Marvel United Review

A few weeks ago, we posted our “How to Play” article for Marvel United, which you can read here. Ever since then, we have been playing game after game of Marvel United, beating the three included villains multiple times. But does Marvel United hold up over the long term, and is there enough here to justify a purchase? Let’s get into it with our full review of Marvel United, created by CMON Games and published by Spinmaster.

Overview

In Marvel United, players will pick on of the included heroes in the game, select their figure and deck, and use that deck to defeat villains at key locations from the Marvel universe. The game unfolds like a story – or a comic book if that helps you visualize – where players take turns playing cards from their hands to hopefully defeat the villain. Careful though, because for every few cards the players place, the villain will play cards from his own deck, attempting to topple the Avengers for good.

The Components

If there is one thing to say about games from CMON, it is that the components are fantastic. That continues here with Marvel United. While the card quality leaves a bit to be desired, the figures that are included in the game are highly detailed, and easily painted (and you are encouraged to paint them, in fact)! Here are is our Iron Man figures ready for his next games:

#MarvelUnited #IronMan #Painted @SpinMaster @CMONGames pic.twitter.com/hIqHGf40vv

— Adam Roffel (@AdamRoffel) August 21, 2020

Quality components are great, and as we’ve said many times, they can make a good game great! But the gameplay itself needs to hold up well – if it doesn’t, we’d never get this game to the table to see the great components. Thankfully, Marvel United plays as good as it looks!

Playing the Game

Included in the box with all the heroes are three villains – Redskull, Ultron, and Taskmaster – and each villain plays very differently, and engages with the locations in the game in different ways. At the least, assuming you utilize the same heroes each time you play, your initial investment will get you AT LEAST 3 unique game play experiences. But when you factor in the abundance of heroes to play with – who also interact differently than each other thanks to special abilities – you are really given limitless game play experiences, which will only increase exponentially when future expansions launch for the game.

And to that end, I found many hours of enjoyment over the first few weeks of owning Marvel United. Initially, we thought the game was much to easy (playing with myself, my father-in-law, and 10 year old son), and we even had to check the rules after each game to make sure we were playing correctly. We were shocked when we realized we had played the game exactly as the rules had intended, and were a bit disheartened by how easy it seemed.

Then we read a small little box as the back of the rules – if you want to make your game more difficult, consider removing the wild and/or double wild cards from the game. We did, and things got intense, really quickly. And this all to show that Marvel United actually scales really well, depending on the age of hte players. With his friends, my 10 year old likely will need the wild and double wild cards in his deck; with myself and his grandpa, however, we definitely do not.

There are other factors that will determine how hard a single game might be, including which heroes you choose, and how you use them. Here is the best example I can provide of how this can have a big impact on the game. During our second game, we decided to play against Redskull. When attempting to defeat Henchman, generally players need to move onto the location of a henchmen to attack. With Redskull’s Hydra troops, when you BEGIN your turn on their card, bad things happen to you. Thankfully, I was using Captain Marvel, which gave me the ability to do 2 damage to someone on an adjacent card. This meant I could attack Henchmen all over the board, without actually landing on their space, and potentially getting negative affects for starting my turn there. In this situation, having Captain Marvel made playing against Redskull MUCH easier, because of her ability.

Conclusion

If you love board games, and have an appreciation for the Marvel universe, than Marvel United is a must own. Whether young or old, new to board games or a longtime veteran, the game scales really well to everyone, allowing you to slightly alter the difficulty depending on who’s playing. And with the promise of tons of expansions to come, Marvel United is a game that will get off your shelf an onto your table dozens of times over the next few years. We highly recommend Marvel United.