It’s Christmas! And that means it’s time for our annual 12 mini reviews in 12 days series. We kick things off with my most played game of all time, Marvel Legendary. We surpassed the 550 games played mark on Christmas Day as we got to grips with the new World War Hulk expansion.
The expansion adds four hundred new cards to the game, making this the largest set since the base game. It also adds a whole slew of new keywords to learn, making this one a little tricky to get going but it hums along nicely once everyone is up to speed.
The new keywords are:
Smash X - Discard a card to get X hits. Simple, straightforward and very powerful. This one also feeds directly into Wounded Fury allowing you to get wounds into your discard pile.
Wounded Fury X - Get hits equal to the number of wounds in your discard pile. Alternatively, a villain or mastermind that has Wounded Fury gets +X hit points for each wound in your discard. It’s a double edged sword.
Outwit - This keyword is quite similar to Spectrum from previous sets but instead of colours you need 3 different cost cards to trigger the effect.
Transform - This is the big one from this set. In previous sets we’ve seen Legendary try to emulate heroes changing and adapting through the keyword Size Changing but really that just gave them discounts for attacking and purchasing. Transform really brings home the idea of mild mannered Bruce Banner shape-shifting into the Hulk in a really big way. The keyword Transform literally has you swap a card from your deck with a card in the transform deck which can naturally change the way you build your deck. In addition all the masterminds in this set transform into different version too making them a cool and interesting addition.
This set also heralds a return of the keywords Cross Dimensional Rampage and Feast. As well as revisiting the idea of Traps that were introduced in the X-Men expansion.
So, what are my thoughts? Well, after 4 games (all of which we lost) I think this set has a lot of potential. The Heroes really do bring something new to the table as they can all transform at least one of their cards. However, the Transform keyword does bring with it a new layer of fiddliness. As someone who owns (nearly) everything for Legendary, I can tell you what game didn’t need was another deck of cards clogging up the play area. I like the idea of placing the transforming cards in the same sleeves, instead of a separate deck, but I use precision sleeves and it’d be a tight fit.
That said, it is cool watching Rick Jones kill off 5 enemies and suddenly transforming into the awesome A-Bomb.
Smash is cool and easy to work with, Outwit is less easy to remember, especially as cards come and go in this set meaning even if you could outwit earlier in your turn you might not be able to later. Wounded Fury is great thematically, a wounded hulk gets more powerful, but has no advantage against an enemy that also gets angry when it’s wounded.
So far we’ve only played against Sentry, whose transformed side has some of the most disturbing art in all of Legendary, so I can’t speak to the set as a whole, but the difficulty seems on par with X-Men, meaning it’s pretty jolly hard, but overall maybe less punishing (i.e. more fun). If you’re a fan of Legendary this one seems like a no brainer to me. 15 new heroes, 6 masterminds, 10 new villain/henchmen groups and 8 new schemes is a buckload of content and from what I’ve seen so far, aside from a little clunkiness, this is a good fun box!