Rhino rampages through the streets of New York, Klaw peddles illegal weapons to the world’s most dangerous criminals, Ultron threatens nuclear annihilation. The world needs champions to stop these villains! Are you up to the task?

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce Marvel Champions: The Card Game, a cooperative Living Card Game® of super heroics for one to four players!

Marvel Champions sees you step into the shoes of the iconic superheroes of the Marvel universe and battle a plethora of dastardly villains and their diabolical schemes. But the champions of the Marvel universe have more to worry about than supervillain schemes—each carries their own iconic history, full of their own villains and personal problems that can pop up at the worst possible time! Can you balance battling supervillains with the demons of your own past and claim the title of a Marvel Champion?

Choose your Hero

In Marvel Champions, you’ll play your hero in your own way. Each hero comes with their own set of unique cards that can be combined with cards from one of four heroic attributes to create customized decks. You may play Spider-Man as an inspiring leader or as a vigilante in search of justice, or take on the role of She-Hulk as a paragon of protection or as a force of aggression. With Spider-Man, She-Hulk, Iron Man, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel included in the Core Set, there’s no shortage of heroes to take on dastardly villains! Keep your eyes out for additional Hero Packs in the coming months introducing even more heroes to Marvel Champions: The Card Game, each with a complete deck ready to play right out of the box!

Fight Your Battles

Of course, getting your deck ready is only half the battle. Once you’ve selected your hero, you’ll be thrown into battle with a villain ready to hatch a nefarious plot! A game of Marvel Champions is played over a series of turns split into the two phases.

The first phase, the player phase, sees players using the cards in their hands to thwart a villain’s schemes. Every card has a resource cost listed in the upper left corner, and in order to generate those resources, you must discard other cards from your hand. Naturally, choosing which cards to play and which to discard provides a significant strategic choice for your favorite hero. During this phase, you may see Iron Man gathering his gadgets, Black Panther strategically developing his plans, and She-Hulk delivering powerful blows to her foes. If you can completely deplete a villain’s hit points and incapacitate them before they complete their scheme, the heroes win the game.

But the player phase is also a time for heroes to recover and investigate. Once per turn, you can swap your hero to their alter ego, playing as Tony Stark, Carol Danvers, and more. Playing as your hero’s alter ego gives you new abilities and lets you recover health, but as long as your hero is recovering, they  won’t be stopping the villains from enacting their schemes.

Defeat Your Foes

After the players have each taken their turn, the villain gets to act during the second part of the turn, the villain phase. Every villain begins a game with a scheme they’re trying to enact. Perhaps Rhino is trying to break into a S.H.I.E.L.D cache, or Klaw is working to get his hands on a batch of illegal weapons. During the villain phase, the villain will take on every hero one-on-one as they work to advance this scheme. If the hero is in their superhero identity, the villain directly attacks them, reducing their hit points — and if the hero loses too many of those hit points, they’re eliminated from the fight! But if the hero is in their alter ego form, the villain schemes, placing more threat on their scheme. If enough threat is placed on a scheme, the scheme morphs and changes, eventually leading to heroes losing the game.

The villain also has other tricks up their sleeve that they’ll use to make life difficult for the heroes. After the villain activates against each hero, every player draws an encounter card. Every villain has their own personal encounter deck, giving them minions, new equipment, and even new side schemes to act as a ticking clock for the heroes. Heroes may even find their own personal problems popping up in the form of old foes and responsibilities peeking their head in at just the wrong time.

Become a Champion

Can you overcome these obstacles and stop the villain’s schemes in their tracks? Pick up your Marvel Champions: The Card Game Core Set when it releases in the fourth quarter of 2019 and find out!