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 Legendary is a co-op deck building game that sees you and your pals band together to fight evil super villains/xenomorphs/the predators/whatever. Mechanically its pretty similar to something like Dominion, or Thunderstone, with slight difference of actually being good. There are a couple of versions out, Marvel was the first, and has about a billion expansions covering pretty much every aspect of the Marvel universe. Encounters followed, tackling the Aliens movies (While also staying compatible with most of the Marvel stuff. Wanna fight Xenomorphs as Spider-Man? You got it!) Predator, set in the Predator universe just came out, and looks to be pretty baller too, though it does require a conversion kit to be used with Encounters stuff. Ok, but how does it play? There are some minor differences depending on what version you have, but basically you have a deck of curated Baddies, Events and Objectives that sit on the board, every time one of you takes a turn, one of these cards slides into play, slowly progressing down a track before escaping (In Encounters, they enter the Combat Zone at this point and start murdering you and everyone you love). Marvel has Masterminds, who act as your main enemy for the game, setting objectives and also lose conditions, as well as influencing which bad guys end up in the bad guy deck, all the while being the big villain you have to beat at the end. Encounters replaces this with a series of Objective cards you have to fulfill to win, and a Boss Monster that you have to kill. I dunno what Predator does someone tell me  Why would I want to play this trash? I'm pretty sure this is one of the best deck builders out there. It's mechanically deep while still being thematically rich (an issue I have with a lot of deck builders is how dry it feels) that borrows from some of the best co-op games out there to make a game that feels refined, polished and weighty while still being simple enough to be explained in a single round of play. There are some downsides, the art is kinda odd and off putting to some (I kinda dig it), and holy poo poo I hope you LOVE organizing hundreds of entirely randomly arranged cards, but the core gameplay is brilliant, the way the game managed to feel like the source material is neat. The first Encounter scenario in many ways feels a lot like the first Alien movie. You're finding weird eggs all over the place, monsters are slowly creeping up on you and you and your rag-tag team don't have the firepower, equipment or knowledge to handle this poo poo, whereas the second, you're a bunch of ultimate badasses with smart bombs and electronic ball breakers, but jesus christ there are A LOT of these alien things holy poo poo game over man game over. The Marvel one does this nicely too. Fast heroes blow through decks in a single round whereas big hitters like The Hulk smash the crap out of entire rows of bad guys. Iron Man tinkers and puts together awesome combos to take out enemies while magical heroes can pull cards out of their buttholes and teleport poo poo around. Its fantastic. Ok, sold, what do I buy I recommend starting with the Legendary: Marvel edition. For a start it's just got piles of extra poo poo for it, so if you like the core game, you can go ahead and add Guardians of the Galaxy, or Bad Guys or Daredevil or pretty much anything you can think of from the Marvel Universe.  Encounters is almost universally praised as one of the best games of last year, and is also a great starting point if you like Alien more than Marvel, though. There aren't really any expansions out for it yet. Well, Predator kinda is but it's pretty Stand Alone. There are rumblings of a Prometheus game expansion though. You can also use villians and heroes from the Marvel stuff no problem, although that does sorta blow the theme apart a little, when you have Spidey, Daredevil and Doctor Strange helping Ridley and the crew of the Nostromo fight off the evil forces of Thanos and his gang of Xenomorphs. Mostly I just really love this game and want some more discussion of it in the forum. Buy it and spend hours setting up your box so you can actually play it then get instantly wrecked, then come in here to whine about it.
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Aug 4, 2015 06:07
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 00:51 |
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It's pretty much the only game I can play solo without feeling like a complete psychopath. It scales really well.
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Aug 4, 2015 15:10
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Still getting the poo poo kicked out of me by the first Encounters scenario! Half of the problem is the random rear end Facehugger deaths, and the other half is finding the cash to get half the cards I need into my deck. Even after we're past the first objective, most of us are still stuck with mostly our basic Grunts and Specialist cards, and those do not do very well at taking out the level 2 and 3 Xenos. Most of the time what happens is we try to stem the tide of Xenos pouring into the combat zone, maybe able to take one out per turn, then inevitably one or two get into the combat zone and its practically game over there and then.
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Aug 7, 2015 14:44
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Adding my Guardians pack into Alien might be the only way I'll win that first scenario
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Aug 7, 2015 22:28
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I just beat the first scenario and that was one heck of a board game night. Mostly got by on firepower alone, but the last turn came down to me drawing 5 cards, looking for 5 damage. The last game that got that intense was serious Chaos in the Old World games with my old group, back when that was practically the only game we all played.
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Aug 15, 2015 05:07
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