Chaos & Confetti

Chaos here!

This past weekend saw the release of the MCU’s latest adventure, The Marvels.  While I am normally already excited to delve into my collection of Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game and to have an excuse to think about anything Marvel related, I am especially excited this time because of how much I actually enjoyed The Marvels as a movie.  If it wasn’t for Guardians of the Galaxy: vol. 3 coming out right before The Marvels, I would probably say it’s my favorite MCU movie for years (at least since Spider-Man: No Way Home). 

Moving forward, I’d like to bring my focus back onto board gaming.  As usual, I’ve decided to use Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game to try to recapture the feeling of the latest MCU movie and to create a challenge for myself and Confetti.  And, since it’s been a while, let’s count this as a…

Chaos and Confetti Cooperative Challenge!!!

For those who don’t know how that works, the rules are simple.  Chaos and Confetti choose a cooperative board game to play.  Then, we craft a challenge around that board game and give ourselves one shot at overcoming it.  No restarts, redos, or retries.  We either rise as conquerors or leave as chumps.

For this challenge, we will take on: Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game.

The Challenge:

In honor of the recently debuted The Marvels,  I have created a scenario and setup for Legendary: Marvel a Deck Building Game that tries to capture certain elements of the movie.  From this point forward, there will be some spoilers for The Marvels.  We will be taking on this untested challenge, which will pit us against Deathbird, who will be a stand in for Dar-Benn.

The Setup:

 Heroes:

• Captain Marvel (Secret Wars vol. 1)
• Ms. Marvel (Champions)
• Nick Fury (base Legendary)
• Photon (Revelations)
• Valkyrie (Heroes of Asgard) 

Scheme: The Dark World of Svartalfheim (Heroes of Asgard)

Mastermind: Deathbird (X-Men)

Villain Groups: 

• Kree Starforce (Guardians of the Galaxy)
• Shi’ar Imperial Guard (X-Men)

Henchmen: Shi’ar Death Commandos (X-Men)

I have included sidekicks and new recruits as possible buys.

Setup Rationale:

Hero selection offered the easiest and most obvious starting point for this set up.  Immediately I could add the three main heroes: Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, and Photon (even if Monica doesn’t go by that name in the movie).  I chose normal Captain Marvel over S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Captain Marvel due to color scheme, but either (or both) could work.  Nick Fury made for another easy choice due to his large presence in the movie.  The final slot is the trickiest to fill, and would need to go to someone with a smaller role.  In the end, I went with Valkyrie, even though she is around for only one scene.  Players could opt for a few other options including: Kate Bishop.

For my mastermind, I picked Deathbird as a stand in for Dur-Benn.  Sure their characters are different, but they could both be generalized into angry space ladies.  Deathbird also has a large obscured weapon in her art that could totally be a hammer (Universal weapon).  Deathbird needs to lead the Shi’ar Imperial Guard, but we can just pretend those are Kree, and then bring in some actual Kree villains (Kree Starforce) for appropriate theming.  I also liked that Deathbird’s master strike brought in warships because enemy ships were definitely an issue in the movie as well.  Shi’ar commandos rounded out the villain deck as henchmen because more Shi’ar enemies would make Deathbird even stronger since she is strengthened by Shi’ar in the city.

Finally, The Dark World of Svartalfheim felt like a good scheme.  Dur-Been destroyed worlds in the film and in the final act tried to steal the Earth’s sun.  What better way to represent that then with a scheme that was the world being plunged into darkness as each twist arrives?

With the set up complete, it’s time to play the game!

The Game:

This is one of those games where the large villains showed up early and immediately starting applying pressure as the board started to fill up.  Confetti and I had to spend our first few turns buying cards and hoping things didn’t get too out of hand before we could respond properly.  What made this even tougher is that the henchmen came with human shields.  This made them weaker in body, but tougher to beat overall. Henchmen are normally easy wins are quick ways to create some breathing room.  The extra step of needing to clear a human shield, slowed down city clearing.  

In retrospect, the initial scramble to get into a decent place with a chance to get our bearings, unintentionally reflected the early movie.  Like our heroines, who were unexpectedly united and thrown into an adventure, we had to just make what we had work.

As the game progressed, we definitely pulled better cards into our decks, but the cohesion and consistency of our decks stills remained iffy.  Thanks to high cost cards all hitting the board around the same time, we had to scrape together what we could.  Eventually our decks started to find some synergy, but plenty of off-mechanics cards still gummed up the works.

Confetti slowly built up thrown artifacts and attack cards, while ditching recruit cards.  I, meanwhile, ended up with a Nick Fury that slowly upgraded my starting hand into SHIELD Officers (mostly Maria Hills).  This allowed me to buy some great cards, but I also had a bunch of recruit cards that diluted my buy powers.  Thankfully, I also had some draw power slowly building. 

To counteract our gains in deck building, we both picked up quite a few wounds, both from the mastermind and a few villains.

Everytime we made gains, the villain deck wanted to beat us back down with master strikes, big villains, and scheme twists.  Each scheme twist made buying and fighting even harder.

Eventually, we got to a point where I could hit Deathbird, but her special tactics ended up entering the city instead of going into victory piles.  So, that meant we had to hit her tactics again if we didn’t want them simply rejoining her deck.

Between Deathbird’s tactics and human shields, we ended up picking up quite a few bystanders, but most of them were regular, so they didn’t give much benefit.     

As we saw the villain deck thinning out, we knew loss could come at any moment.  I hit the mastermind a few times, and Confetti followed up by clearing the tactic from the city, but we weren’t sure our decks came together fast enough.  It didn’t help that the one ultimate card I got, Photon’s biggest cost card, benefitted from a clearer city.  We rarely had an open spot and never more than one after the game got going.  In an odd way, this benefited Confetti who had a few Valkyrie cards that liked seeing full spaces.

Eventually, Confetti got the final hit on Deathbird and brought the game to a victorious end.  It was good that Confetti picked up the win when she could because the final scheme twist was only three turns away and I had a very bad hand coming up.  

Chaos’ Score: 44

• 24 bystander points
• 5 henchmen points
• 15 villain points
• 0 mastermind points

Confetti’s Score: 51

• 8 bystander points
• 4 henchmen points
• 27 villain points
• 12 mastermind points

Chaos’ Final Thoughts:

It’s a sad twist of fate that I hit the mastermind three times but didn’t get to keep any of the tactics for points.  Alas, the win came but not without its losses too (like in the movie).

I enjoyed this game and setup, especially with the nail biting conclusion.  While the pieces were in place, the actual flavor of the most felt good but never fully present.  Maybe I needed a mechanic that involved more card switching.  Still a good game though, and one I was more than happy to play.

Confetti’s Final Thoughts:

I thought this was a fun set-up. I especially enjoyed stealing Chaos points from the mastermind tactics, although it definitely did also help us win. It really came down to the wire and I thought we were going to run out of time.