Smash Up: Marvel Review

What happens when the Spiderverse joins forces with the Sinister Six? You get an alternate universe comic book, of course. Or you get Smash Up: Marvel.

Smash Up: Marvel doesn't reinvent the popular Smash Up system and that's a good thing. If you're unfamiliar with Smash Up, you are given 2 different factions and you smash them up to form one deck. You play your cards in an attempt to capture bases and score the most points. There are a couple of different types of cards, characters and actions. On your turn, you can play one or the other or both. Characters will allow you to directly attack the bases and also modify other cards. Actions will allow you to modify a base, a character, or your own deck. Some actions will even allow you to get more actions or eliminate some of your opponents cards from bases to make it easier to score. The first person to score 15 points wins the game.

The Good: I love how many different factions come in one box. In the core box alone, there are eight decks which is enough to play a 4 player game. Each faction plays completely differently too which allows for some really interesting combos. The familiar IP makes the game feel very approachable to new players as well.

The Okay: There are a lot of different terms that can be applied to specific cards. When you start playing it can almost be overwhelming considering the size of the rulebook. Thankfully they are not too hard to figure out. I also wish that there was an underlay for the bases. Just something that would help distinguish that they're meant to be the objectives outside of the horizontal layout.

The Not So Good: I really don't understand the vertical dividers that were provided. They can't actually be used for their intended purpose unless the game box is opened. Otherwise they have no real purpose. That feels like a miss.

Overall Score: 8.5/10

This was my first real foray into Smash Up. I'll be honest, I've had the base game of the original sitting on my shelf for a very long time and I haven't touched it. I'd love to see if Marvel can mix with it. Avengers and Dinosaurs vs. Hydra and Wizards could be a really interesting, silly match. I'm way off topic here. The game is really good. It has a lot of strategy and planning inside the box, especially if you get teams that don't really mesh together you'll need to figure out how to overcome this issue. I know Disney is on the way but I really hope they do an expansion or two for this one.

Thanks to The Op for sending this my way to review.