A Message From The Stars is a cooperative word game that was on Kickstarter back in October 2023.  It was a group of games (Through the Desert, Switchbacks, and A Message From The Stars) that was part of the same Kickstarter: see link here.   The only game we care about here today is A Message From The Stars.  This arrived at my house in last April 2024, after promising delivery in May 2024!  That’s right! It delivered early!  Congratulations to All Play for delivering early!

As a Kickstarter, it came with a little bit extra: fancy dice and dice holders!  See above right.

At first blush, this looks like it might be a party game!  It’s a smaller box and the player count is 2-8+ !

You should heed the label on the back of the game: The Strategy Line (see above).  This isn’t really a party game?  I guess Codenames, another word game, is considered a party game, but this is deeper than Codenames and much harder. Message From The Stars is much more of a deduction game with math and word elements.

Let’s Take A Look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

Even the size of the box suggests it might a party game: it’s relatively small.  See the Coke Can above for scale.

This is a game about two teams: the Aliens and the Scientists!  The two teams are trying to guess (cooperatively) each others words and some important letters!   This is, at its core, a word game.

Each team gets a card with some words on it: see above. The words are in three groups.

Each team (Aliens or Scientists) rolls some dice to choose randomly a word per column.  The Kickstarter expansion that came with the game (see more discussion of this below) holds the card and the dice; this is so you can see what words the Alien (pink above) is trying to communicate to the Scientists! The words are  Pollution (2), Mirrors (5), and President (6).

The Scientists do something similar: the words the Scientists are trying to communicate to the Aliens are Atlantis (2) , Field (4), and Factory (5).  See above.

You might think this sounds like a lot of party games.  But hold on! It gets more complicated! It this were just about guessing words, then, ya, this would be a by-the-numbers party game.  What makes this more complex is that you are also trying communicate which letters are important as well as the words!

There is a deck of 26 cards with the letters on the alphabet.  Each label is labelled with its frequency in words in the English Language: A is a very common letter (green above) and Z is a very very uncommon and labelled a “tough” letter (red above).  The Alien will be randomly choosing 6 of these letters!

Behind the Alien Screen are places for 6 letters: Trust, Amplify, and Suspicious letters. See above and below.

To be clear: this isn’t a cooperative game where you “win” or “lose”!  You just get a final score that tells you how well you did!  The final score of this cooperative game is a metric of how well the Scientists and Aliens communicated!  The final score is the number of words guess correctly (max 6: 3 words from the Aliens and 3 words from the Scientists) plus the number of letters guessed correctly (max 6)!  The maximum score is 6 + 6 = 12, which represents perfect communication.

The game last 4 rounds (in the cooperative mode), which each side providing single word clues to the other side in a round.

For example, over the course of the game, you can see the 4 clues the Aliens (above) provided to the Scientists.

Basically, in just 4 words (and a hash value), the Aliens have to communicate their 3 words and 6 letters, and the Scientists must communicate their 3 words similarly!

The hardest part of this game, which takes it away from a party game and into a deduction game, is that each clue word is also “scored” by how many matching letters it has!

Remember those 6 letters the Alien has?  If the word clue contains some of those 6 letters, the “hash score” value is given along with the word.  Disgusting is given a score of  – 2  for three reasons:

1. It contains the letter T (Trust +1), which starts the value off at 1
2. It contains the letter G (Trust +1), which increments the value to 2
3. Finally, it contains the S (Suspicious -), which negates the value to -2

The rules for the score are not simple, and it takes a few turns to kind of get what’s going on there.  You’ll notice that the word DISGUSTING is doing double-duty: it’s trying to communicate some of the letters AND also a clue on the first column (“Pollution”)!  Is DISGUSTING enough to imply POLLUTION?

There are a number of dry-erase boards for helping keep track of the word “hash scores” so you can try to reverse-engineer why the score was made!

See as Jeff (above) tries to reverse engineer “Hibernate” and “container” to see why they got their scores. Notice how nice and thin the letters are!

This game has fantastic components: everything in the game is dry-erase (the cards and the boards) so it’s easy to re-use them over and over!  Perhaps the best part is that the game uses ultra-fine dry-erase markers!  Recall how “thick” dry-erase markers ruined both The Revenant Society (see link here) and The Forests of Admiron (see link here).   I am glad to see the A Message From The Stars got the better dry-erase markers!!  This makes a huge difference in a word game!

For a game that looks like party game, A Message From The Stars has really, really good components.  Except for the die that comes with the base game …

The base game comes with just a single die you roll.  See above.  You probably want the expansion (below) with the cool dice.

The Expansion

You probably want to get the dice and box expansion (see above). It makes the game that much easier to play.

As a warning, there are absolutely NO INSTRUCTIONS on how to build the dice holders!  I had to look up an image online to see what they looked like!  As a community service, I am providing some pictures (below) of the what they look like when assembled!

Almost there …

Done!  Notice how nice the dice are too.  These holders just make the game a little easier to play.

Solo Play

There is absolutely no solo play in this game!  See the box above!  This is a game for 2 to 8+ players!  Boo for not following Saunders’ Law!!

Since there was no solo play, I just “pretended” to play both sides (mostly the Alien side) so I could get a sense of how everything works.  Once you see how the scoring system works, it clicks!  But it does take a little bit to “get” how this game works.  “Oh, my WORD is supposed to be both a clue for the words AND the letters!! Oh, that’s hard!“

I get why there’s no solo mode: you really can’t have any knowledge of what the other side is doing for their clues.  This is a game with a lot of implications and connotations and indirections with your word clues: it requires a good grasp of the English language and some math skills, but also knowledge of implicit and explicit meanings of words.

We’ve discussed The Changing Perspectives Idea here before, where you run both sides and “pretend” you don’t know what the other side is doing.  That’s a lot harder here in A Message From the Stars because the clues have so much open interpretation!  The Changing Perspectives Idea works so well in Shipwreck Arcana (see link here) because all information is precise: you can use logic to dictate your choices rather than any implications.   Here, in A Message From The Stars, not only do your words have connotation and denotation and context, but they also are chosen to help with the letters! There’s too much “innuendo” and “vaguery” in words for a clean Changing Perspectives Idea to work here.

So, no solo mode.  

Cooperative Mode

So, we’ve tried this a number of groups.   Sara and Teresa and myself played a 3-Player game (I was the Alien, they were the Scientists).

They groked this game pretty quickly, and we got into it.  They liked it!  Sara and I have had good luck with Word Games; I played the Paperback Adventures, another word game, with Sara and we both loved it! See our adventures here!  And Teresa is very smart and precise.  Between the two of them and myself, we had a very good time.  But, me, Sara, and to a lesser extent Teresa, really like word games.   And the math Sara didn’t know, Teresa filled in on.  They were a perfect complement to each other.

Unfortunately, not all my sessions went that well.  See above, as Robert’s look of confusion (upper right) belies his disinterest in the game!  Robert’s a smart guy, but the rules are a little intimidating.  I give Robert a little bit of a pass because he was busy trying to get some work done in the background.  We didn’t have his full attention … and it’s clear this game requires your full attention!

At some point, Robert just walked away and left me and Jeff to play.

Jeff and I had a good time.  But Jeff didn’t love the game: his Math and deduction skills were good, but he doesn’t like word games.  He generally expressed an “admiration” for the game: “This is a good game, just not for me”.

Group Dependent

This is a game that is very group dependent. It has a weird cross-section: you have to like word games, you have to be able to do some math, and you have to be able to do logical deductions. It’s a very cool cross-section! And I love it! I love word games! I love math! I love deduction!

But the rules, especially for scoring the letters, can be very intimidating.  This definitely does not feel like a party game: it’s a very contemplative game as you traverse word, math, and deduction skills.

That picture of Robert walking away is kind of ominous and a little telling: you have to be completely focused on this game for it to be fun.   Otherwise, it’s too easy to get lost.

Know your group.  This game is very group dependent, more than many other games.

Conclusion

I give A Message From The Stars a very strong recommendation … but only for certain groups.  That cross-section of people who like words, maths, and deduction seems like a small set.   I think you’ll know from the description of the game whether this is for you or not.  

The components are great, and the production is quite good for this word game.  They even used ultra-fine dry erase markers!  That’s a gold star from me!  

I really liked this game, but you need to decide for yourself if this is a game for you and your friends.  If you are unsure, give the game a try at a convention or a game store.  I really liked it, and so did some of my friends.  But not all of them.

War of Kings: Marvel United is the next expansion we will look at from the Absorption Expansion Explosion of Multiverse Marvel United!  To be clear, you need one of the base games in order to play this: this is truly an expansion only.

We’ve looked at The Coming of Galactus  (see review here) and the Stretch Goals box/Team Decks (see review here), as well as the base game Multiverse Marvel United (see review here).

This week, we’ll dig deep into the heroes and villains from this set!

Why This One?

You might remember that there are 8 major expansions in this delivery of Multiverse (see 7 of them above).  Why are we concentrating on the lesser known War of Kings?

I was first introduced to the Inhumans (the heroes of The War of Kings expansion) back in December 1976. I still have the original comic where I met them! See above and below!

Something about this group of misfits enchanted me: the stern quiet of Black Bolt, his loyal wife Medusa, and the interesting group of heroes!

I try to remember why the Inhumans made such an impression on me … and I think the artist George Perez (see above) may have had something to do with that. I have always loved his art! In fact, George Perez was responsible for the art in Future Imperfect, the defining Maestro story (which we saw last time in Multiverse Marvel United).

Over the years, I have always loved The Inhumans cameos in The Fanastic Four! Issue #240 by John Byrne (see above and below) was a defining moment in their history as they move Attilan to the moon!

There’s something glorious and regal about the Inhumans. So, they had to be my next set to open!

Unboxing

The War of Kings is a standard (if smaller stature) sized box in the Marvel United line.  See above with a Can of Coke for perspective.

There are a bunch of distinct tokens you need for this set: we’ll see them as they come out in our games (see later below).

War of Kings comes with 4 new Locations: Attilan (remember that city Black Bolt lifted in Fantastic Four #240?), Blue Area of the Moon, Watcher Citadel … all part of the Inhuman’s mythology!  (For those of you who don’t know, the Watcher’s house is on the moon is near where the Inhumans live now).

War of Kings comes with two bad guys you can fight:  Gladiator (hero and villain, i..e., an anti-hero) and Vulcan (definitely a villain). They both operate VERY differently!  

There are seven Inhumans in this box (8 heroes if you count Gladiator): Medusa, Black Bolt, Lockjaw, Crystal, Karnak, Gorgon, Triton and Gladiator (left to right, top to bottom).

The minis are all pretty fantastic, with Crystal’s looking the most stunning!

The hero decks look great (not as great as Perez or Byrne, but still great and consistent with Marvel United).

The Villain decks also look great.

Over the course of 4 games, we were able to playthrough all villains and heroes to get a sense of this set! Each game revealed something interesting about each of the heroes and villains! Let’s go through the games and see what we saw!

Vulcan vs. Black Bolt and Medusa

In the comics, Black Bolt and Medusa are husband and wife (king and queen).  The new mechanism of bond seems to be very thematic: it allows you to choose which Black Bolt/Medusa card you want from the storyline!  See above. This cool feature pretty much dictated that I needed to play with Black Bolt and Medusa  in my first two hero game!  I wanted to see how well that worked!

Also, both Black Bolt and Medusa have the Terrigenesis card as their Starting Hand card.  What is that crazy thing Terrigenesis?

The Terrigen Mist tokens go into the board (one at each location) and if a Terrigen Mist token is there (and a Terrigenesis card is up), that hero may draw that token! See rules above.

See a sample Terrigen Mist token above.  It’s turned face-down: if you draw it, you must use the symbol immediately!   Most of the Inhumans have this as their starting Hand card (Lockjaw and Karnak don’t … we’ll see why below).  This mechanism is just a nice way to add “a little more power” to the Inhumans.   It’s not game-breaking, as you don’t know what symbol you might get, and it really just gives you one more symbol you might be able to use!  But it’s something all the Inhumans “share”.

Take a look at Black Bolt’s Terrigenesis card above.

The Villain here is Vulcan, and he’s rough!!! 

Every time the heroes get KO’d, they have to take a KO token: if the heroes are ever KO’d too many times, they lose (4 times in 2-Player game, more for more players)!  See above as Medusa has been KO’d twice and Black Bolt once!

Another thing that’s rough about Vulcan is that when he BAMS, he makes players discard a card (at the start of his turn) for every card with Special Effects!  That makes you rethink the cards you play the cards with Special Effects!!  See above, as Medusa knows she might have to discard a card: her Bond with Black Bolt will be used against here! Interestingly, this isn’t called damage, implying damage mitigation techniques won’t work against it.

This is a very difficult mechanism to play against, as most heroes have many Special Effects.  I wish this had been specified a little better, as I think there are some open questions about this:

One: What’s Damage? Discarding a card is akin to damage, so does it count as “damage”?  We don’t think so, as it’s not explicitly called damage, just “discard 1 card”.  See above. (This would useful for Triton, we can stop all damage with some Special Effects).

Two:  What’s Blank? One of the Threat cards in Vulcan’s set is Power Suppression which “…treat Special Effects on all their cards as blank this turn”.  What does that mean? Can Heroes use the BAM effects against Vulcan and NOT take damage if we start on one of those Locations??  It’s really not clear, but the phrasing suggests “this turn” which is just for the Hero’s Turn? Maybe?  It’s not clear. It would be cool if we could be strategic and try to use those Locations against Vulcan.  But, I think the phrasing suggests you can’t do that: the duration of the effect is just the player’s turn, I think?

The problem with too many expansions is that sometimes things can get underspecified: this is an example of that.  We saw some of this underspecificity in the Absorption Expansion when we fought Emma Frost.  To move forward and not bog down, we went ahead and played with the interpretations that hurt the heroes the most (discarding 1 card is NOT damage, and Special Effects are only blank during the Hero turn).

Moving forward, it was an interesting battle!  Since Vulcan does damage to 3 Locations (his and adjacent) when he BAMS (and he BAMS a lot), we had to work to make sure Black Bolt and Medusa were far enough away from each other so that Vulcan’s BAMs didn’t damage both of them (every KO is a KO token that brings us closer to end game).  We had to mitigate that as much as possible to keep the KOs under control!

The use of the Special Effects was worrisome too, as it made you reconsider when to use them!  In the end, it was Medusa’s Bond with Black Bolt that allowed her to use Black Bolt’s double-double wild to take down Vulcan!

Despite the issues with underspecificity of some of Vulcan’s rules, this made for a really interesting puzzle: when do you use Special Effects card and when do you not?  And the Special Effects on Black Bolt and Medusa seemed very thematic.   This was a great game: thematic and engaging with lots of thought and strategy!

Vulcan vs. Lockjaw and Crystal

Crystal has Terrigenesis like the other Inhumans.

Lockjaw is a dog, so he doesn’t have Terrigenesis.  He’s a dog.  A smart dog, a cute dog, a good dog, a loyal dog, a teleporting dog (!),  but still a dog.

Crystal and Lockjaw really struggled against Vulcan, losing after too many KOs!

There’s something sad about seeing LockJaw KO’d on his turn: What villain would do this to a dog???

Crystal even has a cool power to put up a Seismic Barrier: see above!  … but it didn’t work as we as hoped, because Vulcan still does damage to his location AND adjacent Locations, so even when he was stopped, he still did damage to Crystal!

In the end, Vulcan won by KOing Crystal one too many times.

I think that Crystal’s cards are cool, but she doesn’t seem ideal against Vulcan.  To use the Seismic Barrier against Vulcan requires two plays in the Storyline: one to put it down, and one to get away!  

One important lesson I got from this session is that Lockjaw is probably the perfect hero for newer players!!!  He’s a dog, which most people love, and he’s cute, and he’s not too hard to play.  Lockjaw isn’t the most powerful or more interesting deck, but he’s fun and simple to play.

Crystal is interesting, but you have to know how to use her deck well.

Gladiator vs. Karnak and Gorgon

Gorgon is just kind of a heavy weight attacker: his Starting Hand card is Terrigenesis, like most of the Inhumans.

Karnak is a little different for Starting Hand: his Foresight card (see above) allows players to do a little more planning (by looking at the top few Master Plan cards).  I didn’t use this ability too much with Gladiator, as we were too busy taking out threats/civilians/thugs.  

Gladiator is SO DIFFERENT from any other  villain from Marvel United!  

 

As an anti-hero, Gladiator has a Hero Hand … which you use when he is a villain! Whaaat??

Gladiator can’t be defeated by doing damage to him.  (Gladiator is basically one of Marvel’s answer to Superman).  Basically, he duels the players every so often, and you keep score!  Whosoever has more points wins!  In a 2-Player games the Heroes need 3 victories to win (see Heroes Duel Track above),  but Gladiator wins if he gets 3 victories (see Gladiator Duel Track above)!

A duel is all about Matching symbols on cards!  When you duel Gladiator, he draws a number of Hero cards (usually 2, sometimes 3 if a particular threat is on the board), and you have to match symbols one card at a time!  See above as Karnak has a duel ready to go!

The first card is revealed: and Karnak can match the Wild!  The duel is underway!

But, the second Gladiator card is revealed and it’s a wild!   Karnak has no wild to match a wild!  Karnak loses this duel!!  Had Karnak matched the second wild, he would have won!

Karnak and Gorgon had a fantastic time dueling with Gladiator!

Before you go into a duel, you assess your hand: “Do I have enough variety of symbols to do a reasonable duel?”  It’s a very different way to think about fighting!  You can’t take down Gladiator, but you can gain his respect in combat!

And yes, you can use two cards to match symbols on a single card (see above, as Gorgon matches the second card with TWO cards).

While Vulcan’s rules are very poorly specified, Gladiator’s duel rules are VERY WELL specified!  See the rule sheet above.

On the end, Karnak and Gorgon gained Gladiator’s respect!  So much so, that he joined their team!

Vulcan vs. Gladiator and Triton

Gladiator was so impressed with the Inhumans, he joined them as friends!

Gladiator as a hero is pretty intense: he is a butt-kicker.  His Starting Hand is amazing (with two amazing cards), as he heals AND fends off Crisis tokens!! Holy cow! See above!

Triton is arguably the most interesting of all the Inhumans, as he puts Water Tokens out.  If these Water Tokens are on his space, he can some cool things!

See above as Communion With Water allows Triton to get a Wild token if there’s water!  There’s a bunch of cards like this Triton’s deck!  

Triton and Gladiator had little trouble taking out Vulcan.  

Although Vulcan’s “Discard 1 card for Heroes with Special Effects” was problematic (and still caused issues),  Gladiator and Triton made a good team.  Gladiator beat the crap of out Thugs and certain Threats, and Triton helped manage the other Threats.

It was no surprise when Gladiator beat the crap out of Vulcan to win the game!

Thoughts: What I Liked

There’s some really great ideas in this set:

1. Triton is fun to play, as he has to manage his Water Locations; he has to thoughtfully place and use his water cards.  This makes him different and really fun to play!
2. Black Bolt and Medusa’s bond cards were very interesting and effective: it really does encourage playing them together, as they really work well together.
3. Lockjaw, although one of the lesser heroes in this set, is still fun!  I would pull him out to newer players, or just to people who like dogs.  How can you go wrong with Lockjaw?  He’s such a good dog!
4. Gladiator is one of the more powerful hero characters I have played!  His specials allow removing crisis tokens!  And heal!!  And he has so many attacks!  I may have to bring him out as backup if I am having troubles …
5. Gladiator as a villain was so interesting!  The duel mechanic was just a breath of fresh air in this set!
6. Vulcan was a real a tough villain: the Special Effects and KO issues associated with him really make you rethink how you play …
7. Crystal can be interesting hero to play, but I think you have to know a little more about her deck before you dive in.
8. The Teregenesis effects were  … ok.  They weren’t game changing, but added a fun element to the game.
9. Karnak is a different flavor of hero with his Foresight: that ability could be game changing in some games!
10. Gorgon was cool!  He was a butt-kicker too!

What I Didn’t Like

The biggest complaint from this set was how poorly many of the rules around Vulcan were specified.  Does Power Suppression work in the player’s favor too? (I think the answer is no).  Does the BAM effect count as DAMAGE? (I think the answer is no).  Oh yes, and you aren’t allowed to play powers that affect Vulcan’s cards in the Storyline, but it seems to imply you can affect  the deck (which is not the storyline, so we did that a few times) … again, not 100% clear.

Given how much space they spent on specifying Gladiator’s duel, a few sentences describing Vulcan’s rules would have made this game that much more enjoyable.  I wouldn’t have been guessing.

Conclusion

Even though I still have many many Marvel United expansion boxes in shrink wrap, I can very definitely see The War of Kings this coming out again soon!

All the heroes and villains in this box are very interesting in some way!  Even Lockjaw, in his dog-like simplicity, becomes a hero I think people will want to play!

The War of Kings is a great expansion for Marvel United: 9/10 (probably would be 9.5/10 if Vulcan were specified better).

So, The Marvel Multiverse set finally materialized! See The Expansion Absorption Explosion for more! This week, we are just looking at the standalone box: Multiverse: Marvel United. In order to play any of the many many expansions we got during The Expansion Absorption Explosion, you need at least one of the standalone Marvel United boxes.

There are four standalone boxes!!! See above!! Which one do you want? If you like Avengers, the original (top right) Marvel United is your best best. If you like the X-Men, the X-Men Marvel United (bottom right) is probably for you. If you like Spider-Man and the animated movies, Spider-Geddon Marvel United (upper left) is for you! Finally, if you like Marvel Multiverse shows on Disney+ (like Loki and What IF?), the Multiverse Marvel United (bottom left) set is probably best for you.

So, why would you want this Multiverse box? We’ve discussed all the other standalone boxes somewhere else: you might consider looking at those posts before moving forward: Marvel United (see here and here), X-Men Marvel United, (see here), and Spider-Geddeon Marvel United (see here)!

Let’s take a look at the Multiverse version of the game!

Unboxing

This is the same size as all the other standalone boxes: see Coke can above for scale.

The production is very similar to the others: there’s two giant token sheets (this is one of the reasons you need a standalone version of the game: so you can get the tokens).

The miniatures for this game are just as good as any of the standalones!  Se above as the villains (red) rest with the heroes (blue) and one anti-hero (purple)!

There’s a bunch of new Locations, thematic to the heroes and villains we have in this set (another reason you need a standalone box: every game needs 6 locations).

It’s the cards that you need to play: there’s a deck of heroes, and a deck of villains!  And, something new … Equipment cards!

The equipment cards are new thing we’ll talk about below.

There’s 7 new heroes: Captain Carter (from What If?), Loki (a good guy: from the Loki TV show), Spider-Man 2099 (from the comic), IronHeart, Mighty Thor, Black Panther Suri, and Cosmic Ghost Rider!  See their decks above!

The new villains (with their threats) are Immortus, Emperor Doom, Maestro, and Cosmic Ghost Rider!

Each of the new Villains is very different: we’ll talk more about them below!

Overall, this looks great, just like every other standalone Marvel United box!

Equipment

This is a brand new thing: equipment cards.  See above!  Most (but not all heroes), can get some equipment cards!   Captain Carter gets a shield, Mighty Thor gets Mjolnir, Loki gets a Sceptre, Black Panther Suri gets a spear, and Cosmic Ghost Rider gets two things: A Hell Cycle and a Hellfire Chain!

Equipment is optional: if you want to take your equipment, you have to take your double-double wild card out of your deck … for game balance.  See above as Captain Carter and Loki trade out their double-double wilds for equipment!

Equipment has an active and inactive side: when active, you can use it effects listed: see Captain Carter’s shield above on the active side.

Once you use it, it becomes inactive, and has to be recharged to flip back over.  Typically, some hero cards can recharge it, or you can take the recharge action on the card (see above).  This is why you have to get rid of your double-double wilds: the items can be used multiple times!

Even if you don’t get a “specific” item, there are generic equipment cards that any hero can get (at the cost of a double-double wild card).  See above.

Interestingly, there are Equipment cards for heroes from OTHER sets: see some Equipment for Wasp and Spider-man, and others!  If you have the original Marvel United with Wasp, you can use these equipment cards!  

Overall, Equipment cards are my favorite new thing in the Marvel United system: the cards give you more choices during your turn!  And they make the heroes feel even more thematic (well, the specific equipment does).  Loki’s Scepter doesn’t feel that great, until he uses it to bash Maestro from across the board and take him down! It’s just like him to misdirect …

Playthroughs

Over about 2 weeks, I played through all 4 villains of the game, with a wide assortment of the heroes (usually a different pair of heroes per game).  Mostly, they were solo plays, but there was one cooperative play as well.  We’ve talked so much about the gameplay for Marvel United elsewhere (from the Expansion Absorption to any of our reviews), we’ll just concentrate on all the villains!  And along the way, we’ll take a look at the heroes in here!

Cosmic Ghost Rider vs. Captain Carter and Loki!

Cosmic Ghost Rider is the recommended first villain: he does seem the easiest.   

The Cosmic Ghost Rider is collecting the souls of evil men (the thugs), and if he gets enough souls (his track goes high), he wins!

I chose Captain Carter and Loki to battle Cosmic Ghost Rider.

Good times: Loki and Captain Carter didn’t have too many problems taking out Cosmic Ghost Rider, but they showed the power of their equipment: see above as Loki takes out Cosmic Ghost Rider with his Scepter from afar!

Good times.  We also got to see the flavor of Captain Carter: that shield makes her much more interesting! It can be used as defense or offense as needed: very thematic!! And Loki’s special effects are so interesting and thematic: he can redirect damage to somewhere else, or … the best bit … he can redirect a moving villain to any Location!  It totally fits with his trickster persona.

Captain Carter is probably my favorite Hero from this set ..

But Loki, with this Tricker abilities, is a close second!

It’s clear: the equipment cards work and they work well.  I am not sure I will ever play without them if I can.

Immortus vs.  Captain Carter and Loki

Immortus is an interesting villain: he’s an immortal, so you can’t “kill” him! All you can do to win is to complete all three missions: see a winning game above!

I liked Immortus: it changed up the gameplay enough to get around the normal arc the game takes (almost do two missions at the same time, so you can defeat the villain but get three turns as long as possible); in this case, you are working on all three missions all the time!

Immortus wasn’t hard or easy: he was a good challenge.

We stayed with Captain Carter and Loki for battling Immortus: they are my favorite combo!

Maestro vs. Cosmic Ghost Rider and Mighty Thor!

Maestro is by far the hardest villain in this game!

He heals ABOVE HIS STARTING HEALTH whenever a Hero is KO’d or an Overflow happens!  And the KO’s happens a lot, because Maestro Does 3 Damage to 1 Hero!! BAM!

At first, Mighty Thor’s Mjolnir equipment wasn’t that great (because it can only summon 2 cards). I almost reverted her back to having her extra double-double wild.

Cosmic Ghost Rider was an absolute blast to play! His two equipment cards give even more options when playing! And he babysits a baby Thanos! Cosmic Ghost Rider is probably my third favorite from this set.

The Maestro destroyed us in three games: see above as he moves to us and KO’s Mighty Thor!!

The problem is that the Maestro has a ton of hit points by the time you have to take him out (8? 9? 10?)  And you just can’t do enough damage!!!

Oh! And Rick Jones has to be on the same Location as The Maestro  (this is so thematic: this comes right out of the Comic book: Future Imperfect! ) or Maestro IGNORES the first two damage you do to him! See Rick Jones above!  He’s just a token …

We finally did defeat Maestro with Mjolnir!  We kept Mjolnir summon card at the bottom of Mighty Thor’s Deck when she was KO’d … so when we needed the full power of Mighty Thor and her hammer, would could summon her!!  Our fourth and final game resulted in a win!

Without a doubt, The Maestro is the hardest villain from this set.  He may even be harder than Galactus!  (See our review of the Coming of Galactus from a few weeks ago!).

Mighty Thor is great with her hammer … if you can use it right.  It may take a few plays before you get the hang of how to use the Mjolnir card.  Cosmic Ghost Rider was just fun to play with his equipment: you always felt you could do something interesting on his turn.

Emperor Doom vs. Captain Carter and Loki

I asked Sam who he wanted to play … he wanted to play Loki!  So, I played Captain Carter and we played a two player cooperative game against Emperor Doom!

Emperor Doom was a challenge: his little Doom tokens take over everything! If you don’t do something about them, you will lose!  Me and Sam squeaked out a win.

Emperor Doom is probably the second hardest villain of the bunch; we probably should have lost.

Conclusion

What If? is probably my favorite show out of the newer Marvel Universe stuff, and Captain Carter makes a great showing in that universe!  She is my favorite character by far in this set! Loki  redeems himself (in his Loki TV show), becoming a good guy! His hero character is so thematic with his trickster capabiltiies!

Most people probably don’t care as much about Mighty Thor and Black Panther Suri and Spider-man 2099 and some of the more obscure characters in this set (it’s not like Captain Carter is known outside of What If?).  And, if I were recommending a base Marvel United, it would be a hard sell to start with this one.

And yet, I think Multiverse Marvel United is my favorite of the standalone Marvel United titles!  The Equipment cards really enhance the game thematically and mechanically, given each Hero more flavor and more choice!

This set contains an odd assortment of characters, but if any of them speak to you personally, I would recommend Multiverse Marvel United.  For example: My friend Derek and I both loved What If? and Loki.  We’d have long discussions about the shows when the episodes were out.  He is a more recent board gamer, and if I were to try to get him into Marvel United, I would probably start with this set; I think these characters would speak to him.

The Equipment Cards are that cool: I think we’ve gotten to the point where Multiverse Marvel United has entered into 9.5 or even 10 territory.  I  love this game, and the Equipment cards make the game that much better.

In early August, The Marvel United Multiverse set arrived: see above and below. This is the #1 entry in my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024!  

This is crazy, because now we have the original Marvel United stuff, the X-Men Marvel United Stuff, and now the Multiverse Marvel United Stuff!  Have we lost our mind?  Yes.  Yes we have.

Unboxing

The bigger box comes with a bunch of expansions: Coming of the Galactus (which we reviewed a few weeks ago), War of Kings, Age of Apocalypse, World War Hulk, Annihilation, Maximum Carnage, Civil War, and Secret Invasion.  Whew!  That’s right: each one of those is an expansion for Marvel United!

We aren’t done yet! The other box comes with the Stretch Goals (the big box with more heroes and villains), The base Game Marvel Multiverse, Campaign Decks, Team Decks, Pet Companions, and a few other Stretch goals!  Oh, and how can we forget Fin Fang Foom? Whew!!

Is This Ridiculous?

Yes.  Yes, this is ridiculous.  Do you want to know why?  I still have about 10 of the original Marvel United expansions STILL IN SHRINK WRAP!  I am super excited to play The Sinister Six!  Thanos! Asgard!  And yet, they are still in shrink wrap.  And here I am, ordering 7 new expansion, 1 new base game, and a bunch of other extras.  

Why do I do it?  I love my Super Heroes.  I know, someday, I will play all of them.  Even if I am in the Old Folks home playing through them, I will play through them.  I actually think I will.

In the meantime, I am trying to enjoy what I have when I can.

Stretch Goals Unboxing

The Stretch Goals box is pretty mammoth.

Look at how many new heroes and villains we have! Holy Cow!

The four sides of the box (after the lid has been taken off) so all the heroes and villains in play here!

The Stretch Goals box has a new mat (for a new Wrecking Crew play), some new Locations, some new Tokens, and a few new rules (see the rulebook above).  

Underneath the minis are all the cards: heroes and villains.

There are SO MANY cards in the Stretch Goals box.

The top-level (3 levels of minis) are the villains (red) and one hero (blue).

The middle layer is a mix of heroes (blue) and anti-heroes (purple: characters that can be either villains or heroes).

The bottom layer is all heroes.  Note that Cassie from Ant-man is a HUGE mini, as is Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.

The upper left corner is empty!!! What’s that supposed to be?

Relax, It’s just Iron Lad: it’s included as a special Stretch Goal box.

Oh my goodness, there are so many cards. So many heroes. So many villains.

Playing From the Multiverse Stretch Goals

Cypher is new in this box.  He is a New Mutants character that was killed off.  

Even though Warlock comes from the previous set, he seems the proper character to team-up with Cypher: there were inseparable in the New Mutants.

Who are they fighting?  Illyana … err, Darkchild … she went a little “bad” for a while.  But it’s up to Cypher and Warlock to bring her back to sanity!  Darkchild is an anti-hero in the new Multiverse set.  

I had a fabulous time playing my old friends (well, they felt like old friends) and trying to bring Illyana back from the dark side!  

In the original Absorption Expansion mess, I was worried about how well “untried” combinations would work together; recall, we have some trouble with Emma Frost.  Part of the issue is just that there are so many heroes and power and villains and new things,  I do worry that they may not work well together.   

Luckily, most of my games from this set so far have seemed fairly balanced.

Team Decks

The Team Decks are a new way to give you more choice!  Basically, there are “two extra” choices you can use on your turn; instead of your own cards, you can choose to not draw and just use one the Team Deck cards instead (there are usually 6 Team Cards total).

There’s a price to use the Team Decks …  well, two prices … well, three prices …
1) All members of the team have to get rid of the double-double wild card from their deck (for balance). 
2) There is also a “bad” Team Deck card, where you have to play it facedown to the storyline to get rid of it!  
3) You actually have to be a member of that team …

The Team Decks adds a little more “drama” to the game, but it also adds more choices!  It’s not affected by KO’d effects, it’s just another option in case you don’t have quite what you need.

I liked the idea of Team Decks; it simply adds more choice to the game.

The New Mutants Team Deck was in the Promo Team Packs, but there are several other Team Decks …  like tons of Teams and Team Decks.

I would recommend the Team Decks to “add some spice” to your Marvel United games.  Find a group of heroes you like, and use Team Decks!  I wouldn’t recommend using the Team Decks unless you are fairly experienced: Team Decks may throw off new-comers off for their first few games.

Help! I’m Drowning, But In a Good Way!

I am very happy I got the new Marvel United Multiverse set, despite the fact that I am drowning in Marvel United content.   Find me when I am in the Old Folks home in a number of years, and I’d be happy to play any of the Marvel United expansions that are still in shrink at that point … I mean, I promise I will play them eventually … the good news is that they will still be playable for many years to come! 

Defenders of the Wild is a cooperative tactical fighting game that was on Kickstarter back in October 2023.  It promised delivery in August 2024, and lo and behold, it arrived at my house in early August 2024!  A Kickstarter that delivers on time!  That never happens!

I was initially drawn to this game because of the art.  See above: The art of Meg Lemieur permeates the game and it is gorgeous.  I think that art is a big component of why this made the #9 spot on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024!

The game looks to be something like a cooperative version of Root: cute animals are at war …  not with each other, but with the machines threatening to take over the forest!

This looks to be a cooperative game with some strategy and tactics.

I see a hex map (see above) and the game immediately has a war game quality to it. And that’s not a wrong assessment for this; Defenders of the Wild has elements of a cooperative war game.

This a slightly deeper and more technical game than some cooperative games, so the 14+ age requirement is fairly accurate. Most of my playtimes have been about 20% longer than listed (maybe 1 hour 20 minutes or so), but the play time on the box is still fairly accurate. I have also played the game at 1, 2, and 3 players, and it seems to work at all those player counts.

Let’s take a closer look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

I was surprised when Defenders of the Wild arrived: it’s a smaller box than I expected! See above and below with a Coke can for scale.

Despite the smaller size, the game is gorgeous.

In the game, each player chooses one of 4 factions to play: the factions define which deck of cards you get (see above) and the tokens you get (see below).

You can see why a Root comparison is obvious here with the cutesy but fighty meeples (above). Even the colors of the meeples seem to imply Root.

Each player then grabs up their player board, cards, camp, and chooses one of the two Organizers: the Organizers (see Thexuloa and Nextor above) are the “leaders” of your faction, and form the flavor of the Defender deck you get.

You don’t get all the Defenders from a deck: you only get a subset.  If you choose Thexulia, you get the Defenders listed above.

Nextor (above) gives your Defenders deck a slightly different flavor from the same deck of Defenders.

The Defenders (like Rintraw above) are the cards you play during the game.  You have twelve Defenders that you cycle through (and then reshuffle if needed).

Every turn, you must play a Defender: each Defender gives you three things (See Rintraw above as an example):
1) The number of action points (lower left: 4 for Rintraw above): how many actions can you do that turn?
2) Preferred terrain (upper left: Plains for Rintraw): what terrain do you travel best through?
3) Special: when you reveal “something” usually happens (bottom of card): what happens when I reveal the card?

Depending on where you are in the game, you will have three or fewer Defenders to choose from: see above as we have a full complement of Defenders.

You DO NOT get a new Defender card every turn: you ONLY draw back to your hand limit (3) when you build a new camp!  See above as the Zyrinn prepares to build a camp and get her three Defenders back!  You must be building all the time to get your Defenders back!

You can only build a camp if you have enough “support” in the game:  The little pawn on the circular support board above denotes “how much support” you have: you can’t build a camp until the pawn reaches the next campsite!

How do you get support?  A bunch of actions each give you one support: see the Summary cards above! Every time you Clear Pollution, Destroy a Mech, Breach a Wall, Rewild a Factory, you get a +1 support and your pawn moves forward closer to a camp.

This is a tactical game (with some strategy): players will be moving around the map cleaning up the pollution (the little hexes), taking out Mechs (the small silver claws) and breaching walls built by the machines!

This is a game about cleaning up the wilds: the pollution, toxic waste, the mechs, and the factories.  Players loses if too much of the forest becomes toxic, a factory needs to be built and there’s no more, or 2 Defenders from the same Habitat are killed.

How do factories, mechs, and pollution come about?  From the Machine cards: see above.  One machine card comes out after every turn and builds factories, spreads pollution, or generates more mechs.  The same 7 cards are shuffled and come out over and over.  Each Machine card is very distinct and generates “bad stuff” in a very particular way.

Players win if they “rewild” all of the 5 the 5 factories (see the purple hexes above: they used to be factories) and build all of their camps!  

The game has beautiful art and a very good production.

The components are high-quality with
1) wooden meeples, camps, and organizers
2) linen-finished cards
3) thick cardboard hexes
4) beautiful art

The game unboxes and makes you think: “This game looks cool“.

Rulebook

The rulebook is okay.   There are certain things I really like about it, and certain things I really don’t.

It gets a B- on the Chair Test: The font and form factor are both a little small, so it’s a little harder to see it on the chair text to me.  Also, there is a lot of text in the book (see above): it really needed more accompanying pictures.  But, it stays in the B range because the rulebook does NOT flop over the edges: it stays open and I can consult it on the chair next to me.

The Components page is great: it shows all the components and marks them so you can correlate the stuff.  Good job!

The set-up is pretty good, but it has some flaws.  For one, there’s a lot of text, especially since it spills over in the next page.

There is generally a lot of text in the rulebook (see above); it feels like a few more pictures would have helped.  Also, sometimes the rulebook reads like a legal document.

An index would have been nice; there’s a lot of rules in this rulebook.

The rulebook ends with a description of the cards/Defenders in each deck.  This wasn’t the most useful thing to put on the back because the descriptions don’t say anything more than the cards.  I would have preferred a glossary or something close to an index.

The rulebook was very text-heavy, needed some more pictures, needed a few more elaborations (see sections below), and it probably needed a glossary or index (as it’s very rules heavy).  It was ok. I was able to learn the game from the rulebook pretty well, but it took a few tries.

Solo Plays

Defenders of the Wild supports solo play (congratulations for following Saunders’ Law).  See the back of the box above.

Unfortunately, the solo rules take up half of a page, full of rules that are exceptions to the base game. See above.  The basic idea is that you play as a 2-Player game, but with some non-standard way of handling the Defender cards.

This game has so very many rules, I can’t recommend throwing another set of rules at the solo player.  I ended up just playing all my solo games as a two-handed two-player game, where I alternated between players like a normal 2-player game.  There are no exceptional rules when you play two-handed two-player; the game plays normally and  this seemed to work just fine.  For your first learning game, I absolutely recommend playing this way: there are far too many rules for you to be throwing another half-page of new rules at the players.  

My first solo game ended in a win, as I rewilded all the factories without dying!  See above. BUT, as it turns out, I got a lot of rules wrong.   It took me about four (five?) gameplays to get all the rules down; there are a lot of rules in this game.

My second and third solo games were pretty rotten. 

I got smashed by toxic waste in my second game (when three pollutions congregate on a single spot, it turns into toxic waste).  Too many toxic wastes came out, and I just lost quickly!  It was very depressing.

My third game, where I got most of the rules right, was a defeat as my second Defender got crushed (recall: you lose if a SECOND Defender from a faction dies).  I started to get the cadence of the game by the third game, as I was close to a win: I had one factory left.

Unfortunately, my loss on the third game had me worried that the game might be too random. Whether I won or lost depended on just a few die rolls or card flips.

Cooperative Games

My first cooperative play (after 3 solo games) was a 2-Player game with Sam. There were still one or two rules I was getting wrong: having Sam there forced me to rethink/resolve some of those.

Our 2-Player game was also lost by too much Toxic Waste: see above. We couldn’t get into the Factories to rewild them (for various reasons), so the Build Factories action becomes “spew pollution” when there is no enclosed space for a factory.

We were doing “okay” in the game until the Bad News (the Machine cards) just seemed to conspire against us: we had 4 factories built in so many rounds, then pollution just spilled out as we couldn’t clean up or shut them down.  It was very depressing.  We didn’t feel like we could do anything about it.

My next cooperative game was a 3-Player game.

Even after five games under our belt (solo and co-op), we were still “discovering” or “reinterpreting” the rules.  

For example: You lose if you can’t build the final factory, but what does that mean?  Does there have to be an enclosed area out (we think so, but we weren’t sure)?

Our game ended in a loss because of one card flip: we had no way to mitigate the Machine card that came out!  All Teresa had to do was use one action to build her final camp, and we lost because of the way the Machine cards came out.  I suppose it was suspenseful that we lost on a final Machine card, but it felt anti-climactic.  “Oh, we lost because of something random we can’t do anything about?”

One thing I will say: the game feels “easier” with more players.  Why? You have more Defenders that can die (6 = 3 * 2 for a 3-Player game), you have more camps on the board where you can rest or gain tokens at (as the camps are much more likely to be in reach with more players, as there are more of them), and Defender cards that help all players help more players, and there’s more “reach” as players can spread out to get the Factories/Pollution/Toxic Waste under control quicker.

In a 1 and 2-Player game, I/We struggled hard to get stuff done, to move, to clean, to build.  In a 3-Player game, it seemed a little easier to get stuff done.

What I Liked

One: This game looks good on the table and the components are high quality.

Two: I like how the woodland creatures are well-colored coded and consistent, and the Mechs are all silver and metallic. It’s very clear what are the natural forest pieces, and what are the metal intruders.

Three: I love the art in this game. Meg Lemieur knocked it out of the park.

Four: This rulebook isn’t great, as it misses some elaborations/descriptions of rules, but it does something that most cooperative games don’t do: Defenders of the Wild tries to specify what happens in all edge cases when there are questions.  Most cooperative games just throw their hands up in the air and say “players just choose something together if there’s a question” … which I always think is a cop-out.  I write about this issue in more detail here in Resolving Ambiguity in Cooperative Games.   For all of its issues, I really have to applaud Defenders of the Wild for trying to specify all edge cases!  This leads to some weird/fiddly rules (“you have to preserve the arrow direction on the factories when you move or flip them”, “Machines reset on hex boundaries after scanning in the direction of the Direction Circle”), but it’s all in the name of specifying the behaviour of the Bad Guys. 

I stand-up and applaud Defenders of the Wild for this.  It’s refreshing to see a cooperative game try to be complete in specifying edge cases.

What I Didn’t Like

One: Why are there Communication Restrictions? I didn’t discuss it in the overview, but this game has restrictions on communications when choosing the Defender to play: all players all shut-up, can’t say anything, and must choose the Defender to play in silence.  See rules page 10 (above).

I hated this Communication Restrictions and my friends hated this Communication Restriction.  Rules like this are almost always to keep the Alpha Player in check (so one player doesn’t tell everyone what to do).   In this game, I don’t think that’s much of an issue.  In fact, it made the game less cooperative, less strategic, and less fun.  Each player’s turn “tends” to be like a multiplayer solitaire turn anyways: a player takes his turn and others don’t really get involved; in fact, there’s nothing anyone else can do on your turn!  So, each player tends to take their turn “maybe” with some advice from others.

So, by taking away the ONE decision point where players might be able to help each other, this rule makes the game even less cooperative and strategic.  I really think this rule is a misstep; this game needs every little bit of strategy it can get.  Otherwise it becomes a random slog.

: 

Two: Not enough choice! There’s a rule that you only get new Defenders when you build a camp. I understand why this rule sort of “forces” you to build camps, as camps are an important part of the game: This rule strongly encourages you to build camps. But not having a full hand of three Defenders completely takes away your choice during the game. When you have a full hand of three Defenders (see above), the game feels strategic: “I can make choices relevant to the state of the board and the future and my friends“. If, for some reasons (say too much randomness, see below), you can’t get a camp built (and you have no more Defenders), you are completely at the mercy at the top card of your Defender deck (which you can’t even see). So, the game is playing itself! You just turn over the top Defender card and “see” what happens that turn! It is not fun, it doesn’t feel like you have any choice, and it feels like the game is playing you.

I really feel like a very simple house rule could fix this: it would be something like “you can draw a card after every turn“. There’s still a chance to play a support cards (which will exhaust your cards faster), but maybe building a camp STILL refills your hand to three Defenders. I feel like I should always have some sort of choice, or why I am even here? The game is just playing itself.

Three: Too much randomness!  We haven’t discussed it at all, but there is a 6-sided die in the game.  Whenever you perform an action next to a sniper Mech (see more Sniper issues below) or on the same space as a Hunter mech, you must roll the die.  A sniper hits you 50% of the time for 1 point of damage. A Hunter hits you 33% of the time for 2 damage and 50% of the time for 1 damage (83% of the time, you will take damage)!  That may not seem like much, but 4 damage kills a Defender!  And two dead Defenders means the end of the game.

If you roll poorly AT ALL during the game, you have to start play very conservatively!  Let’s say I was aggressive for one turn and rolled poorly, killing a Defender.  For the rest of the game, I CANNOT take any chances, as another dead Defender means Game Over!!  So, the game becomes like you are walking around on your tip-toes to get anything done.  It’s not fun as you feel like you can’t do anything. 

“We need to rewild that factory!  I’ll do it! Oh wait, I just 2 damage from a mech, one more roll and we lose the game, I’ll just run away, heal, and come back.”  

You might just say “stay away” from the mechs. That’s impossible; they are constantly being spewed out, and the middle of the board (where you need to be for rewilding factories) is full of snipers who will just pick away at you. Since you can NEVER enter the core, you just have to take it (unless you happen to get a Defender, there’s just a few who can kill Mechs from afar). This becomes a game of running up, doing one little thing, then running away.

In many games, I just felt like I couldn’t get anything done because of a few early bad rolls: once you have one dead Defender, your moves seem so tentative and dull and not fun …and you have to be careful, otherwise you will probably lose.

Four: Machine Cards are also too Random! In my first 2-Player game, we got 4 factories built in quick succession, just because of the way the cards came out, they spewed pollution and caused so much Toxic Waste! We had no chance! We couldn’t clean it up fast enough, and we couldn’t rewild the factories. We got destroyed.

If you have a few factories out and then get the two Factories at the end of the deck, reshuffle, then also get those Factories at the beginning, you can get 4 pollution spews in a row! You can’t come back from that! This is like the Variable Turn Order problem we see in games like Aeon’s End or The Plum Island Horror. If the “Bad News” cards come out in just the wrong way, you can get totally screwed. See our full Discussion here in A Discussion of Variable Turn Order and How To Mitigate Its Randomness!

That discussion does offer a potential solution: maybe the players can have a few “fate” tokens which they can spend to “skip” or “redraw” a bad news. I am not proposing getting rid of a Machine card for a turn, but it would be nice if the players had a “hacker” token (more thematic than a Fate token) where they could choose one of the top two Machine cards. Only spend it when it matters and it would allow the players to feel like they have some agency in their own fate.

Five: Too many things underspecified. This is harder to say, because I really like how this game tries to specify everything. It misses some important things, and some things are so subtley described, it’s not clear. I sometimes feel like I needed to read the rulebook like a legal document.
Some examples:

Rockets: Rockets kill one Mech without a dice roll. It does NOT say whether it’s on the current space ONLY or also an adjacent space? A Rocket, thematically, feels like it could reach a space next to it. I am fine believing it’s just the current space (and that’s the way I played it), but it’s not clear. One sentence would clear this up. Or MAYBE a Rocket even will destroy ANY mech on the board? That would be game-changing! But it’s not clear. UPDATE: After the 5th game, we found a Defender whose text said “Rockets can be used to target adjacent hexes”, implying they could only be used in the current space all other times.

Hunters vs Snipers: A Sniper is defined by being a mech in a Factory, and a Hunter is defined by being a mech in a Habitat space. I think. I don’t think a Sniper can ever becomes a Hunter or vice-versa. I think. Why is this not clearer? What I did, as a house rule, was to place SNIPERS with the prongs on the top, and the HUNTERS as the mechs with the prongs on the bottom: see picture above. This seems like a very easy way to help visually distinguish the two types of mechs, but the rulebook just calls them both mechs. It’s very easy to miss the difference as you are playing. Again, I just wanted a few more sentences on this: the description in the rulebook feels like a legal document. “We are defining a sniper to be a mech on a factory”. (Does a Sniper turn into a Hunter if a tile is rewilded? Technically, a rewilded factory is still a factory, so maybe, but a few sentences would be helpful).

The Factories Machine card:  All the rules are NOT written on this card.  When you build a factory, you are ALSO supposed to deploy 2 Snipers to the Core.  (And you have to move everything with the new factory).  This is nowhere to be found on the factory card!!!  A few simple sentences on the Factories Machine card that would help make the game easier to play.  It feels like you have to keep your nose in the rulebook at all times or you might miss a rule!  I like the art of Meg Lemieur on the Factories Machine card, but I would rather have the Machine cards more complete and functional than pretty.

These are just some examples of missing or rules needing better descriptions.  If you don’t play with the right interpretation of any of these, this game becomes substantially different.

House Rules

We really want to like this game.  We love the art, we love the universe, we love the ideas, we love the basic idea of a cooperative kind of wargame.  But we are really struggling with the game, as it feels too random.   Here’s a set of House Rules that you might try in your game if you are struggling with it like we are;  maybe try some and keep the ones you like.

1. Always draw a Defender card at the end of your turn.  This isn’t a panacea, as you can still get down to fewer cards by using support actions, but it least it generally keeps you feeling like you have choices every turn.  A camp build will always bring you back to 3.
2. Turn the mechs upside down to denote Snipers, and rightside up to denote Hunters.
3. Have a pool of 2 or 3 (4?) Hacker tokens.  When a Machine Card is drawn that is decided to be too devastating, you can discard a Hacker token to take the next Machine card instead.  This helps give the players a little control over the pure randomness of the Machine deck.
4. Get rid of all Communications Restrictions. The game already feels like multiplayer solitaire! Allow the players to find the best Defenders to help everybody AS A GROUP so the game feels more cooperative!! (If you are having Alpha Player issues with this rule, then either don’t play with that person, or put a timer on Defender choosing).
5. Allow players to discard a Defender card rather than take a damage; not killed, but it definitely leaves the game: maybe it’s KO’d.  The randomness of the die is NOT fun: I wish there were more mitigation methods for it  (This rule is probably the one we feel most unsure about).

Granted, these will all make the  game easier, but the game is already pretty hard.  If you feel like these House Rules make the game too easy, there are also DIFFICULT Machine Cards which make the game substantially harder.

House Rules 2 and 4 are probably ones I would absolutely recommend for everyone!  You can probably take or leave House Rules 1, and 3 and … especially 5.

Reactions

Sam: “I currently give it a 6, I would like to play it some more to refine my opinion.“

Rich: “I am really struggling with this game. I want to like it so much, but it is far too random for me. There’s a lot of great things in the game, and I feel like there are people who would like this game as-is: Objectively, I would give it a 6/10. Subjectively, as-is, I would give it a 4/10 because I don’t ever want to play it again: it’s too random. With some House Rules, I would maybe move up a couple of points to a 6/10 or maybe more. There is so much to like in this game.”

Sara: “This is under a 5 for me. It wasn’t fun, and I was glad when it was done. It was just too random. I might play it again if someone really really wants to play, but probably not. I really wanted to like it.”

Teresa: “I dunno, a 5 or a 6. It was frustrating, but I had fun with the little animals. “

Conclusion

Defenders of the Wild is a game that introduces a wonderful world with a wonderful production.  The randomness of the game (from random die rolls to random Machine cards) held this back for me and my groups.  After a number of plays, it’s clear that you can get to strategies where you mitigate some of that randomness (as you do get better as you play more), so it’s not just a random slog.  But the question is: is it fun to get there?  My groups didn’t think so, but that’s just some opinions.

I think the target audience for Defenders of the Wild might be war-gamers looking for a cooperative adventure.  War-gamers are used to dealing with swings of randomness from skirmish to skirmish in pursuit of a greater victory: it’s clear, you can get better at this game as you play, so there is definitely both strategy and tactics.  If you were looking for a cooperative Root, this might be a decent pick for you! It has the cuteness of Root, the war-gamer nature of Root, but in a cooperative game!

This game seems to be better with more players, as there seem to be more opportunities to get stuff done on your turn (more camps, more chances to push your luck since dying isn’t quite as critical, etc), and that seems to lead to better mitigation of some of the randomness.  Unfortunately, the one and two player games just seem to succumb to the randomness too quickly.  

This might be the perfect game for you and your group: take a look at what we saw. Be aware that the randomness and some of the underspecificity of the game led my group to rate this from 4/10 to 6/10.  I don’t think any of us thought this was a bad game, but it just wasn’t for us.  

If you do find yourself wanting to try this out, I recommend playing this out with bigger groups for the best chance of a good experience.

Invincible is comic book series about a kid with “super-man” like powers; this comic book series is unique because it has one voice (Robert Kirkman) through the entire run of the series.  Most comics are lucky if they get a consistent voice for 3 years.  The series started at issue #1 in January 2003 and finished up with issue #144 in February 2018.  For 15 years, over the run of the series, we saw Mark Grayson mature and evolve from a kid to a man.  It’s a very mature series, but it is very well written.  Even the art stayed consistent (between two artists:  Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley) over the run of the series!

I really liked this comic book series (having collected the entire run from beginning to end), but it is quite mature: there is quite a number of mature topics.  The series is also incredibly violent and has very graphic fights.

Fast forward to July 2024: Dire Wolf has come up with an Invincible board game called Invincible: The Hero-Building Game!

This is a cooperative board game for 1-4 Players, 45-90 minutes with Ages 13+.  See above! Invincible is a cooperative boss battler game where players have to take out the big baddie (and do other heroic stuff along the way).  I will say this: the board game is much much much less violent and graphic than the cartoon or the comic series.  If you were worried about the violence or maturity, especially for a boss-battler game, don’t fret!  That 13+ for ages is an accurate depiction.

Invincible: The Hero-Building Game is an interesting twist on the cooperative super-hero genre: it’s a bag-building game!  We’ll see elements from other modern board games: Orleans (with its bag-building, especially with the Invasion cooperative expansion), Marvel United (with its super-hero theming and civilians mechanisms), Marvel Champions (with its super-hero theming and Threat mechanism), and Quacks of Quedlingburg (for the push-your-luck).

I ordered my copy from the Direwolf website, and it arrived at my house in early July 2024.  Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

I was grumpy when I opened my box: the rulebook had shifted around during shipping and got all folded and messed up!

See the can of Coke for perspective: this is a normal sized box.

Each player assumes the role of one of 4 characters from the Invincible universe: Invincible, Atom Eve, Rex Splode, or Robot.  See above and below.

Each player also gets a standee. See above.

This is a bag-building game (we mentioned earlier), so each player gets their own bag to put cubes into: see above for the bags and the cubes.

There’s a bunch of scenarios that come in the game.  You can choose to play them in order, as one-shots, or in an ordered campaign. See the first “suggested” scenario above.

There’s a bunch of civilians to protect: if the players ever have too many civilian casualties, the game is over! Players lose!

The game board is three regions of a city (A, B, and C).  Bad guys appear and fight our heroes, or threaten civilians (if there are any in their zone).  If a zone is ever bereft of civilians, the game is over!  So, it’s a bit of balancing act making sure the civilians are safe while still taking out the big bads.

The mechanism for keeping track of civilian casualties is pretty simple: there’s actually a casualties track below the main city boards.

Bad guys appear in the city and cause havoc, threatening civilians or just doing damage to our heroes!

Each players starting bag contains the cubes above: 6 black and 3 orange, yellow, blue, purple.  The cubes are used to “power” abilities in the heroes.

As the game progresses, you can “buy” more powers: see above as Invincible has more powers to put cubes on!

It’s fairly intuitive how to place the cubes: obviously, a single yellow cube will activate the power above!  And there’s also orange, purple, blue, and black cubes in the game!

The black cubes are a mixed blessing: they are wild (so can be used for any color on any power), but if you ever draw 5 black cubes, you crash!  A crashing hero has to stop and will take some damage (because he pushed himself too hard).   You can save a hero from crashing, but it stops another player.

A crashing player will roll the black/red dice to see how damage the “crash” did.  If someone tries to save the hero, then the white dice will indicate how successful the save was!  You aren’t even guaranteed to save a crashing hero!

There are also “bad news” cards (this is a co-op game after all): the event cards come out after all players decide to finish and quit drawing from their bag.  These symbols will cause different villains to do different things … usually hitting the heroes or threatening civilians!

If the heroes can handle the final villains, they win!   The above scenario needs the the heroes to defeat 3 Flaxans in order to win!

This is a boss-battling bag-building game!  (Say that three times fast!) The components are decent, but not super high-quality.  Most of the cardboard is kind of thin.  The cards aren’t great quality (they need linen-finishing I think), but the art of the cards is very consistent with the Invincible universe.   Unfortunately, this is not the same level of production as a giant Kickstarter: I can imagine a world where the cards are linen-finished, the boards are nicer, some of the villains have special tokens, and the hero standees are acrylic standees!  But that’s not what we have here.  Still, everything was very readable, and all the components worked.  UPDATE: After about 5 plays, the blue bag for Invincible has developed a hole in the bottom! Grrr…

Rulebook

The rulebook was pretty good.

It gets about a B on the Chair Test: I can put it on the chair next to me, keep it open flat, and consult it while I play.  It only gets a B because it’s just a little bigger and the paper quality is a little flimsy.  (Maybe I am just grumpy my rulebook got smashed before I even opened my box).

The Components page is excellent: it spans two pages and is easy to correlate all the components against their labels.

The rulebook even does a good job of separating what components you will need for your first game (Episode 1) vs a Full Game vs. Episode-Specific Components!  See above! That’s really nice!

The set-up pages do just what I want: two full pages (well three pafe) labelling and showing the steps with a giant picture showing up what things look like!  See above!  The set-up even separates “Episode 1” (first play) from Full Game!  Again, really nice!

Generally, this rulebook was good at showing pictures and explaining how everything works.

There’s no index (booo!) and no glossary (boooo!), but there is a Keywords and Card Mechanisms section.  This isn’t a super complex game, and I was able to find rules when I needed them, but an index would have been helpful.

The back cover was quite useful with a list of a lot (but not all) icons.

In general, I was happy with the rulebook.   The lack of index and my squished rulebook were my two main complaints.

Onboarding

It’s been a while since I had a game direct me through my first game so nicely.  The Episode 1 deck is all set for you: you don’t shuffle it at all!

The Episode 1 game is a simplified version of the game, showing off the main mechanisms before jumping into the full rules.    That first Episode 1 deck has everything separated out to easily set-up and play.

Luckily, there are instructions to resetting the first scenario!  I have played the first game (both solo and cooperatively) and the full game a few times, but I plan to teach this game a lot at RichieCon, (and I did: see here) so I will reset the game back to “Episode 1” for teaching purposes.   I think it might have been nice to label the Episode 1 cards so it would be a little easier to reset, but heck, I am just happy they had a list of instructions for that reset!

The onboarding was pretty darn good!  It wasn’t quite as good as onboarding as Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth (that game sets the bar very high for your first game: see our review here for more discussion), but it was pretty darn good.

Solo Play

There are solo rules!  Huzzah! The game follows Saunders’ Law and has a viable solo mode!

In the solo mode, you still have to take control of 2 heroes: See above as the solo player takes control of Invincible and Atom Eve.  

Basically, the solo player alternates between the two characters as-if it were a 2-Player game.  There is no true solo play (one character) in this game.  I suspect it’s because you need 2 characters to be able to catch each other when you crash (see Gameplay section above); that crash mechanism is brutal, and a second character helps mitigate that.

There’s some strange rules about sharing/not sharing the hands and confidence during the training phase … which I just ignored.  I just played the solo game as if it were a full 2-Character game: no exceptional rules. Having these weird sharing/non-sharing powers/confidence rules from the solo section takes me away from the main flow of the game! I want to be able to feel like I am playing the main game with no exceptions.  I understand why they wanted to do this: it feels like you have to think less about which powers to buy, but in the end since every other rule is just like a 2-Character game, (including maintaining two bags, two characters, and every other rule), I just played solo as 2 characters.  And it worked fine.  I recommend this way for playing solo!

There is quite a bit of maintenance to operate the game, as you operate two characters, the bad guys, the event deck, the confidence phases, and everything else!  But it never felt too overwhelming; I felt like the turns moved along pretty quickly.

My first game was Episode 1 with the two characters Invincible and Atom Eve.  The game took away just enough of the extra rules to make the game more palatable to set-up and play, but it still taught the core of the game.  I also appreciated that specific bad guys were chosen to come out: they were all “simple bad guys”, which is what you want in your first game.

I have learned now to keep two chairs out for games with Episodes: The rulebook and episode guide (see above).

I lost my first game because one too many civilians died in Zone C.  (Remember, if any zone is bereft of civilians, you lose!).  So, I “pretended” one civilian had survived, so I made my may to the endgame, just so I could see what that endgame looked like.

With that one change, I was able to defeat Flaxan Invasion! (Take out three Flaxan baddies: see above).

Obviously, the game was a bit challenging since I (strictly speaking) lost!  But it was close, and I had a good time learning how the game worked! See above for my “winning” game!

My second game was Episode 2: This is the full game!  Welcome to the Big Leagues!

The game still unfolds the game way, but now you have more powers to manage! Set-up is not too much more difficult, as (remember) the rulebook does have good descriptions for Episode 1 and Full Game mode!

Players now have Signature Powers and Ultimate Powers! The Ultimate Powers go beneath a power you have and can only be activated if the the power above has already been activated!

The Signature Power now goes on your board: See as Atom Eve has her Bubble Up Signature Power (in addition to get Starter Power: Convenient Creation!)

The game becomes a lot harder now, as you have to generally start worrying about more! Not only do you have to save the civilians and beat-up the bad guys, but you have to worry more about Threat!  Dealing with Threat reminds me of Marvel Champions: instead of fighting on a turn, you may try to add Threat markers (see Villain above) to stop him!  Above, the Villain is trying to blow-up the heads on Mount Rushmore, so you have to “eliminate that Threat!”

In the Full Game, you character ends up with a lot more Powers!  See above as Invincible has bought 3 Powers, and 2 Ultimate Powers, most of these needed for dealing with Threat!

The Full Game is great: I am really glad they have the Episode 1 on-boarding experience, but it felt great to jump into Episode 2!  It was challenging and interesting the whole way!

I look forward to more solo plays.  This is just a blast!  And you can play any Episode in any order!

But, I suspect my next few plays will be teaching this game cooperatively to my friends at my Game Groups and at RichieCon (Editor’s Note: I did teach it cooperatively at RichieCon!)!  I think Invincible will be a hot game at RichieCon!  (One thing to note for Set-Up: leave space beneath your character card for 2 cards so it’s easy to add Ultimate Powers!  You can see I didn’t quite leave enough space, and the Ultimate Powers are hanging off the board).

Cooperative Play

Cooperative play went smoothly: Sam and I started with Episode 1, and frankly it was very easy to teach.  We had a smooth time!  Sam didn’t even really know who Invincible was, but he still enjoyed the game.  I am an avoid Superhero gamer, but Sam was fairly neutral on the theme … but he still liked it!

Now that I have some plays under my belt, this was a breeze to teach.  The cooperative elements worked really well: we were able to “save each other” from crashes twice!  I asked for help a number of times: “Hey, if you can do one more damage, we can take this guy out!”  And Sam would ask for help when he needed it!

Sam liked the game! He said to me “After RichieCon, I want to play the campaign! This was fun!”

I also had ulterior motives to teach Sam the game: I wanted him to be able to teach Invincible at RichieCon!  I am pretty sure this will be a hot game!!!  The TV show is hot right now, the game is  getting good buzz!   If I can’t teach, Sam will be my goto teacher!

Things I Liked

O1) One of my favorite aspects of this game is that it embraces Player Selected Turn Order (PSTO): fine grained: See above as the rules describe how “Players can pull and play their cubes in any order they wish!”  This allows players to hold back a little when needed to coordinate their actions! It’s also cool because it’s fine-grained (meaning players can intersperse their actions across turns)!   But, what tends to happen is very similar as we saw in Slay The Spire: (see review here):  Play tends to proceed simultaneously (everyone draws from their bag and plays simultaneously) until we get the points where it’s clear we need to coordinate … if someone crashes, or we need to save some civilians (to not lose), or to take out a baddie completely, or whatever makes sense!   Like Slay The Spire, we paradoxically have Simultaneous Actions (which moves the game along) but also fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order (which keeps up cooperation when needed)!  I love how this works in Invincible!

2) I loved how you always feel like you are getting better and better in this game!  Every turn you typically buy a power and a new cube for your bag!  You just always feel like you get better and better as you play!  And you get choices: Which powers do I buy?  Which color cube do I buy? The level-up system just keep you invested in the characters!

3) I like how this game really embraces the Invincible comic vibe: the art on every card is different, like a “snapshot” from the Invincible universe!   People like me, who love the comic, really appreciate how this makes it feel like the comic.  People who don’t know the series can still enjoy the comic-booky vibe that permeates the game!

Things I Didn’t Like

one) At the end of the day, what you draw from the bag is still random.  And the Event Deck can be a little too random.  Although there are countless mitigation techniques for drawing cubes (you can add cubes, you can redraw one pull, you save another hero from crashing, etc.), sometimes that randomness can just get you … and it’s frustrating.  It’s very frustrating when you pull 3 black cubes on your first turn!  Ergh.  Like I said, there are plenty of mitigation techniques (including you can get KO’ed three times before the game ends) .  As for the Event Cards: I do remember Episode 1 ending because the event card  just destroyed so many civilians … I never saw that coming!  This randomness is just something to be aware of … but since this is a boss-battler, there has to be some elements of randomness to keep it spicy.

2) It feels like the production could be a little better: the cards aren’t great quality (even though the art is), and a lot of the boards feel a little cheap. And my Invincible bag developed a hole!!! I would love if there were acrylic standees this this! But, we get cardboard standees.  And, like I said earlier, the blue bag has already developed a hole in it! Argh!!

Conclusion

Invincible is a really good cooperative bag-building boss-battler.  Despite a slightly lesser production quality and some innate randomness, this game could easily be my favorite game of the year!

The upgrade path is fantastic as you feel like you are always upgrading and leveling-up your character!  The Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained) and Simultaneous Actions make the game flow quick when it needs to and become contemplative when it needs to!  The game just naturally ebbs and flows!

The solo game is fantastic, as is the cooperative game! I could see chipping away at the campaign over time!  It’s so easy to get this to the table! It’s fun as a solo game, despite still having to run two characters!

Objectively, I would give Invincible a 9/10, but if you love the comic world like I do, maybe you’d bump it to a 9.5/10 or a 10/10!  This is a great game!  Invincible would easily make my Top 10 Cooperative SuperHero Games!