It’s Marvel’s world and we’re all just living in it. In this piece, we’re going to look at some of the easy to enjoy Marvel titles out there, ones that re-theme classics to give them that superhero flavor.
We’ve talked before about big standalone titles like Marvel Champions, Marvel: Crisis Protocol (now with an updated core set!), and Marvel United, so this week we’re taking a look at their lighter brethren. These are the games good for any night, with any crowd, and best served with a side of superhero swagger.
Marvel Villainous Lets You Do What Thanos Couldn’t
Disney’s Villainous line has a great hook: you get to play as a chosen evil-doer, advancing your schemes through your unique locations, playing your asymmetric decks, and cackling like mad as all villains should. Marvel Villainous (Prospero Hall – No specific designer credited) shifts the setup by making the Fate deck shared—those heroes are after all of you, not just one—and adding adjustable Events to shake things up, usually in a bad way for the bad guys.
The general gameplay flow, where you’ll move your villain’s pawn to a spot and perform an action to generate resources, Fate an opponent, or play some
cards, is the same as standard Villainous, so if you’ve already tried that title, it’ll be easy to jump in here. You’ll be doing all this in service of your unique goal, whether that’s accumulating Infinity Stones as Thanos or assembling your unstoppable robotic army as Ultron. Marvel Villainous is essentially a race, and those Fate cards are your tool to slow your opponents down.
Often, a Fate card might send a hero crashing onto your player board, blocking part of a location and the associated action spots until they’re dealt with. Naturally, you won’t handle such clean-up yourself, but by spending power (those resources you’ve been generating), you can hire up some nasty minions to do the dirty work. Turn Iron Man into scrap, and now the world’s yours to dominate.
Marvel Villainous is heavy on the interaction. Heroic sand will get thrown in your gears. Rolling with wild swings, laughing with good and back luck, and doing your best maniacal Cate Blanchett impression when playing Hela are key to getting the most of this one. That said, its fast pace and easy-to-grasp rules make it playable by young and old, and villain difficulty ratings can help equalize skill levels. I’d also recommend a quick training session with newbies before throwing a four player game, as play time can drag if folks don’t have a good grasp on what to do.
The Villainous game system continues to iterate, with Marvel and Star Wars forks of the original idea. If you’re seeking some supervillain fun with more than a little bite, Marvel Villainous is worth checking out.
Engine-Build The Avengers With Marvel Splendor
Among the hallowed list of modern gateway games, Splendor has a safe spot near the top. Its clean engine-building combines with tactile components and svelte production to draw in anyone, from a board gaming neophyte to a grizzled hex-and-counter warrior wanting thirty minutes of back-and-forth bluffing, blocking, and buying.
Marvel Splendor adds a few tweaks to the beloved formula, though I find its most appealing upgrade is the theming. No longer are you maniacally collecting 
gems like some mad Liberace aiming to bedazzle the world. Your targets now are various superheroes that you recruit by gathering the resources they require—Groot does not work for free, my friends. As in Splendor, these heroes grant bonuses to acquiring more of their pals, scaling up your team until you hit the requisite composition to take down Thanos.
This is, it must be said, a much more satisfying objective than simply accumulating heaping amounts of precious gemstones.
The trick with Marvel Splendor and the various Splendor offshoots is timing the switch from building up your resources to snapping up cards. Played right, you can chain turn after turn without stopping, like Nick Fury recruiting the Avengers, all the way to the end. A savvy opponent, though, can read your cards and stop your streak with a well-timed purchase of their own. This interference makes Splendor Marvel best at two or three, when turns run fast and folks have space to see what hero they need to zero out to keep the game in check.
All told, if there’s no Splendor in your collection, or you’d like to upgrade from the base game to something with infinitely more zest, Marvel Splendor keeps the vibrant soul of the original while dressing it up in a superhero suit, and a cracking one at that.
Sling Dice and Insults At Your Pals With Marvel Dice Throne
Yahtzee proved that simply rolling dice over and over again to score points felt pretty darn good. Dice Throne, and its Marvel fork, prove that rolling custom dice over and over again to smack down an opponent feels even better. The Roxley Games production, a masterclass in well-crafted components and storage, offers a slam-bang duel in under half an hour.
Marvel Dice Throne, like its more traditional fantasy counterparts, comes in character packs or as a whole battle chest, bringing the likes of Captain Marvel,
Spiderman (the Miles Morales version), and Black Panther to your table. Each superhero is dramatically different, offering unique special abilities and tactics to pursue in obliterating your foe.
Those abilities come about through Yahtzee’s three roll and go structure, bracketed, Magic-style, with a before and after window to buff your character or your dice with drawn cards from unique decks. You’ll be rolling those dice aiming for straights, matching symbols, or, if you’re lucky, all sixes to trigger an ultimate ability. Naturally, both you and your opponent can throw cards at one another’s rolls too, interfering with the results as much as possible.
What dice you might choose to keep or reroll depends on your character. Take Thor, whose attacks can often make use of his hammer Mjolnir to deal bonus damage. Timing the hammer’s hits and recalls can shift a middling strike into a devastating one, as you lop hit points away. Scarlet Witch can swap out your opponent’s dice, making it difficult to roll into bigger attacks, and the chaos continues from there. Every character has their thematic powers, and a helpful complexity gauge makes it easy to get started.
What Marvel Dice Throne does best in its race to make the enemy hit zero, though, is a lack of busts. You’ll rarely, barring an opponent’s meddling, find yourself doing nothing on your turn. Strategy presents itself as risk and reward, a balance between dealing raw damage, protecting yourself, or disabling the opposition. A straightforward smacking might feel good, until you realize Loki’s made you miss once again.
Marvel Dice Throne brings depth without overwhelming rules grit, its storage is top notch and gets you playing in literally less than five minutes, and the snappy gameplay makes it easy to do tournaments or best-of duels. It’s great fun, the sort of thing that’ll come off the shelf at nine PM on a Tuesday just to have a laugh before bed.
Oh, and it’s fully compatible with Dice Throne Adventures, letting Dr. Strange team up with The Cursed Pirate and the Vampire Lord from Dice Throne Season Two for some madcap dungeon crawling. When’s that comic coming, Marvel?
Squirrel Girl Gets A Tabletop RPG
So you think a dragon’s dangerous? What about Galactus?
The Marvel Multiverse RPG is exactly what you think it is. A sandbox to explore your own adventures, either by jumping into the suits of your favorite superheroes or creating a brand new target for Ultron’s many, many robots.
This isn’t just a simple fork of an existing ruleset, but an original, “d616” system that gets you into the action with a sourcebook and three d6s. You’ll have a giant collection of powers to choose from if you make your own character, while taking Daredevil or Spiderman for a whirl lets you jump right into a one-shot or a longer campaign without burning a session building up a character from scratch.
Speaking of one shots, there’re a couple of adventures you can jump right into, like Deadpool’s one-shot or The Cataclysm of Kang campaign, which features six linked adventures doing what the MCU hasn’t yet managed: making Kang interesting! Upcoming expansions include everyone’s favorite mutant school teachers, the X-Men, along with (naturally) the Spiderverse.
Superhero RPG settings, particularly ones that give you specific rules for tossing cars at your worst enemies (or your best friends) are rare, and if your group is deep into Marvel’s many fantastic stories and colorful characters, Marvel Multiverse will be a treat. Given its theme and simpler dice set, the Marvel Multiverse can also serve as a great RPG introduction to novice roleplayers.
After all, once you don the mask, you can be anybody you want.
Dread it, Run from it, IP Arrives All The Same, and Maybe That’s Not So Bad.
Licensed games and RPGs have a mixed history, but done well, dressing good bones with familiar characters and storylines can draw in new players or give a thematic urgency to gameplay otherwise lacking in generic battles for victory points. Splendor and Villainous gain new life with Marvel’s inclusion, while Dice Throne’s battle Yahtzee fits with superhero clashes like a glove.
If there’s a superhero fan in your life who prefers their games on the lighter side or without a shipping crate’s worth of crowdfunded extras, the games above make a great first, and lasting impression.
