In the playground of tabletop games, deck-building games are the kindergartners. Their cousins, the collectable card games, have long since established themselves and evolved into hundreds of types, but deck-building games remain a small group running on just a few engines. The DC Comics Deck-Building Game is the latest in the genre and the first outing for the Cerberus engine created by Cryptozoic.
Deck-building games turn the pre-game process of crafting a well honed deck that Magic: The Gathering enthusiasts and similar gamers will be familiar with, into a game by itself. They begin with each player holding a small number of weak cards; on each turn the player uses his current cards to buy better cards from a shared main deck, slowly increasing the size, power, and usefulness of his personal deck. In the DC Comics Deck-Building Game the objective is to use your cards to defeat a stack of Super Villains. You do this by building a deck of increasingly powerful cards consisting of heroes, equipment, superpowers, and more, eventually obtaining enough power in your hand to defeat/purchase the current Super Villain and unleash the next one until the stack is emptied. Each card gained over the course of the game has a value in victory points and the winner is determined by which player has the most victory points when the final Super Villain is defeated (or when the main deck runs out). A standard game uses eight of the twelve Super Villains but any number can be used depending only on how long you want the game to run. Each Super Villain appears with a First Appearance Attack that affects all players unless they choose to use a “defense” card from their hand to avoid it. The only exception to this is with Ra’s Al Ghul who is always the starting Super Villain (he is pulled from the stack prior to shuffling then added face up at the top of the pile) and has no attack. First Appearance Attacks all have some negative impact on your game, forcing you to discard cards from your hand, incapacitating your Super Hero so their abilities are inactive, or forcing you to take on Weakness cards than give negative victory points at the end of the game. The effects of attacks remain active until the Super Villain is defeated.
In the game you play as one of seven DC Super Heroes: Green Lantern, The Flash, Aquaman, Superman, Batman, Cyborg, or Wonder Woman (an eighth, Martian Manhunter, was available as a promo card at Cryptozoic events). Each hero brings a different ability to your game: Superman gains a power bonus for each different Super Power card played, Batman does the same for Equipment, while The Flash gets to draw an additional card the first time each turn that a card in your hand instructs you to draw one. The different Super Heroes change the game each time because you naturally create a deck which benefits your current special ability, focusing on purchasing equipment cards for Batman or villains for Wonder Woman, as much as the shuffled main deck will allow. These two factors mean that you cannot rely on any set plays planned out in advance during a game. When I played as Wonder Woman I hoped to capitalize on her villain purchasing perk by utilizing the Suicide Squad multiple bonus and Lobo's ability to remove dud cards from my discards. However neither came out from the main deck, or they did so on my husband's turn and he purchased them before I had chance, so thinking ahead will only get you so far. That shift in your play style each game combined with the random order of cards from the main deck give the game a tremendous re-play value which will only increase as the inevitable expansions hit the market.
This was the first deck-building game I had ever played and so after watching a couple of YouTube videos to get a feel for the style I plunged right into some games with my husband (also a deck-building newbie). We’ve played almost every night since. The game is perfectly built for our play style. It’s complex enough to require us to think through our moves, strategize our card play order, and think through our purchases, but not so complex that each turn stresses us out with too many options and takes so long to complete that the other player becomes bored. I like a game that makes me think but not one that makes my brain hurt and this one toes that line almost perfectly. We have found ourselves developing preferences for certain Super Heroes and choosing to avoid others. I myself am rather partial to Batman and The Flash but did not enjoy my time with Aquaman. The game is a good length too, generally playing out in around 30 - 45 minutes so we can get a few games in during the evening or have time for something else as well.
The game does have a number of flaws, one of which is the abilities and powers on cards being poorly written, or seemingly conflicting rules between cards. One of the most common questions I have seen on forums regards Wonder Woman’s ability which allows her to draw extra cards at “the end of your turn” which reads as rather pointless until you realize it means drawing the extra cards into your next hand for your next turn. Why not simply write the same ability as “draw an extra card into your next hand” or similar? The Riddler’s ability is also worded in such a way that has you reaching for the rule book. I could also point out another of the game’s obvious issues, the presence of only one female Super Hero in a deck of seven. Catwoman, Supergirl, and Mera appear as heroes in the main deck but surely there was at least one other female who could have received Super Hero status, and where the heck is Batgirl? The Super Villains stack is even more unbalanced with no female characters at all in the twelve. Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, and Cheetah are all classed as villains inside the main deck and are in fact the only female Villains in the whole game, compared with twenty-four male Villians and Super Villains. Hopefully more ladies will appear in future expansions but at the moment it’s a poor show for a brand whose New 52 re-launch was all about “diversity”. But then if I’m honest I wasn’t expecting anything better and that in itself says a lot.
A number of variant games have been created by Cryptozoic and appear in the rule book or on the company's blog. Game owners have also been posting a number of their own variants on forums including solo game rules which I intend trying out soon. I also plan on taking it along when I see friends at the weekend as, although packaged in a huge box, presumably large enough to store future expansions as well, the cards can be shifted into standard deck boxes (except–annoyingly–the seven over-sized Super Hero cards that would need to travel inside something larger) making it fairly easy to transport. Taking the expected gender imbalance out of the equation, the DC Comics Deck Building Game is one of the most enjoyable games I have played in the last year and I can see myself investing in expansions and playing regularly for a long time to come.
The DC Comics Deck-Building Game is out now for $30-40/£25-30 A copy was provided free for this review.
