Guardians of the Galaxy

Yes folks, I finally got round to this!

I didn’t get to see the movie over the summer, sadly, but snapped up the DVD once it was released the other day. Very impressed, I must admit! There are very few of these movies Marvel have been churning out that haven’t been good, of course, but still! I had no real idea what on earth this was all about, just a few names being bandied about and such, so it was really good to finally get some idea of what all of this was about.

The film was really good, anyway – for a more conclusive review, I’d like to point you in the direction of this blog, anyway. As you may recall, I also took delivery of the latest expansion for Marvel Legendary at the weekend, so now that I had more of an idea of who all these folks are, today I took the game out for a try!

We get the five main Guardians from the film here, along with two masterminds: Thanos, and the Supreme Intelligence of the Kree. The whole Infinity Gauntlet stuff really dominates the expansion, with some pretty awesome synergies coming up between all the cards. I played two games this morning, starting with Unite the Shards:

The schemes use these Shards tokens that, in this one at least, tend to flow almost endlessly back and forth between the heroes and villains/mastermind. Control of the shards almost takes precedence over the game itself! The Scheme Twists give shards to the mastermind, but you can buy them for a cost of two from the mastermind’s supply. There was a lot of this back-and-forth in my game, it was a nice sort of sub-game, almost, a nice change to the flow.

The second game I played was with Forge the Infinity Gauntlet, against Thanos and the Infinity Gems. Another excellent game, with some more different aspects. Thanos is much in the vein of Galactus from the Fantastic Four expansion, with a variable health based on how many cards you control – this time, Infinity Gems. These are villains, but when you defeat them they go into your discard pile. On future turns, you can play these cards as artifacts, which each have an effect that can benefit you, but also reduce Thanos’ health by 2. However, Scheme Twists will put these gems back into the city, and so it continues…

I’ve only had the two games, but I really love this expansion! It’s got some excellent stuff in it, and it all works so damn well together, I can’t recommend it enough!

Same for the movie, too!