Marvel Champions: The Card Game

I did not expect a Marvel card game to become my go-to solo evening, but here we are. Marvel Champions is built to work as one hero against one villain, and it’s clearly optimized for exactly that, the hero/alter-ego flip mechanic timed against the villain’s turn is a genuinely clever piece of design, and playing it solo doesn’t feel like a lesser version of some other intended experience the way solo modes often do. It feels like the actual game.

That’s also, honestly, its ceiling. I’ve read enough reviews saying flatly not to play with more than two players to trust the pattern, and my own table has confirmed it, this is a game built around one or two people managing their own hero, and adding more bodies mostly adds waiting. If you’re shopping for a big-table superhero card game, this isn’t quite that, it’s a focused solo or duo experience that happens to have a lot of characters available.

Where I’ve had to actually budget is the expansion pattern. Every hero pack, every scenario box adds real variety, the aspect system means the same hero plays differently depending on what deck-building philosophy you attach to them, but it adds up into a genuine money sink if you chase completeness. I’ve done the price-per-play math on this more than most games I own and the math keeps working out in the game’s favor, because the modularity means a new hero pack isn’t just one more thing to own, it’s dozens of new hero-and-aspect combinations layered onto everything I already have.

My one real gripe, shared by a few other reviews I’ve seen, is that the final round of a scenario can feel decided before it’s played, once you can see the villain’s remaining health and your own hand, there’s not much drama left in actually resolving it. Small thing against everything else this game does right. Five stars, easily the best solo card game I own.