Stand with Batmann, Superman, Wonder Woman, and other DC Comics' most famous heroes to duel villains, crises and challenges! See what it's like to have superpowers and overcome evil!
Superhero Duel by Cryptozoic Entertainment and Egmontu is a deck building card game. The game engine, developed by Matt Hyra and Ben Stoll, uses mechanisms that are well-known from other card games of the genre.
We build our deck from famous heroes and villains from DC comics, as well as their characteristic Equipment and Superpowers. We play the role of one of the Superheroes – depending on how we agree with other players, we can randomly choose it or choose it. They include Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash and others. Interestingly, we will meet the same heroes later in the Main Deck, from where we buy cards, only under a slightly changed name, such as Man of Steel, Princess Diana of Temiskera or The Fastest Man on Earth. Each character has its own unique skill that the player will be able to use throughout the game.
Draw a card!
Superhero bonuses are presented as simple activities, such as drawing an additional card or adding a Power point, when we use, for example, Equipment or Super Powers in the current turn. So we get purely mechanical commands – the creators did not make much of the plot with them. Only with the Flash card does the rule that the player who plays it starts first, because, as you know, this character is the fastest. In other cases, the skills are not justified in any way.
All the cards are described in a similar way. Of course, in card games, fast-paced action is much more important than rich story plots, and thanks to the smaller amount of text, more space is left for attractive graphics from comics. However, sometimes adding even a few words before the dry command could stimulate the imagination and add extra flavor to the game.
Superpowers and other attractions
We start out with the simplest and lowest power Blows, but over time we gain more and more equipment and allies. The general rules are very simple and clearly described in the manual. We have five cards in our hand per turn, thanks to which we buy more from the bank or defeat the Super Villains. Among them were, among others, Joker, Brainiac and Deathstroke. The player with the most victory points in his deck at the end of the game wins. Along the way, however, we have a lot of various changes, thanks to the Rogues attacking us, as well as various actions from the acquired cards. Some of them give us a permanent effect that we can use every turn – these are Locations. We use others once, until we shuffle our deck. In addition to helping each other with Heroes, Superpowers and Equipment, we have the ability to disturb other players by using Rogues. The plot is not fully thought out, because we are all Superheroes, so theoretically, we should fight on the side of good, and meanwhile, we can attack each other. Playable, it is quite interesting.
The basic set of the Superhero Duel
In the base of the game we get as many as two hundred and fourteen cards, many of which are the same, e.g. starting cards: Blows and Helplessness. as well as two separate piles of Kopniaki and Weaknesses. In addition to these separate types, there are many repetitions in the Main Deck as well. Therefore, before the first game, it is necessary to shuffle it very carefully – otherwise repetition can become tiring. However, the creators thought about how to use doublets to make their presence more meaningful. Some cards make the collected copies from a given series give us additional Victory Points.
Apart from the fact that the graphics are repeated on the cards, I must admit that the packaging is also not very original. We have seen the images of the heroes it contains before. Personally, I even have a poster on my wall with them on. However, the box itself deserves great praise because it is very practical. It contains a lot of compartments that allow you to segregate cards, as well as a lot of free space where additional sets can also fit.
