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One of the things that's amazed me about the success of The Avengers, The Dark Knight, Man of Steel, Captain America: The First Avenger, and other recent superhero-based movies is that few people actually read superhero comics. If you check out sales figures for Marvel Comics and DC Comics — and here's one such example from December 2013, courtesy Comic Book Resources — you'll see that in a month each publisher might sell 2-2.5 million units total for all of the titles that it released. Only a few titles reach sales of 100,000, and on average a title sells about 30,000 copies, which in the larger scheme of things is next-to-nothing — and yet sales of tickets for movies based on these heroes is huge!
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I'm not sure what to make of that, whether the comic book publishers do a terrible job of presenting ideas that resonate with a far larger audience than they reach, whether movies are simply a more attractive medium than comics (which all too often feel like product rather than a creative endeavor), or whether everyone has just enough experience with the superhero comics (as I do from having read them in my youth) that the movies attract curious souls who want to revisit old friends. Whatever the case, these movies have generally succeeded on a level far beyond the comics themselves would seem merit.
Which brings us to Cryptozoic Entertainment's DC Comics Deck-Building Game and DC Comics Deck-Building Game: Heroes Unite, the latter of which hits the U.S. market today. DC Comics Deck-Building Game was released in November 2012, and like the movies mentioned above, it's found a place in the mainstream market, specifically the U.S. bookstore chain Barnes & Noble, which features this game (and the Marvel Comics counterpart Legendary from Upper Deck Entertainment) in its game section and special superhero-themed endcaps and displays. Do gamers buy that many games at B&N? Probably not if you're talking about gamers-on-BGG gamers, but if you're talking about the casual Joe who plays games every so often, then yes, they buy games at B&N that they otherwise would never discover because they're not gamery enough to visit game stores, but instead just find stuff as they run across it.Both Legendary and DC Comics DBG involve deck-building — a concept likely to be unfamiliar to Casual Joe — and when you compare the two, Upper Deck is aiming more toward the established gamer market due to the complexity of the set-up in Legendary (seeding master strikes in the deck, figuring out which hero and which villain groups to use) and the two in-game currencies (which can be a challenge to juggle if you're not used to such things) whereas Cryptozoic presents a game design as mainstream-friendly as the license, with a few peripheral decks of identical cards and most everything else being shuffled into a central deck./pic1355432.png)
Cryptozoic uses this same deck-building engine — dubbed "Cerberus" — in a number of games: the Lord of the Rings series, CapCom Street Fighter, Naruto Shippuden, and undoubtedly more to come. In games with the Cerberus engine, players start with a small deck of cards, most of which provide one Power — Power being the currency of the game — and a few cards of which are nothing but filler. On a turn, you play cards from your hand of five, resolve actions on any of the cards you play, use your Power to acquire cards from the central line-up of five cards, then discard any remaining cards and draw a new hand of five. You place acquired cards into a personal discard pile, and once you shuffle your discards for a new deck, you'll start drawing and using these (in most cases) more powerful cards so that you can generate even more power and eventually try to take down the goal cards worth the most points.
That's a generic description of the game, a description devoid of superhero references, but that's the heart of the game engine, with "power" being a generic enough term that you can interpret it however you wish. In terms of the DC Comics game, you use power to defeat villains, discover equipment, exhibit super powers, recruit heroes, and visit locations. With Lord of the Rings, power allows you to defeat enemies, discover artifacts, exhibit maneuvers, recruit allies, and visit locations. Power changes meaning with each set, but while the names for certain cards differ — DC's "Kick" is Lord's "Valor", "Vulnerability" becomes "Despair", "Weakness" becomes "Corruption" — the core gameplay is identical and you can jump from one title to another following a brief vocabulary lesson.
(I presume the Cerberus name derived from the games being independent, à la Cerberus' multiple heads in the dog of legend, while also being part of one entity; as noted in the rules, you can combine titles from the Lord of the Rings series or the DC Comics series because they use the same terms from one set to another, and in practice you could combine any of the Cerberus games if you're willing to translate terms on the fly.):strip_icc()/pic1777939.jpg)
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In any Cerberus game, each player starts the game with a character card that provides a special power, and again players could theoretically mix cards from one game to another. Red Tornado's ability, for example, references only differing card types — something that occurs in all of the Cerberus games — whereas Batgirl's "Punch" reference would have to be translated into "Courage" or other terms. (Barbara Gordon's walking again? What?) No matter — the point is that players have some guidance from the get-go as to what they might want to do in the game: Hawkman wants to have heroes in his deck, Black Canary villains, Nightwing equipment, and Shazam wants power, power, power!You can ignore that suggestion and be content to take whatever you can afford to acquire from the card line-up, but you'll likely do better to play to your strength. I've played Heroes Unite only once so far on a review copy provided by Cryptozoic (along with LotR: The Fellowship of the Ring DBG a couple of times), and in that game the Red Tornado player (not me) nailed cheap cards of differing types in his initial turns, then parlayed those differences into multiple power boosts to further accelerate his growth. (I recall Red Tornado only from a terrible mini-series with art from Carmine Infantino, one of my least favorites, but apparently I've missed a lot of DC activity by him/it in the past decades.)/pic1941561.jpg)
One strength/weakness of the Cerberus design is that every card you acquire/defeat/purchase/discover goes into your discard deck, then reappears during later draws for your own use. Sometimes this makes perfect sense — another hero now teams up with me from time to time, or I evolved a new super power or created new equipment (Batarang to the face!) — but not everything works this smoothly. In Legendary, when you defeat a villain — with the villains being placed in their own row separate from hero cards, this being another complication of gameplay — you place that villain in a separate points pile, essentially a wall of taxidermied triumphs to show how awesome you are; in DC Comics, you place the villain in your deck, then use its ability for yourself in the future, possibly attacking your fellow heroes to strip cards from their hand and fill their deck with Weakness (which costs points and fills your hand with chaff). What gives, hero? Why are you attacking me?! Thematically I suppose that you now have immunity from the villain because you've defeated him in the past, possibly gaining knowledge in the process that you can now use, but everyone else still suffers from the villain's presence because they weren't awesome enough to defeat him themselves. (Of course I can argue for or against the thematic presence of almost anything because my adherence to thematic fidelity in any game is tenuous.)The flow of villains into the card line-up, and therefore into players' decks, will vary in each game. The more villains present, the more you'll want to grab cards with defense abilities in order to keep them at bay so that you can carry on with your own plans. I failed to do this, and a villain-enabled Nightwing (not to mention Red Tornado in his Mind Control Hat) attacked my hand repeatedly, leaving my Starfire as little more in window dressing in the game, doomed to pick up Kicks and mostly watch from the sideline. (Ironic, perhaps, since Starfire has been accused of being little more than window dressing herself since DC's New 52 reboot in 2011.)/pic1940833.png)
The goal cards in Heroes Unite, as in the original DC Comics DBG, are all super-villains, each worth a ton of points relative to the other cards in the game and ranging in cost from 8 to 12. Whenever a player acquires a super-villain, a new one is revealed at the end of his turn, attacking everyone without a defense at the same time. Boom, destroy cards in your hand! Boom, gain multiple weaknesses! And so on. As in Legendary, these guys are the top cookies, the thing you take if you possibly have a chance to do so, not just for the points but for the typically awesome powers that they pass on to you. Alas, I saw none of them in my hand, so I got to witness those awesome powers only from afar. They seemed nice.
A game of Heroes Unite ends when either all of the super-villains have been bagged or the line-up can't be filled after a player's turn. (Simply combining multiple games would nullify one of these endgame conditions, so the official suggestion for how to combine games is to use all cards of a few types — e.g., equipment, heroes and villains — from one set and all cards of the other types from another set.) Players then tally points on all the cards they have and see who will be hogging the headlines in The Daily Planet. Twasn't me in my first outing — far from it actually as the winner's score was nearly that of the other three players combined — but perhaps next time I won't be seduced by the promise of the power rings. Ryan Reynolds has already learned that lesson himself, right?
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