COMPONENTS - The meeples are adorable, the art is great, and the cards and tiles work well. No complaints here! 0:00 - Introduction 0:27 - Deck-Building 1:08 - Hero Management 2:09 - Co-Op and Downtime 3:08 - Monsters and Scenarios 4:08 - Tactical Cardplay 4:58 - Final Thoughts
Love this game! Great whooping fun, visually stunning, and packed full of surprise turns. It comes off the shelf and onto the table quite often in our home.
Glad you liked it as much as we did! The marvel united-like "use all of these abilities in whatever order is best for you" is a really fun mechanic... And as you noted, tons of scenario and character variety. My only gripe is it's a pretty hard game, and while lowering the difficulty helps, it's the only game I know where lower difficulty playthroughs take significantly longer to play. I feel like there should be a "remove x hero cards" option. Finally, kudos to Luis on a great Kickstarter. It looks great and delivered quickly... I backed another game the same week as this that's a full year delayed in comparison!
Agree on the difficulty. Also, some of my easy mode plays have been my most boring, because the swingy losses I mentioned in the review can also go the other way and you steamroll the heroes. But regardless, great game!
This game is awesome, there's a mini expansion for a Cthulhu type monster that adds a whole mechanic and an adorable tentacle monster that is definitely worth getting and gives me a lot of hope for future content :) I also love that I can play it with kids, adding some simple house ruling to make it a bit easier and more enjoyable for them (for example, I let them immediately use an item card when they acquire it instead of having to put it in the discard first), but then can bring it to game night and still challenge seasoned gamers. The scenario variety is great and difficulty can be scaled up & down greatly. Additionally, the kickstarter campaign was incredibly well done, especially considering the time it fell in to (bang in the middle of the pandemic), and the designer is super responsive to questions and comments. Unexpected game of the year for me - thank you for the review!
Our family really really enjoyed the game, going up to normal difficulty and winning a few more times... but it also crushed us maybe 3 times and we haven't played since. I wish there was a way to balance how long the play is versus how swingy/suddenly over it can get... still loved it and made a lot of great memories, I hope we'll come back in time. Great review per usual! Thanks Mike!
This seems like a game that would be fun played multihanded. No down time and a lot of options for defense. I got the KS but have yet to try it out. I should clean my table off and do it!
Mike, do you think a good variant to fight off the hero draw bad luck (avalanche) is to reveal all the hero cards at once so the players can better act in damage control? ( Doing a key block can often. Stop the avalanche). I haven't tried it yet, but I think it should help.
Do you mean revealing them at the start of the turn instead of the end of the turn? That would certainly help and give you a strategic chance to respond. Or maybe split the difference, when you are drawing 2 hero cards, and only reveal one of the 2 at the start of your turn
@@OneStopCoopShop at end of turn, but reveal both, so if you have defense cards or effects, they can be used as to the bigger picture of what is coming. At beginning of turn may make it too easy.
I suppose some of the suspense and decisions are made in estimating or hoping certain path/hero doesn't trigger. Often times I had a choice of which monster to keep alive (2 diff rooms being killed) and knowing where 2nd hero is going can help me choose which monster to keep alive so as to avoid a hero waking up a band). So seeing both cards could help a little in avoiding those situations (which tend to be a downers and ppl see as swingy). It is part of the game. Happy to hear any variant you may recommend.. split open could be interesting.. for sure you can plan for the 1 second one still being wild.
It's not often that a game releases with both great art (and families can relate too) and great gameplay elements between deckbuilding, tower defense, and tactics. Great review. I hope the developer comes out with another kickstarter that's a reprint for this game and a sequel and/or expansion to this one. I still can't help how cute those meeples would look in other games (and how big they are compared to other games with small meeples and/or miniatures in them). If companies could use big meeples like this game instead of miniatures that break easily, maybe we won't have to worry about miniatures breaking all the time. Now I wonder how these big meeples compare to alyrcis standees in something like Mega Man Adventures, if you guys ever do a "Are miniatures and ayrics standees as good as Keep The Heroes Out meeples?" in the future.
@@OneStopCoopShop Same here, since paints for minis are expensive and I don't have the house space to set up a nice paint studio for them. Then again, I'm not great at art, either.
