Which Witch Is Which? A Review of The Witching Hour

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!

Designer’s Diary for Sidekick Saga

As we pass the 6th Anniversary of Sidekick Saga being on Kickstarter, let’s look back to the original design and development process! This was a labor of love for me; I have collected comics since I was 10 years old, and I think I still have every comic I every bought! I love comic books and Super Heroes! I wanted a cooperative Super Hero game with a story, as none really existed at the time!! Let’s look back and see how this design came about! For the record, all pictures in this diary are from my own personal comic collection! See below as I go hunting for comics!

Inspirations

But let’s jump in … what inspired Sidekick Saga?

Sidekick Saga started life from an inspiration in (surprise) a comic book: Future Imperfect by Peter David and George Perez. There’s one very notable scene in Future Imperfect when Rick Jones, (the sidekick of the piece, and sidekick of many heroes like Captain America and Hulk), keeps the Maestro at bay using a collection of “artifacts”: Iron Man’s gauntlets, Captain America’s shield, Thor’s Hammer!

The sidekick, by being smart, was able to hold his own (with a little help) with the Maestro, an incredibly powerful villain!

The scene above, with its collection of items, stirred something within me …

Another comic that inspired Sidekick Saga was the 1990’s Robin (by Chuck Dixon, Tom Grummett, and Scott Hanna). In this era, Tim Drake became the third Robin, and frankly, was the smartest of all the Robins! He figured out Batman’s identity! In this series, the Tim Drake’s Robin patrols Gotham without Batman, but has help from The Huntress, Oracle, and even Commissioner Gordon! Tim Drake is mostly just a normal human doing the best he can to ward off evil, using his smarts and his fellow heroes to fight crime! The cooperation of the Arkham Sidekicks was pivotal to their success!

Another unlikely source of inspiration was Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 5 finale. Some SPOILERS: in the Season Finale, Buffy used pretty much EVERY WEAPON at her disposal, from other episodes in Season 5, to fight the big bad at the end! There was something familiar about this approach; it’s what Rick Jones did in Future Imperfect! In this case, it inspired more of the idea that some important items persist from game to game. It also kept alive the idea that “collecting stuff” was an important part to battling the big bad!

A final unlikely source of inspiration was a game called Seven Wonders. You heard me. It was interesting that, at the time, my friends were very bi-modal on two games: they either loved Seven Wonders and hated Sentinels of the Multiverse or hated Seven Wonders and loved Sentinels of the Multiverse! What if I could unite these groups and have the notion of cooperative drafting? What if, rather than working against each other in a drafting game, you could pass each other what we needed? This created the whole idea of Supply Lines: cooperative drafting, much like Seven Wonders (it even had a directionality of the Ages): see above.

Putting all these elements together served as the basis of Sidekick Saga: I wanted a cooperative drafting game (where players would pass each other cards they needed) where players explored the city looking for technology to help them fight the big bads! And every card should matter! You might not think something matters (like stuff in Season 5 of Buffy), but then all of a sudden, it becomes important!

Leads and Legacy

As the development of the game progressed, I need to refine the exploration-type mechanic to the game. For the Sidekicks to succeed, they had to find stuff (like Buffy or Rick Jones)! Some stuff was incredibly useful, so it seemed like you had to “pay” for it somehow! This introduced the idea of Leads (originally they were called clues, but I was worried this might invoke too much of a Clue game comparison): if you hunt down enough Leads, you can find where Jor’s Hammer (I didn’t want to get sued), the Star Shield, or the Cave Warrior’s car (which looks nothing like the Batmobile) would be stored! I originally considered the idea of having to have “different kinds of Leads“, but dismissed it quickly as it would too frustrating if you got the wrong types of Leads. Leads were generic: if you got 6 Leads, you could get the Cave Warrior Car which would help you move around the city faster AND protect yourself!

We dubbed these very special Items as Heroic Items: these were very special items that were hard to find! They might take three to six turns to get one of them during the game, so you didn’t want to lose them between issues! So, Sidekick Saga became a “legacy” game when any Heroic Items you obtained persisted from game to game!

Honestly, I really liked the idea of a story spanning multiple issues! It’s very typical of comic books of my era: a massive story would unfold over 4 to 6 issues of the comic! Think of the amazing story that unfurled from Issues 1 – 4 of the original Wolverine mini-series! Things would change massively from issue to issue, and what the heroes did really mattered! So, the idea of a legacy comic story was something I really really wanted to embrace.

(And the time Sidekick Saga was in development, there were NO Super Hero board games with an ongoing /legacy story)

In this case, each “game” would be an issue of a comic book series. What was the story? All the Super Heroes had disappeared! What had happened to them? All that was left were the under-powered Sidekicks! Could these lowly Sidekick keep the bad guys at bay while they tried to solve the mystery of what happened to all the Super Heroes? That was the story I wanted; that was the story that would make the Sidekicks take center stage!

So, Heroic Items, would persist from issue to issue. It introduced a tension; do heroes pursue Leads to get a Heroic Items, at the cost of making it harder to defeat the current bad guys?

To help alleviate some of this tension, The Leads became multi-use cards; you could either save them up to get a Heroic Item, or you could use them directly (Leads would also do something useful for you). This gave players more agency, more choice: they could pursue Leads, but could also just use them as needed (for immediate help or later help)!

Exploration

The exploration idea came from playing cooperative deck-building games like Aeon’s End; nine different things you could get! I liked cooperative deck-building games, but to me it always seemed an inversion of what I wanted: In deck-building games, you know what you buy, but you typically have no control over when it comes out! What if you inverted that idea and made it so you don’t know exactly what you get, but once you get the cards, you can play them whenever you want!?

That’s the idea of the city; each Location in the city has 8 cards, and those cards are “related” by a theme: The Police Station has Police cards, Rincon Labs has Scientists and Technology, The Suburbs have a lot of Research/Lead cards, etc. You have an idea what you will get, but maybe not exactly. Then, once you get stuff from a Location, you can play it whenever you want!

But through Heroic Items like the X-Ray glasses, you might have a little more control. And X-Ray glasses are an inside joke for anyone who grew up with comics; there were always ads for these things in the comics!

So, players move around the city and explore locations looking for technology and Leads to help them in their quest to take down the big bad!

Secret Identity and Hero Modes

Another thing I wanted was the tension of Secret Identity vs Hero form. The Secret Identity is absolutely am essential tool to keep the Sidekicks out of trouble! (At the time I was exploring this idea, Marvel Champions had not come out yet, and to my knowledge, it was an original idea to have players go from Secret Identity to Hero and back. I documented my playtest here on my Unpub play of Sidekick Saga, which was 6 months before Marvel Champions was released; so, don’t go saying I copied Marvel Champions on this!)

But, I also wanted the Secret Identity mode to be useful; when you go into Secret Identity, you escape combat, but that’s also a main way to get Leads in the game! The Secret Identity is all about doing research away from combat!! When you are in Secret Identity mode, you get BOTH a Lead AND a card on your Location! But, of course, while you are doing this research, the Bad Guys are getting more and more powerful since you aren’t fighting crime! It’s that tension you see in comics all the time! When do I go into Secret Identity mode to research (and stay out of the Bad Guy’s way) and when do I go into Hero mode to fight crime? That’s a big part of being a Sidekick! It’s also a big part of the game!

I still remember a particular scene in The Amazing Spider-man #18 where Spider-man changes back to Peter Parker to escape the Sandman. See above!

Those original Stan Lee/Steve Ditko Spider-man comics (which I read when I was a young kid), had quite the influence on me! I still remember those scenes! (I didn’t have the original Spider-man comics that are worth tons … I was just a kid! I just had the little collection of books : see above). But Peter Parker used his Secret Identity as a tool so many times in those early Spider-mans … I really wanted a mechanic like this this in the game to capture that!

Advancement

One of the funnest part of Dungeons and Dragons is leveling-up: I wanted to make sure there usually some notion of leveling-up between issues: new powers, new Heroic Items, new heroes, … something to give fun choices between issues! I also wanted to make sure losing wasn’t so devastating!

If the players lose an issue, then new items, new Heroic Items, new things are introduced into the game .. and they get to try again! I wanted this to be a self-balancing game; if it was too hard, then new stuff would come out to help the Sidekicks!

Protection Hierarchy

One of the final pieces of the puzzle was the Protection Hierarchy; I remember reading many Daredevil or Batman comics where the hero has to work from the bottom-up to uncover the network of the Kingpin/crime lord who is running the city! And typically, the phrase “Stop protecting your higher ups; they don’t care about you!!!” comes up when the good guys question the underlings … what if that were actually a mechanism? What if you couldn’t actually even take out the bad guys higher up in the criminal network until you’ve “dealt with” with all of their subordinates? What if the subordinates actually “protected” the higher-ups?

And that’s exactly what the Protection Hierarchy is in Sidekick Saga: you can’t attack any upper level bad guys until you deal with the subordinates first! The lower level bad guys protect the higher one! (But, of course, the upper level bad guys can do stuff to YOU … because it’s hard to be a Hero!)

Hacking

If there’s any one mechanism that is really inspired by the Robin or Birds of Prey comics, it’s Oracle and her hacking abilities.

Oracle is a hacker who helps Robin (well, she helps the Dick Grayson Robin more, but that’s beside the point) by finding out information and “distracting” the bad guys with her hacking. How could we represent this idea in the game? Delphi (inspired by Oracle) can hack the bad guys and put them into disarray!

The idea of disarray is that the bad guy is so busy “dealing” with the results of Delphi’s hacks, they couldn’t do anything else. I loved the idea that even if you can’t take out a bad guy, maybe you can keep it out the way for some time. Thematically, the idea of “causing an alarm to go off”, “turning off the power in the building”, etc. are things that a hacker would do. And what does it do? It distracts the bad guy (puts them in disarray) for a few turns.

The idea of hacking was further improved by allowing hacking to bypass the Protection Hierarchy! Delphi can hack the upper level bad guys and keep them from wrecking the Sidekicks!

Art

I don’t love the art in most Super Hero board games: it always feels like they get artists who are great artists, but don’t “get” Super Heroes!! It felt like they didn’t love Super Heroes like I did! I just remember that I never loved a lot of the art of the first few Super Hero games I played, and I wanted something different for Sidekick Saga: I wanted an artist who got Super Heroes. I wanted someone who’s art really embraced that ethic!

One of my favorite parts of working on Sidekick Saga was working with the artists, especially Phil Cho! I adored his art from Venom Assault (see BGG entry here) and his Deviant Art page showed that he really understood Super Heroes! I contacted Phil, and he was very willing to help out.

To this day, the cover for Sidekick Saga is one of my favorite pieces of art of all time, maybe because it has such personal meaning to me. Given more time, I would have had Phil Cho do all the art in the game, but I had promised my Kickstarter backers delivery quickly, so I did work with a few other artists to help out.

Christina Murphy did a fantastic job stepping up and “matching” Phil’s art! One of my favorite of her pieces is the army of snowmen! So creepy and so what I wanted!

I also had William Liberto help out, mostly with the Heroic Items: I wanted all the Heroic Items to have a similar and consistent vibe, and he did a great job!

Final Thoughts

I am very proud of Sidekick Saga! It’s the game I wanted! It’s a Super Hero game with an overarching story! It has exploration, it has cooperative drafting, it has every card being useful in one way or another (by being multi-use or directly useful), and it has ways for the Sidekicks to be clever in their combinations! I play the entire Sidekick Saga at least one a year, and I am always happy that the game unfolds differently every time! How could I use all the cards and powers I had to defeat the bad guys? It’s different every time!

I know Sidekick Saga didn’t have a great critical reception, but I am grateful to all my backers who supported the original Kickstarter and all the people who reached out to me over the years in support; thank you to all of you.

Cooperative Rules For Comic Hunters

Comic Hunters is a game originally from Brazil: it took the world by storm as a drafting game with 4 different types of drafting and also Marvel comics covers as the cards (see below)! We really liked it! See our review here!!

This game has been so popular that they translated the rules to English, and it has been selling for $200 or more on e-bay!

After all this popularity, it looks like Arcane Wonders is going to pick up the game in the United States: see here! You don’t have to pay $200 for it anymore!

My only lament was that the game was either solo-only or fully competitive … until now.

Development of Cooperative Rules

These cooperative rules for Comic Hunters have been in development for about 6 months now. (Let’s be clear: I have no affiliation with any of the developers or companies, I am just a fan of the game). I’ve had some basic ideas, thrown some away, playtested, tried new ideas, lather rinse repeat …

You can see version 0.9 of my beautiful, hand-crafted Whim cards above.

We’ve been playtesting at 2 and 3 player counts: the current rules only work for a 2 to 3 player cooperative game. We run out of cards when we try to play 4 players (see why below), so currently the cooperative mode only supports 2 or 3 players.

There’s been quite a bit of playtesting and editing: hopefully you’ll find this something you can enjoy!

Introduction

Here’s the introduction from the rulebook:

You and your friends have been collecting comics together for years! You love to go to the comic store, conventions, and flea markets together, looking for some rarities. Sure, there have been some friendly rivalries for comics along the way, but you and your friends love comics. If only your allowances were bigger, but that makes you appreciate the comics you do have a little more…

Then one day the Jerk comes into your life: he’s an Insufferable Jerk who just ruins everything! He thinks he knows everything, he thinks his way is the only way to do anything, and he puts down everything about you and your friends. He just happens to be rich and inserts himself into your groups. He tells everyone his collection of comics is the best! He is so annoying!

Your job in cooperative Comic Hunters is to get bragging rights over the Insufferable Jerk (sometimes referred to as IJ). In order to win the game, players must get bragging rights over the Insufferable Jerk in all aspects of comic collecting. To do this, at least one of the cooperative players must outdo the Insufferable Jerk in every aspect of the game:

   a) Combined, your collections must have more variety than IJ!

   b) From size perspective, at least one player must have more comics of a hero for each hero!

   c) For each highlight, at least one player must beat IJ!

   d) At least one player must have more Secret Stash points than IJ!

As a group, if you can outdo the Insufferable Jerk in every single aspect of comic collecting, you can shut him up! You hope to teach him collecting comics is supposed to be fun, not some sort of power play.

Players work together get the best comic collection they can, as a group.

Downloads

See above for the version 1.0.0 of the game! (The current version is 1.0.2 in the downloads section: the changes are mostly just very minor clarifications and rewordings). To play cooperative Comic Hunters, you need three things:

A copy of the original game Comic Hunters
The cooperative rulebook: see the PDF download at the end of post.
The 5 Whim Cards: see the PDF download at the end of the post.

The cooperative rulebook you might want to print, but you can always just look at in online (see below). The 5 Whim cards you must print! They will be “about” 3x5in when you print them.

The cards are all one-sided, so you want to print each card on a separate page and par it down to about 3×5. I used cardstock for mine. The idea is that these cards will go above the comic board:

These Whim cards are the AI that controls how the Insufferable Jerk works.

Feel free to download and try this out! I currently am keeping all rights to this, but I may release this to the public domain later on.

Feedback

We’d appreciate any feedback! Problems? Mistakes? Please feel free to reach out to us at returnfromsubroutinellc@gmail.com or post on BGG in Comic Hunters section!

See downloads below (remember, you need to download 2 things).

comic_hunters-1 Download

cooperativecomichunters-2 Download

coopgestalt

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

Tag: comic-books