My nephew picked up a hero deck at game night, flipped through the card art for a minute, and asked me which comic this was based on. It’s not based on anything, it’s original IP, and I think that’s the best compliment this game gets, the flavor text and art commit hard enough to the superhero genre that people assume there’s a licensed universe behind it. There isn’t. Somebody just built one from scratch and made it convincing.

Mechanically it’s a fixed-deck cooperative game, each hero, villain, and environment is its own separate deck with its own quirks, and the combinatorics of mixing and matching are genuinely the appeal, a villain that felt unbeatable with one team comp turns manageable with a different one. Where it costs me points is bookkeeping. Buffs, debuffs, damage modifiers stack up fast, and even with the enhanced edition’s cleaner card layout, I’ve had games where we paused to recount a hero’s current stats more than the actual decision-making warranted. The rulebook itself is fine on the core loop but thin on edge cases, I’ve had to make more than one table ruling on the fly that I later found contradicted by an official FAQ answer, which is exactly the kind of gap a well-organized rules reference should close and doesn’t here.

Setup is light, which I appreciate on a weeknight, sort the three relevant decks and you’re playing in under ten minutes, no fiddly board to assemble. Teachability is decent for the base rules but the real learning curve is in absorbing what each hero’s deck actually does, which takes a session or two per character before you’re playing them well rather than just legally.

Four stars. The flavor and variety earn it, the bookkeeping keeps it from a fifth.