Today, rather than a normal review, we wanted to do something a little different. We want to highlight our all time favorite game!

Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game, has been one of the most played games in our home since it came out in 2012. Over the years as new expansions have been released with exciting heroes to work with, masterminds to battle, and schemes to overcome, it has cemented itself as our very favorite in our collection. 

If we could only keep one game, it would be this one. 

Because of that, it was time we talked about it officially on the blog! 

Just a reminder, you can shop this and all our favorite games by visiting our Amazon Storefront!

I’m often highlighting Marvel Legendary on Instagram. If you follow us (and you should!) it’s not uncommon to see us playing it in our stories and chatting about what hero teams we’re playing with. We love helping people build fun, thematic decks to play with and hearing what combinations worked well or were a challenge for others. In fact, we even shared some deck suggestions last year in anticipation of Avengers Endgame releasing! 

Today I wanted to highlight why we love it even more today after 8 years of play, and why we continue to bring it back to the table again and again. 

First, a quick overview of what Marvel Legendary is!

Set in the Marvel Comics universe, Marvel Legendary is a deck building game where players will work together to battle evil Masterminds by each assembling a team of heroes, recruiting them to their hand, and deploying them to attack villains, rescue bystanders, and stop the Masterminds’s scheme!

Each hero, villain group, and mastermind all come with their own unique set of cards. To play, you’ll choose which mastermind you want to face, villains you want to fight, and the team of heroes you’ll have to recruit from. Everyone begins the game with the same starting hand which they will use to recruit powerful heroes to build a stronger deck of cards from which they will be able to pull from. 

At the start of every player’s turn, a new villain is flipped into the city, if a play chooses to, they can fight one or more of these villains using their hand of cards. Defeated villains are collected by that player for points at the end of the game. If you have enough fighting power, you can also attack the Mastermind. When the Mastermind is successfully beaten four times, you end the game and win. If you are overrun by villains or the Mastermind’s scheme is completed, all players lose. 

So that’s the briefest of overviews! Take it from us, this game is amazing!

Why We Love Legendary

Apart from it being a truly enjoyable gaming experience, there are a few key reasons why we love playing this game again and again, year after year. 

Storylines

Because you have total control over what cards you choose to put in the game, you can have a LOT of fun creating storylines, reimagining things from the comics or movie universes, and giving your favorite heroes the team ups they deserve. While you definitely don’t have to be a Marvel fan to enjoy the game, if you are, here is where you’ll have potentially the most fun!

When a new movie comes out, we always seem to find ourselves playing out that movie through this game. You can put together your favorite storyline from the comics and play through that (it seriously works so well!) or you can create your own fan fiction! We didn’t have to wait to see how Thor’s teamup with the Guardians of the Galaxy went, we made an Asgardians of the Galaxy deck and had a blast! (Mr. Waititi, call me! We’ve got ideas!)

Easy to scale difficulty

Marvel Legendary can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. We’ve built games where we’ve just gotten walloped in record time (so humbling) and others that allow for our daughter (8) to play with us! You can always build the game to suit the challenge you want to face, which I absolutely love. Best part, if something isn’t working out? All you have to do is just swap things around for the next game!

Theme is so perfectly incorporated

I can’t say enough about how well the theme works in this game. It really starts to feel like you are building a team of heroes rather than a deck of cards. Each hero is really well designed. Their card effects usually always feel like something they’d be able to do and helps make each hero feel unique from the rest. It’s also fantastic how well the established hero teams work together! Teams you know, like The Guardians of the Galaxy, The Fantastic Four, or Spider friends are all made more powerful when they team up together. It’s very well done!

Artwork is wonderful

The comic artwork is first rate! The cards in the base box all have the same artwork on each card while the wording is different. Once expansions started releasing, this changes so that each unique card of a hero has unique artwork. We love this because it not only gives more great artwork to the game, but this also makes it easy for players memorize what actions cards give players and once memorized, you know just by looking at the image.

Cooperative with winning “MVP”

We’re competitive souls, but sometimes we like to work together too. Marvel Legendary gives us the best of both worlds. To beat the Mastermind and foil their scheme, it requires a good deal amount of teamwork. One player may need to clear the city of villains while the other attacks the mastermind on their turn. While players all technically win or lose together, each villain or mastermind you defeat or bystander you save earns you a specific amount of points. At the end of a game, you’ll count up these points to see who had the highest total. So while you all win, there’s still a player that get’s to claim MVH (most valuable hero!) status! It’s usually me, right Adam?? 😉

Satisfying when deck comes together

Like any hero team, your deck builds slowly throughout the game. When it finally comes together and you’re pulling card after card, your heroes are all activating and you’re able to pull off insane combos and attacks — it’s amazing! It adds to the overall theme because it really feels like your group of heroes have finally figured out how to work together, and the payoff is worth it. 

Great for solo play

Pretty straight forward here: if you enjoy playing games solo Legendary is fantastic! It’s like reading one of your favorite books — sometimes it just fun to go on a solo adventure with your favorite characters.

Endless Possibilities and So Much to Discover!

There are literally hundreds of cards! With so many fantastic expansions you can create nearly any team your heart desires to combat a huge variety of masterminds! Add in the fact that there are well over 100 scheme twists, each bringing a different challenge for players to overcome, you’ll never play the same game twice! 

So how do you store and organize all those cards?

If you’re like us, the space in the base box can only last you so long. While you can definitely store cards in the expansion boxes and make do (we did for the longest time) you may eventually want an official home for everything so you have it all in (relatively) one place.

Enter the Hobby Lobby artist case with the Broken Token insert!

The Broken Token wooden organizer fits the trunk perfectly and helps keep your card collection in nice, neat rows so you can build decks easily and put everything back in its place quickly.

Depending on your card collection you may need one or two of these trunks. We have two with plenty of space to spare in the second. These give us enough space to hold all of the currently released expansions. (You can typically snag the artist case from Hobby Lobby for 50% off regularly, so if you happen to see it full price, make sure to snag a coupon or wait a couple days for it to go on sale again!)

The only thing we need to store outside of the trunks separately is the game board. Everything else, including the rule booklets sits inside the trunks. It’s not the most portable game by any means (these suckers are heavy!) But it is so easy to pop open the trunks and get playing in a matter of minutes since we no longer have to open multiple boxes trying to find specific cards. 

As Marie Kondo said: “Putting your house in order is the magic that creates a vibrant and happy life!” 

I can’t speak for my house, but I feel like this definitely applies for Legendary! 😉

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