Sentinels of the Multiverse

The artwork here deserves its own mention before anything else, Adam Rebottaro’s cards genuinely look like they belong in an actual comic, and every card carries a small line of banter that sells the atmosphere better than most licensed superhero games manage with a real license behind them. That part of the pitch delivers completely, an original Iron Man style character and an original Batman style character sharing a table without a single trademark issue.

The problem is what happens once several heroes and a villain and an environment are all in play at the same time, every new card played means checking it against every other active modifier, and that snowballs into real bookkeeping the longer a fight runs. Reading that as a design flaw versus a genre feature depends on your patience for it, and I’ve watched it lose people at my table who came in expecting something closer to a lighter card game. It rewards repeat plays once you know the villains and don’t need to re read every card fresh, but the first few sessions are slower than the box suggests.

Hero balance is the other real crack, some characters are simply stronger than others with no deckbuilding layer to compensate the way Marvel Champions later added, so you end up with a couple of heroes nobody wants to pick twice. I’d suggest randomizing hero selection instead of letting the table pick freely, it saves you from watching the same three heroes get chosen every single session. Keep a stack of d10s or d6s on hand for tracking health rather than relying on the components alone, that edge case isn’t covered cleanly by the rules as written and it’ll save an argument later.

Good co-op for the right group, just know upfront it’s closer to a slow simmer than the fast punch up the box art promises.