play even though there's no official rules currently for such play. Some character Archetypes are fantastically better suited to team play than to solo play. While this may be an intentional design idea, it really means that in one-on-one duels some of the sample decks that are available are almost guaranteed to lose against other sample decks. This is a real downer, and means that unless you want to play multi-player that you might, unless the card pools improve for some character archetypes, be stuck choosing from only one or two of the archetypes for duel play instead of having a wider selection. Thus far, the play balance of the demo decks has been, in a word, horrible. Some decks win like 90% of the time against other decks.
Much of the art is drawn from the City of Heroes comic book by Top Cow (owners of the Darkness, Witchblade, and Cyberforce franchises). The game looks great and the art, for the most part, is of consistently high quality. A couple of the super archetype symbols and their associated supermovement icons are a little too stylized to be intuitively obvious to people who are unfamiliar with the online MMORPG.
Marketing for this game has been innovative and fantastic. First, AEG printed up many sample decks at Gen Con. Second they have released completely playable demodecks and sample rules online at http://www.cohccg.com/ . Third they've had a build your own character contest and have announced a winner -- they are going to build a guy's homebrew character, give him copies of his character card and powers, etc. They are also cross-promoting with the comic book and the online game -- playing in CCG tourneys gives you clues to special MMORPG features, while playing the MMORPG can get you access to unique cards, etc. This is, in fact, the most intelligently marketed CCG I've ever seen. If this game had the marketing money that Upper Deck has for the Vs. system, it would likely dominate the Vs. system and chase it out of the market.
While this game is a really novel design, unfortunately, all the in-game play stalls involving doing everything other than actually interacting with your opponent make this game fall a bit flat at times, leaving me pretty bored often when I'm playing. Also, some of the card design really leads to pretty obvious tactical choices being used over and over and over again, making me wonder, in the long run, how much replay value this game will have in some match ups.
The game is currently available only in demodeck format, but soon 25-card Battlepacks will be released, designed for tournament draft play. They will include 11 fixed cards per pack, 13 mixed cards, and one rare. Enough to let you have a viable chance to get a character up and running. I'll be interested in seeing AEG's draft rules for these packs to see how they end up working in practice. I'd say that in terms of rules and trade dress this game has a great backbone, but I think the cards that the developers have chosen to put on that skeleton leave the game a little anorexic in terms of its actual play. It almost feels like a supers fight simulation, but falls flat just short of reaching that goal.
I'd give this game a B- for the time being, but continued development might turn this game around because the game's backbone is pretty strong and innovative, and the marketing, as I've noted, is very intelligent.
Only time will tell if AEG's downsizing of employees and product lines will leave this game with enough remaining support to actually survive in a CCG market with a major competitor like the Vs. System.
Check out http://www.cohccg.com/ and the fan site http://www.herovsvillain.com/ for support for this game.
