Review – Marvel: Age of Heroes

Marvel: Age of Heroes is an X-Men adventure on the tabletop. Controlling a pair of X-Men each, players gear up for missions before jumping into action to fight villains and complete objectives. With multiple scenarios and gameplay options, it offers versatility and strategic depth.

Review

In Marvel: Age of Heroes, 2-5 players set their sights on enemies like Magneto and Apocalypse. Every player controls a pair of X-Men as they train at the Xavier Institute and embark on dangerous missions.

Each round is divided into 2 phases. First, during the Institute phase, players place their workers onto Institute spaces, which help them to power up. These spaces do things like increase players’ resources or allow them to play/draw cards. Players’ resources are tracked on individual tableaus.

Cards consist of events, allies, and team-ups. Events are typically one-and-done actions, but ally and team-up cards are played onto the board. Many of them open up new action spaces for players to use later on. The space on the Iceman card, for instance, provides a big boost to a player’s physical resource, while Nightcrawler’s ally space allows a player to trade places with an opposing hero (teleporting, I suppose).

If a player wishes, they can place workers onto the X-Jet rather than an Institute space. Each piece assigned to the X-Jet will be available in the second half of the round, the Mission phase.

During this phase, heroes on the jet are assigned to mission locations. These include spaces on team-up cards, mission tiles, and the Extraction Zone. Mission tiles are where players fight enemies, spending resources to deal damage, and the Extraction Zone has an action that changes throughout the game. Most victory points come from the Mission phase, so it’s important for players to get out there and fight.

Once all Mission phase actions have been resolved, players retrieve their heroes and a new round begins. Play continues until a game end condition is met. (The triggering condition varies by scenario.) At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins!

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Marvel: Age of Heroes is a sound worker placement game from the co-designer of Lords of Waterdeep. It offers a good deal of variability thanks to multiple scenarios, unique character abilities, and different enemies for players to encounter. This game asks players to balance their desire to complete missions with their need to power up at the Institute—after all, heroes must train before charging into battle.

Prospective players should understand that this game is more strategic than the theme might suggest. Just as Lords of Waterdeep feels less like Dungeons and Dragons and more like a euro strategy game, so Marvel: Age of Heroes is less of a “BIFF-BAM-POW” superhero rollick and more of a mid-weight strategy affair. It is also quite mechanical; don’t expect any dice-chucking hootenannies.

Speaking of theme, the X-Men theme works okay—it’s fun to imagine the mutants training together and battling villains—but it’s strange that this game is competitive rather than cooperative. It’s not like the heroes fight each other directly, but given that the X-Men operate (mostly) as a team, it seems odd that this game has a single winner. Shouldn’t everyone win or lose together? Though I love seeing comic book characters in games, I feel like the theme might actually work against the mechanisms a bit in this case. (Though I will say that the player-characters’ powers make thematic sense.)

On the plus side, Age of Heroes has a strong production quality, the stars of the show being the acrylic X-Men standees. They are fantastic. The board’s sprawling footprint clues players into the scope of the game, and the imagery is lovingly illustrated. Intuitive iconography and well-organized boards help to keep things running smoothly.

Overall, my opinion of Marvel: Age of Heroes is positive, though a thematic disconnect brings it down a bit. This game doesn’t feel like an action-packed comic book adventure, but rather it feels like a resource optimization euro. If you like that style of game, this might be one you’ll really enjoy; there is no doubt that it’s a solid design. (And I certainly prefer the X-Men theme to a generic farming/trading theme set in the Renaissance.) If you like worker placement games, or if you want a more strategic superhero game, this might be one to check out.

A review copy was provided by WizKids.