Marvel Heroes is an excellent game that looks great and plays well…once you get your head round the rulebook. Unfortunately, it’s been translated from Italian and isn’t the clearest set of instructions in the world. Don’t start drinking until you’ve sorted out the details, and don’t buy this for your kids and expect them to figure it out.
Stick with it, though, and you’ll be rewarded. The game’s excellent at capturing the spirit of the comics, down to the little explosion symbols on the combat dice, which tell you how bad you’ve hurt the leotard-clad dude you’re fighting.
Speaking of fighting, the Marvel Heroes system combines a paper-rock-scissors thing with handfuls of the funny red dice mentioned above. Before battle is joined, the hero and villain involved secretly select which superpower they’re going to use. Heroes generallly have three evocatively named options (e.g. Thor has Mystical Blasts, Mjolnir Whirl and Thunder God). Combat has the potential to last three rounds – first the hero attacks, then the villain does, and if they’re both still standing, there’s a contest of wills.
If you love rolling dice, totalling up hits…and maybe adding some comic sound effects for good measure, it’s a great system. There’s a decent amount of luck to Marvel Heroes, and die-hard comic book fans might get mad when the Mole Man manages to deliver a TKO to The Thing.
As is so often the case with Fantasy Flight games, one of the biggest drawcards is the collection of pieces. Once they’ve tossed the brightly-coloured-but-kinda-boring board aside, comic geeks will spend the first few minutes arguing over which of the fully painted figurines they’ll be controlling.
When the dust settles, each player gets a team of four heroes (The Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four or Marvel Knights), as well as the nemesis of one other player, which means you always have something to do. It’s a good way to combat the dread spectre of downtime, which plagues so many FFG titles.
On your turn, you and your super team will be flying or Fantasticaring around the Big Apple, trying to solve the various crimes taking place on a daily basis. Your heroes have various specialities, like “Mystery” and “Danger”, that give them the edge in conflicts they’re better suited to dealing with. Dr Strange is obviously gonna be better at dealing with weird mystical stuff than Wolverine, for example.
Meanwhile, your opponents will be busily do their best to put flies in your ointment, by playing villain cards and setting traps for your unwary do-gooders.
There’s heaps more to tell you about – villains completing master plans, flavoursome story cards and diabolical henchmen – but the Green Goblin’s just kidnapped Gwen Stacy, so I gotta go…
