With the threat of the Dark Arts looming, Dumbledore has authorized for students to being training in the Defense Against the Dark Arts. In the Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle – Defense Against the Dark Arts deck-building game, students from each of the four houses train against each other in one-on-one battles. Do you have what it takes to Wingardium Leviosa your way to victory?
In the late 2000s, Dominion took the board gaming world by storm. It essentially invented the deck-building genre of game, which has since been riffed on countless times. For those wanting to put on a deck-building game night, finding games is easy. Throw a rock into and game store and it’ll hit three deck builders before touching the ground.
With this edition of the Board Game Night Playlist, we’re going to build the perfect deck of cards within three different deck-building games. Let’s see what made the list this month!
Paperback by Tim Fowler puts players in the shoes of aspiring writers. Pouring over each word, players compete to become the most famous writer of the bunch by completing work on paperback novels. No, you won’t actually have to write novels to win the game, but your vocabulary will be put to the test in a game that is equal parts Scrabble and Dominion. Are you ready to become the next J.K. Rowling, Stephen King or Nicholas Sparks?
Who doesn’t want more of a good thing? This is the logic that drives the sale of expansions of any sort. With board games, I’m not one to shy away from purchasing additional items to supplement my main purchase. Just to name a few, we have three out of four Pandemic expansions, almost all of the Marvel Legendary expansions, and hundreds of additional dice for Dice Masters.
Once you start down the expansion rabbit hole, it’s hard to stop. The urge to have a complete collection kicks in and making the decision to cut things off can get quite difficult. When is the right time to pull the plug?
Marvel and Upper Deck’s latest take on the Legendary deck-building game turns the tables on the classic good versus evil conflict. In Legendary: Villains, 1-5 players play as the bad guys as they try to stop the heroes from completing their missions. While this is a standalone game, it is fully compatible with the original Legendary and all of its expansions. Is the role reversal, new cards and a few new mechanics enough to justify the existence of this game?
Originally released in 2012, Legendary: A Marvel Deck-Building Game is one that I fell in love with during the summer of 2013. By then, Upper Deck had already announced its plans to support the game through “Big Box” and “Small Box” expansions. Big Box expansions, such as Dark City, contain upwards of 350 cards that will release every August. Small Box expansions, such as the Fantastic 4 expansion, have up to 100 cards that will release every 3-4 months. It’s exciting to know that Upper Deck and Marvel plan to support this game with a steady flow of content, though I do have concerns about how things are priced.
Legendary: Dark City is the first major expansion to Marvel’s deck-building game. With 17 heroes, 5 masterminds, 8 new schemes and more, owning this would basically double the size of the experience. There’s definitely a surface-level appeal to having more of a good thing, but do the cards in the expansion improve on the core experience?
Having played a lot of Dominion and DC Comics Deck-Building Game, my chief complaint between them is that they squander an opportunity to create a story that comes to life as it’s played. I love them both for their wildly addictive gameplay mechanics, but I never feel like I’m doing anything beyond managing the numbers. In particular, DC’s game has the opportunity to leverage its great cast of characters to tell a cool in-game story, but they’re mostly just used as art over top of the standard deck-building formula. Worse yet, its moment-to-moment story beats don’t fully make sense within the overall premise of the game. For instance, why can players use villains to take out super villains? From a strictly mechanical point of view, it doesn’t matter. However, it does break the immersion and take away from what could have been a more authentic DC Comics experience.
With a slew of unique mechanics specifically designed to convey the struggle between good and evil, Legendary: A Marvel Deck-Building Game aims to bring the Marvel universe to life in a way that its deck-building counterparts don’t. This added context however comes at a cost of a steeper learning curve. Is the trade worth it?
In Third Person 