To me, Agatha Harkness will always be the old lady from the Fantastic Four comics who helped out the Fantastic Four when they needed magical consultations! But, of course, this Marvel United expansion is set squarely in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Scarlet Witch being a Villain (like the second Dr. Strange movie), and Agatha Harkness being an anti-hero; both hero and villain from her own Marvel TV show. And yes, there is a reference to the song “Agatha All Along” within this set.

The Witching Hour is an expansion for the cooperative super-hero game Marvel United.

In order to play this, you need the tokens, cards, and Locations from one of the many base games: see above.  You can ALMOST play The Witching Hour by itself, as it has a bunch of heroes and villains (their cards and minis).  Alas, you need one of the base boxes.

This was originally on Gamefound about a year ago: January 2025!  It promised delivery in June 2025, but it is almost 6 months late.  Usually I don’t mind when a kickstarter is late, but in this case The Witching Hour has been available at Amazon for almost 6 months BEFORE we got ours!  (It was, now it’s not?  But I do see it at GameNerdz and other places) Basically, I could have ordered from Amazon, gotten free delivery, and gotten it 6 months earlier!  That didn’t sit well with me.  It turns out the one available on Amazon was the 1st edition with some errors in the printing, so waiting for the 2nd edition meant I got the corrected version.  So, that’s good I guess.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

I am used to my Marvel United expansions being about the same size as the original box.  Nope!  This one is a lot smaller! See above and below.

This little box is packed to the brim with cards and minis.  See above with Can of Coke for scale.

The quality of the insert isn’t great; see above as just the slightest pressure causes it to bend.

And it’s also a tuck box?  Tuck boxes are one of my least favorite ways to store things.  They always seem to cause damage to something when you fold the tab in.

Besides those issues, this looks great! The quality of the cards and the art and the minis is all consistent with Marvel United in general.

Be careful; there is an equipment card in the game that’s very small and easy to lose!  It’s also crucial when you play Agatha!  Don’t let this fall out of the box!

The quality of the cards and minis is great.  The insert is ok, if a little cheap.  I also don’t love the tuck box. 

And be careful with the Darkhold!  I guess that goes without saying …

 

Villain Centric

We’ll take a villain-centric view of this expansion.  What do I mean by that?  We are going to fight all the villains, with all sorts of different combos of the Heroes.  Those combos will show the strengths and weaknesses of the Heroes, but it’s the villain who will define each session.

The other reason for this is that most of the heroes in this set are a hodge-podge of heroes from Convention promos and other sources that weren’t mainstream.  The heroes are a pretty eclectic collection, and not really thematic to the magical motif of this set.

So we’ll just squint as say this set is “Witchy Villains!” … and some Heroes  (Which are all pretty cool but not witchy).

There are two new villains; Agatha Harkness and The Scarlet Witch. 

I mean, I know Scarlet Witch is both a Villain and Hero in the comics (depending on when you find her), but in this set she’s a Villain.  (Her Hero version is in the Season 1 Stretch Goals set).  Also, be careful, as there is another Villain Scarlet Witch/QuickSilver in the X-Men: First Class Marvel United expansion set (which we reviewed here).

Strictly speaking, Agatha is an anti-hero (which is why her figurine is purple) which means she can be either a hero (blue) OR a villain (red).  She just can’t be both, because you only have one figurine.  Although … I could imagine something where you used another figurine for the villain.  Maybe Agatha’s body got taken over by Scarlet Witch!!!  Or something silly like that.  Somehow, something crazy like that seems like it would happen to Agatha anyways, …. you know what, I think I just an idea for a new session …

We’ll take the heroes and villains through their paces and see what we see!

Sessions 1,2, and 3: Scarlet Witch vs Agatha and Deadpool (X-Force version)

This is an unlikely pairing:  Deadpool from X-Force and Agatha!  Note that Agatha has the DarkHold equipment.  Spoiler Alert: it makes a big difference in helping the heroes!

The Scarlet Witch is a harder villain.  She has a 6 Darkhold pages (Threats) on the board! 

Whenever a Darkhold Page gets 3 crisis tokens on it, it clears!  This might seem like a good thing (as it reveals the special ability on the Location), but  …

… Scarlet Witch wins if she gets all 6 Darkhold pages!!! (“clears all threats”).   After numerous games against Scarlet Witch, I can tell you that she usually wins by clearing the threats!

She’s also very interesting in that anything that deals with Crisis tokens on threats is completely disabled! See her starting card above!  I suspect this is simply to handle any edge cases that might happen: simply disallow it.

My first game was a loss as Scarlet Witch found all Darkhold pages!  I think I didn’t realize how important it was to try to keep the Threats from all being cleared!  Usually, you WANT all threats cleared … not here!

My next game, just a replay of the first game, armed with a little more knowledge.

See binding above!!! Basically, since Agatha stopped Wanda from moving, I kept her from finding all the pages and Deadpool was able to beat her senseless!  However, I didn’t realize I stopped her moving, so we played put the last turn and we lost! If I count the Binding as happening, we won!

An important rule you might easily miss is that you can use Heroism (as well as punchees) to do damage to Scarlet Witch.

After one loss, one pseudo-win, and one absolute win, I can declare we beat Scarlet Witch. 

Deadpool is all about the punches, but his Regenerative Healing Factor (see above) always kept him with plenty of cards, which gave him plenty of options on his turn.    His Improved Resistance to Everything was useful here (as it mitigates the Master Plan effects), but almost feels too overpowered?  It’s pretty awesome; we’ll revisit this resistance in Agatha’s villain section!

Agatha was, in general, great.  As cool as her Magical Protection is (which is a unique card in her deck), it didn’t really make much of a difference in the Scarlet Witch villain; I think other places she would be HUGE.

Honestly, Agatha using the Darkhold was both thematic and very useful, as it allowed us to plan for what Scarlet Witch would do.  It’s cost is high to recharge (losing a Thug or Citizen from a mission), but somehow it seems thematic for this morally ambiguous character to recharge it all the time.  “Who cares if we  lose another thug in the world? We’re trying to save the world!”

These games with Agatha, Deadpool (from X-Force) vs. Scarlet Witch were very cool.  This is why I like Marvel United so much!  This was a very different kind of fight with very different heroes and villains!

 

Session 4: Scarlet Witch vs Juggernaut and Mr. Sinister

Just to bring out the more heroes, I tried Juggernaut and Mr. Sinister against Scarlet Witch.  They got their lunch eaten.

The problem is that Mr. Sinister special abilities require him to occasionally be on the same space as other heroes.  In a 2-player/2 -Hero game of Marvel United, he never got to use his special ability!    Players are too busy chasing down Scarlet Witch and saving citizens and thugs … if they don’t, they will lose!  Unfortunately, this means Mr. Sinister almost never ends on the same space as another hero … so his special powers are never invoked, which make him less useful.

Mr. Sinister probably needs to be in a game of 3 or 4 Heroes to be useful (so more heroes can be close by).

Juggernaut was mostly smashy-smashy…kind of what you expect.  

These two did not make a great pairing.

Session 5: Scarlet Witch vs Grey Hulk and Juggernat

Surprisingly, Grey Hulk and Juggernaut made an effective team against Scarlett Witch!

Both heroes are pretty punchy-punchy.  But that worked for them!  They went in a beat up Scarlet Witch pretty badly once she because vulnerable!

See above as Hulk and Juggernaut beat the heck out of Scarlet Witch in round 4!

Sometimes raw punchee is what you want.

 

Session 6: Agatha Harkness vs. Deadpool and Mr. Sinister

Agatha is a very interesting and very different villain!

The threats she puts down are RUNES!  See above!!  Her Master plan cards  activate whatever RUNES are on the board!

When Agatha comes under presure, the RUNES flip to the opposite side, which allows Heroes to dispatch them … but they are still active!  These are pretty powerful!

Agatha also has a special Mission: the Witch Trial!  If it ever fills up with civilians, you lose!

As we noted earlier, Mr. Sinister is terrible in a 2 Hero game.  Deadpool and Mr. Sinister lost.

The real question is: does Deadpool’s resistance ability apply to Agatha’s spells?  Since the runes are activated by the Master Plan special effects, you could argue YES!  But since the RUNES themselves aren’t actually on the Master Plan, you could argue NO!  Also, it’s a matter of how you define “special abilties” on Agatha’s cards … do they count as special powers?

The interpretation of Deadpool’s resistance can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Session 7: Agatha vs Deadpool and Grey Hulk

It’s clear after Grey Hulk and Deadpool lost, that punchees are not enough.  It was very clear that heroes with tons of heroism are needed!  Basically, you need to save civilians as fast as possible because Agatha’s Witch Trial will remove them from the board … and you lose almost certainly lose because the Witch Trial fills up.

 

Sessions 8 and 9: Agatha vs Deadpool and Batman (?) (!)

It was very clear that we needed a hero with lots of Heroism!  The morally ambiguous lot from The Witching Hour is probably not the best group of heroes to display Heroism.  But Batman (fresh from the DC United: Batman Hush set: see review here) has a lot of Heroism.  And his toys help too.  

The first game was close; but we still lost.  Batman’s gadgets were VERY helpful is getting things under control early,but we still had a run of bad luck.  

This was very comic-booky!  We lost the first round, but Batman and Deadpool learned from their mistakes and were able to take out Agatha on their second pass!

Heroism was key, but Batman’s gadgets were pivotal in cleaning things up early.

Session 10: Agatha vs Agatha and Captain America

So, it turns out you CAN play Agatha vs Agatha … with a little help.

This was kind of a silly game, but it was really fun.

We used Agatha (purple) figure as the hero figure and Scarlet Witch (“Who took over my body? I am possessed by an Agatha from a different multiverse!!!”) as the evil Agatha!  See above.

This was a blast, as good Agatha used the Darkhold to see what evil Agatha was going to do!  And Captain America is FULL of Heroism, which is so critical to take out Evil Agatha!

So, you can play Agatha vs Agatha, and it works well.  You just have to squint and use a different mini.

Cooperative Play

You may noticed the last 10 games were solo two-handed games.  Let’s just make sure this still works cooperatively!

So, we tried a 3-player game against Scarlet Witch!  Me as Mr. Sinister, and Teresa as Agatha!

The only way I could get Andrew to play was to promise him Dr. Strange!  And it turns our Dr. Strange makes the game REAL interesting! 

With Dr. Strange, you can remove Scarlet Witch’s starting card from the master plan!  Once you do that, you can actually keep the Crisis tokens under control!  We took this tack to give ourselves a little more time to get to Scarlet Witch, because she usually wins by getting all threats removed!  Dr Strange, and his Eye of Agamammmasdjhajhsjdhjkasfhjajksdf (I think that’s how you spell it) were able to disable Scarlet Witch’s Cthon Master Plan card …. which enabled us to last longer and kill Scarlet Witch!

The cooperative game was full of highs and lows as all of us got KO’d!  The Master Plan deck was almost out of cards!  But than Agatha went in for the kill and punched and heroismed for the final takedown!

The game was fun, cooperative, as we discussed what symbols to put out to help ourselves as well as our compatriots!  Generally, it worked well!

And what about Mr. Sinister?  He was able to use his DNA ability … once.  I still feel like I didn’t take best advantage of his ability.  But it was still better to use him in a 3-Hero game than a 2-Hero game.

Conclusion

The fact that I played eleven games of this silly expansion with a crappy plastic insert and awful tuck box should tell you what I thought: I’d liked it quite a bit!

Scarlet Witch and Agatha (as Villains) and Agatha (as hero) are the reasons to pick this up.  The other characters were fun, but I think the witches were the winners.

If you liked Agatha All Along and you want play some games with these Witchy characters, pick up the Witching Hour.  Even if you don’t love the Marvel show, these villains in particular are pretty interesting and fun.  The heroes (other than Agatha) are fine (and to be clear: Agatha is so interesting!) , but none of them really spoke to me (except maybe Deadpool X-Force)?  Hopefully this far too wordy and pictory review will give you a sense of whether or not you may like it.

I liked it a lot.  That’s why I played eleven games with it!