My girlfriend was introduced to Cryptozoic’s DC Deck-Building Game while on vacation earlier this year and liked it enough to pick up the basic game herself when she got back. And we’ve been playing quite a lot of it over the past few months.
I was familiar enough with deck-building games before she picked this up, having played some classic titles like Dominion and some more esoteric ones like Tonto Cuore. Neither of them were really my cup of tea when it came to tabletop gaming, and so I’ll admit that I wasn’t expecting to have much fun with this game. I turned out to be incorrect. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about how the game runs – you build your deck from the available cards and at the end of the game total up the number of points in your deck to determine the winner, but as a life-long fan of superheroes there is a lot to like about the theme of the game.*
The game plays like your traditional deck building game – you start out with a small deck of basic cards that you use to buy varied and more powerful cards from the main deck in order to continually build and improve your own deck around your preferred strategy and the cards available to you. You play your hand of five cards, resolve your turn by purchasing new cards or attacking your opponents and then end your turn by discarding what you’ve played along with the rest of your hand and draw a new hand. You continue to draw through your deck five cards at a time. Once you’ve completely drawn through your deck, you shuffle your discard pile in order to refill your deck. There are several types of cards that you can purchase – heros, equipment, villains, and super-powers. Each of them give you a variety of different effects as you build your deck from simply giving you more buying power to letting you draw through your cards more frequently to letting you attack your opponents in a variety of different ways. There are also special location cards that get played in front of you and provide lasting effects instead of being discarded at the end of your turn. There are five cards from the main deck available for purchase at the start of each of your turns which are refreshed at the end. There is also a moderate supply of a basic super-powers that you can purchase if there is nothing else available that fits your strategy. Finally there is a small deck of Weakness cards that aren’t available for purchase, can be forced upon you by a variety of attacks or card effects throughout the game that provide you no benefit during your turn and negatively impact your score at the end of the game.
One thing that is slightly different is that you play as a specific super-hero. The base set includes the seven main members of the Justice League – Superman, Batman, Aquaman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, and Green Lantern. Each character has a different ability that will change how you build your deck. Superman gets more powerful for each unique super-power you play in a turn. Batman gets the same benefit with equipment cards. Wonder Woman lets you draw extra cards for buying villains during your turn. Playing The Flash lets you go first in the game and lets you draw extra cards when you first draw a card on each of your turns. They aren’t necessarily the most powerful or exciting abilities, but they can change how you construct your deck based on what you have available for purchase, and the heroes themselves are also represented in the main deck, some of the cards being quite powerful.
The final deck of cards is the Super-Villain deck. These cards include various nemeses of the heroes like Atrocitus, Ra’s al Ghul, Joker, the Anti-Monitor, and Lex Luthor. The are nominally just like the cards that you can buy from any of the other decks in the game. However, they cost quite a bit more and are summarily more powerful and worth more victory points at the end of the game. They also control the speed of the game – the game ends when the final Super-Villain is purchased from the stack.**
Depending on the number of Super-Villains you include, the game can take 45+ minutes and 2 to 5 people can play from just the base set. The base set retails for around $30 give or take and includes everything you need to play.
I haven’t had a chance to take a look at any of the expansions for the game, and there is nothing at all revolutionary about the game design and so there is nothing really revolutionary to talk about, but it has been always been a lot of fun every time that I have had it on the table. If you enjoy deck-building games or simply enjoy superheroes I would definitely recommend you give the game a shot.
*Granted I have always been more of a Marvel fan than a DC fan, but I can certainly appreciate both worlds.
**The game also ends if you are unable to fill the line-up of five cards from the main deck. However, the ratio of cards in the main deck to even a full line-up of Super-Villains (at least in the base set) means you’re going to run out of Super-Villains nearly all of the time.
Ben Erickson
