Marvel Snap Review

ign.com:

Want to have the Guardians of the Galaxy in the palm of your hand, leaping into play, guns blazing, and even fighting alongside Yondu once more? How about putting together your ultimate Avengers crew and doing battle across Stark Tower, Central Park and the Daily Bugle? These are the kinds of dream teams and fantastical scenarios that Marvel Snap allows, and its excellent use of the Marvel licence is packed into a punchy portable card game where matches are short, the gameplay is easy to grok and you’re encouraged to check in every day. Spoiling the fanfest a little, however, is the actual process of building out your card collection, which I’ve found to be a long grind that eventually loses its early momentum.

Marvel Snap is wonderfully streamlined: your deck consists of only 12 cards - no duplicates - and games last for six rounds. The board has three locations to contest, but the locations that appear are random and pulled from a large pool, with one revealed each turn over the first three rounds. Players queue up their actions simultaneously each round, deciding how to spend their available energy (which increases as a match progresses) to play cards to the locations of their choice. Once both players have ended their turn, the cards are revealed one at a time, triggering their effects. The end goal is to have more power than your opponent in two of three locations, so there’s an impressive amount of strategy in choosing where to play your cards, not to mention how to take advantage of favourable locations and mitigate difficult ones.

Because each round happens simultaneously, Marvel Snap is a bit like a series of rock, paper, scissors encounters where you’re trying to anticipate what your opponent is likely to do. On