Marvel Legendary - what the?!

Played this last night. I liked the gameplay well enough. I still feel like Thunderstone best matches the theme to gameplay, but this one was ok.

However...the card design!

First, every card has the same back which makes pre- and- post game sorting a pain in the ass. Second, all of the hero cards have the _exact_ same image and terrible ones at that!?! Third, the font is too damn small when there's plenty of room. Fourth, the 'gameboard' is a mess (the 'bank' spot should be called 'ninja' if you go by the image.)

The thing is, I don't get any of it. With the Marvel license they should have access to planty of top rate, clean character illustrations. Being from Upper Deck, you'd think they'd know card game design.

This one was put together with no thought. The gameplay is kinda fun though.

Have we hammered this one here yet?

If I recall correctly it was reviewed as 'good' and then disassembled in the comments. Artwise it's a schnauzer when it should have been incredible. The box is designed for ten expansions . . . has one come out yet?

I'll second you 'kind of fun' opinion. Easily better than 'not all that fun.'

S.

From talking with the owner, one is coming out soon. Sounds like Deadpool is one of the characters, so that didn't excite me too much.

I love this game. I love the way the cards play abilities echo the superheroes powers and personalities. Unfortunately, the graphic layout of the cards leaves MUCH to be desired. Just really bad and sometimes important symbols are unreadable. Also,set up time is a bit of a drag. Sill love it though. It has X-Men and Avengers!

I like it a lot, too. It kind of steals the better aspects of Dominion, Acsension, Thunderstone and Shadowrift. Deck-building, but with a fun scenario type of format. I still prefer Shadowrift for a thematic deck-builder, but Legendary is solid.

Yes, setup and tear-down is a bit of a pain, though. They did just release an expansion with tons of new characters and schemes. Due to whining by many on BGG, they now have unique art for each hero card, whereas it used to be one piece of art with the different cards made distinct by the borders. I much prefer the original way, because that definitely helped distinguish each hero's cards, making it easier for setup and clean up.

Yah I had some mixed feelings about it. I like that the expansion and playing it correctly made it harder.

On the other hand, the underworld goons, whose purpose seems to be to drain cards out of your hand and force you to waste your turn by defeating/bribing them only to have to give back the trophy cards due to the "master strike", or whatever it was called, was frustrating. Uba and I took the heat for the goons and both of us had scanty decks of shit starting cards because of this while Al and Josh were able to get some decent decks going because of the breathing space we gave them.

In a co-operative sense this worked out alright, I guess but it did leave me feeling like I was spinning my wheels. And it certainly left me out of any chance to be called the winner.

And man, some of the art work on those new cards....continuing the tradition of being horrible.. Who stuck the watermelons in the back of Daredevil's pants?

When you consider that at least 50% of Marvel's success in the comic industry was due to appealing artwork, the crappy graphic design of this game is actually unforgivable. This game is basically the modern equivalent of one those cruddy '70s roll-and-move boardgames published only to cash in on the fleeting popularity of a random tv show.

I played DC Deckbuilding with QPCloudy two days ago. It was EXACTLY like Ascension, but with less bullshit, and better theme.

Still not big on card games, especially Deckbuilding games, but all in all, it was better than most.

The gameplay is really pretty solid and fun, though, so I'd hate for that to get lost in the valid critiques of the art and graphic design. I thought they had moved strictly to Marvel "bullpen" artists for the Dark City expansion, but I'll admit I haven't looked closely at the art of these cards yet to see whether they were noticeably better than the original set's. As I understand it, the art is original to the game; whether that's a good idea or not is another question.

I have no idea where the idea came about that the original box was big enough for 10 expansions. If you sleeve the cards, even Dark City won't really fit in there very well (although others vehemently disagree; I ended up taking my Dark City cards back out and filing them into their own box.

I'd say on the BGG scale that this game is a low 8 for me. What's more than a little frustrating about it is that it could've been not just a pretty good but a pretty great game if not for nagging issues:

-- Card design: Horrid. Absolutely legitimate gripe. Unreadable yellow font against variably colored backgrounds for card titles, and insufficient opacity behind the main card text. Inexcusable. Should've been fixed in Dark City and wasn't. Presumably won't get fixed ever.

-- Card art: I think it's decent enough by and large. Tastes vary. But I tihnk that we're having this debate at all suggests that there's a missed opportunity here.

-- Box design: I appreciate that the box accommodates sleeving--which I consider important in a high-wear game like this--but I hate, hate, hate the attempt at sectioning off the insert. Just give me two long bins and let me sort it out; don't try to guess how I'm going to divide my cards up. There's also the issue that, particularly for unsleeved cards, the insert is vastly too much space; with sleeves it's better, but, as I noted above, there's really not enough room for Dark City, let alone anything after. For Thuderstone, by contrast, I have Advance and the first two expansions together, albeit not using quality-thickness sleeves.

-- Board: Ugh. "Functional" would be the best description. "Ugly" wouldn't be going all that much too far. Opacity is a problem here, too: it's hard to see whether there are cards in particular locations given how busy the background is in the HQ and, particularly, the City. Board is adequately sized but has no particular storage slot in the original box, so it just flops in there leaving about a quarter of the box area uncovered. Why not just go all the way, again like Thunderstone, and make a box-sized board? There's certainly potential reason to, as the KO area is big if you mix the cards together but small if you try to keep stacks separate to reduce breakdown time.

-- Setup/breakdown. Too long, really, and shortsightedly made worse by UD's decision not to label the dividers or (arguably) to provide enough dividers between the base game and Dark City (which doesn't come with any).

-- Difficulty. I've played this mainly as a semicooperative game with an individual winner, but the base game is too easy as a coop. The fact that Dark City masterminds are, in the main, vastly harder than the base game ones suggests a certain lack of foresight in the design. At a basic level, the Dark City masterminds make the base game ones look kind of silly easy, which doesn't make that much thematic sense. I'd like UD to consider ways to include revised or variant cards for the original masterminds in later sets, but there's no indication of that.

-- Scaling. As others have documented well on BGG, the game is best with 3-4, quite a bit easier with 2, and quite a bit harder with 5. Not all games scale well, of course, but this points to some basic design problems, I think, given that the balancing mechanisms don't work all that well for some types of schemes. It all just adds to the randomness of whether a particular game will be super easy or super hard or somewhere in between, a problem not really helped by UD's inclusion of umpteen minor variants to address difficulty.

Sounds like I don't like the game, but I've played it 6 times since Father's Day (a lot for me) and would like to play some more. It's just all this stuff that holds the game back unnecessarily from being what it could've been.

I'm going to go with the expansion being 'not better' when it comes to the cards:



What's her name? The attack is called what?

I'm sorry, Marvel doesn't have the rights to any classic Elektra Frank Miller art? Bad art aside, who made the call for yellow text on a yellow background?

How about these Punishers?
Are these all from the same artist? Kinda looks like it, but Castle has four very different faces. Oy!



Again, no John Romita Jr or Mike Zeck?
C'mon Marvel!


I always find myself enjoying the play of deckbuilders, but have yet to find the one to buy. I was kinda hoping this could be it. I'm passing though. The two frontrunners for me are still Dominion and Thunderstone, with Thunderstone ahead just a little. Maybe the upcoming Shadowrun:Crossfire will be the one.

EDIT: No, wait. Isn't there some deckbuilder coming out about trains? It may even be called...Train. That might do it.

I'm not an expert on these kinds of legal affairs, but Marvel may own the rights, but those artists get royalties every time their work gets reprinted. It's cheaper to use the crappy art. Also why that Batman game had the crappy commercial artist type art.

Seems a strange attack for The Punisher....Hail of Bullshit?

Lifeless euro with painfully obvious decisions. The art is at best a "disappointment". I'm just thanking God that Jeff White is here to keep you bozos straight when I'm at work, because he's the only person on the whole God Damned Web Site making any sense right now! Even Engineer Al is talking stupidese, and he's a smart guy. Al, it's not that your mother and I are angry at you, it's more that we're . . . disappointed. We expected more. We thought you knew better.

All of these games are rehashes of the same thing. All of these games are complete information prior to decision, which means you can lay your cards on the table and come to mutual agreement on how to play. The only thing worse than a lifeless deck-builder is a cooperative lifeless deck-builder. GET THEE TO A REAL GAME .

At some point deck-building will become a supporting mechanic as it should be and it will be a valuable spice to the main course.

S.

Sagrilarus wrote: he's a smart guy.

Don't you think you might want to "rephrase" that, Ladie?


I have fun playing this game. Some people need more than that, but fun is at the core of the games that I enjoy. And art is subjective.