Marvel Champions Ate My Whole Winter

I found somebody’s play log in the reviews, forty-two plays broken down by character, Spider-Man twenty times, and I laughed because I’ve unconsciously started doing the same thing on a notepad by my games shelf. Once you start logging it, you notice this game gets a genuinely huge amount of table time relative to its box size, which for a card game is exactly what I want out of the format.

The core loop, choose a hero, choose an aspect, build a deck, take down a villain’s scheme before they take down you, is simple to explain and deep to actually play well. Setup is quick once you know your deck, which matters, I’m not resetting a whole board every session, just shuffling and dealing encounter cards. The insert in the base box is honestly not great for the expansion sprawl, I ended up building my own card storage system with dividers, which several other reviewers mentioned doing too.

My one real complaint, shared by a reviewer who put it better than I could, is that the villain’s activation phase can feel like it eats half the round, there are stretches where you’re just watching the scheme advance and reacting rather than actively playing. And the campaign endings can be a little flat, no flavor text after you finally take down the boss, just the mechanical win state, which undersells the moment a bit.

Five stars anyway. It scales beautifully from true solo to two players, which is most of how I play these days, and the sheer number of hero and villain combinations means I’m nowhere close to running out of new matchups.