Inverarity is not a Scottish village

Cynthia Hornbeck, a former employee of Asmodee Games, has written a scathing essay, Grab ‘em by the Board Game about Conan, the Boardgame, a massively-funded Kickstarter project published by Asmodee.

At first glance, it's just another Tumblr rant about how racist and sexist Conan is. However, she goes several steps further, by tying the popularity of the Conan Kickstarter to the election of Donald Trump.

The narrative promoted by Trump throughout his campaign and the narrative of Conan appeal to the same kind of people. They exclude and dehumanize the same kind of people. They endorse violence. They treat women as objects. And they have both contributed to getting us where we are today The narratives that we create, promote, and enjoy, from Conan to Star Wars to The Apprentice matter. They shape our deeds and perspectives. Even if the creators of Conan envisioned the game as being apolitical, there’s no such thing. Narratives create their own politics and sit within a political context –– in this case, a political context in which White power has just taken control of the United States. The fact that the Conan Kickstarter did so well should have been a warning. It should have made us realize how many people are still willing, if not eager, to buy into the racist, misogynist narratives of the early 20th century. How many people are willing to perform the violence against others that they’ve watched or played at. How many people are willing to complacently enable violence and hate in return for a bit of recognition and/or money.

The reason this essay has made such waves, besides her former "insider" status, is that Hornbeck went beyond the usual finger-wagging about enjoying problematic things. She explicitly tells us that people who enjoy the Conan boardgame are the same people who elected Donald Trump, people who "are willing to perform the violence against others that they’ve watched or played at."

She finishes with:

As a gamer, start refusing to purchase or even play a game that objectifies women, excludes women, excludes non-White people, makes non-White people the enemy, etc.

Wow. There's quite a lot to unpack there. But let's start with Conan.

Conan: A game only a Trump-supporter could love?

I was one of the backers of the Conan Kickstarter. I pledged for the whole package, including several of the expansions and exclusives, making it one of the more expensive (but not the most expensive, unfortunately — that honor goes to Cthulhu Wars) boardgames I have ever bought.



Believe it or not, it wasn't because I secretly fantasize about raping women and killing minorities. I wish I were exaggerating, but after reading Hornbeck's essay it seems that she believes this is literally true of more or less anyone who likes Conan.

I read Robert E. Howard's stories as a kid, and loved pulp fantasy — from Howard to Edgar Rice Burroughs to H.P. Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber. (Hornbeck, in her essay, mentions Howard's friendship with Lovecraft and Lovecraft's racism as further evidence of the inherent unacceptability of Conan. H.P. Lovecraft, as we all know, has also become unacceptable in fandom circles.)

So let's acknowledge first that yes, the Conan milieu is extremely sexist. It is set in a prehistoric fantasy world that has not yet discovered women's rights, and human beings are extremely tribal, viewing all other races with suspicion if not active hostility. I.e., it resembles the way people mostly behaved in ancient times, notwithstanding the addition of gods, monsters, and magic. People can quibble (and will) over how "realistic" the depiction of women in Conan or Game of Thrones is, but it's generally retrograde and pre-modern, with all that that implies.

(I am aware of the argument that if you have dragons, you can't claim that a medieval or pre-medieval society in which women occupy subordinate roles is realistic. It's a specious argument. There is nothing wrong with playing in modernized AD&D settings where women and men are social equals and we can pretend medieval societies would have no problems putting women in plate armor and on the front lines, if that makes you happy, but it resembles no society that's ever existed in history or myth, so it shouldn't be surprising that most fantasy worlds set in pre-modern/mythical eras resemble our own pre-modern/mythical times rather than a product of Wizards of the Coast, which has to worry about "diversity" for marketing purposes.)

So, Conan in particular is a very "alpha male" setting. And Hornbeck isn't completely wrong that a lot of Conan fans probably fantasize, just a little bit, about being an iron-thewed barbarian who crushes his enemies, hears the lamentations of his women, and has hot naked chicks falling at his feet.



Those classic Frazetta paintings practically define Conan, and the fact that the women are one and all beautiful, buxom sex objects was by design. The appeal to heterosexual males is pretty obvious, and I doubt the veracity of any straight guy, however liberal/feminist he claims to be, who denies it. That said, you can appreciate female pulchritude while acknowledging that depicting women solely as sex objects is going to turn off a lot of people.

Conan is not for everybody. If you don't like cheesecake, you will not like Conan. If you do not like an extremely masculine, violent setting with lots of crushing your enemies and hearing the lamentations of their women, you will not like Conan.

If you are a woman, you will probably not like Conan.

(There certainly are women who do like Conan and other stories in that genre, but let's be honest, they're uncommon.)

And there's nothing wrong with that! You don't have to like Conan. You can find the half-naked chicks draped around Conan as rewards for his rescuing them to be off-putting. You can dislike the blood and sweat and glorification of cleaving enemies' skulls with an axe. You can also find some of the racial elements disturbing. And you can raise these points in a decent discussion about modern sensibilities vs. traditional archetypes and guilty pleasures. Nowadays, it's hard to enjoy something like Conan unironically. Even if you are not at all offended by cheesecake and barbarian violence porn, you have to know that it's just not quite seemly in a mixed crowd. You need to have a sense of humor about it, and at the very least, while guilt is unnecessary, some awareness of the issues that bother other people is.

That said...

Cynthia Hornbeck's essay is strikingly dishonest from beginning to end.

Crush Your Enemies

Conan is closely based on the books of Robert E. Howard, who was coincidentally a close friend of another highly influential author racist, H. P. Lovecraft. Howard’s Conan stories are sword and sorcery adventures that take place before the rise of the ancient civilizations we know. Conan is a Cimmerian, something akin to a Celt or Gaul. His foes include the Picts, who are not blue-painted Scots but rather based on the Iroquois peoples, and the Khitai, who are a magical people based on the Chinese. Conan never fights women unless he absolutely has to, and he always rescues damsels in distress. If you’re a privileged white male or subservient white female, or anyone, really who can just ignore racism and misogyny for a while, he seems like a great guy.

The gratuitous shot at Lovecraft was cheap and easy, but okay, there is no denying Howie was a big ol' racist. Moving on, Hornbeck claims that REH's Picts were based on the Iroquois people and the Khitai are based on the Chinese.



Actually, Howard's Picts were very loosely based on the historical pre-Celtic peoples of Ireland, but his Hyborean history actually makes them a far older race. In his stories, they are frequently just a typical nameless horde of enemies, like orcs, but they sometimes appear as allies and heroes. They are also depicted very inconsistently. According to Howard's writings, he does imagine the Picts eventually migrating to what became North America, and thus becoming the ancestors of the American Indians, and his Pictish wilderness stories were meant to be essentially fantasy Westerns. So they are kinda sorta analagous to Indians, but they are really a race of generic fantasy savages.

You might say the Picts depicted in the Conan boardgame have a bit of a Native American aesthetic to them, though they really look more like generic cavemen. What they clearly are not is actual Native Americans, nor directly based on them, and how Hornbeck concluded that they are specifically based on the Iroquois, I have no idea.



Her point is really that the Picts represent Others — and in the current world of Donald Trump, that means non-white minorities who white people want to kill. Similar parallels have been drawn with Tolkien's orcs. Arguing that point would require a much longer essay, but let's just stipulate that most epic fantasy stories have races of savage, warlike enemies who are basically sword-fodder for the heroes. You may find the concept inherently problematic, but then you probably find epic fantasy in general to be problematic. It is a feature of the genre, and while perhaps it's worth examining stories that present stock enemies who exist only to be slaughtered en masse, viewing every such story through the lens of identity politics to conclude they are really about white supremacy is a modern conceit. Every culture has stories about slaughtering some Other just because they are inherently evil.

As far as the Khitai, Hornbeck has a slightly more legitimate argument here. Khitai, in Howard's stories, was basically "the Orient" where he stuck all the fantasy Asians and their inscrutable Asian magics. This is also something of a tradition in both epic fantasy fiction and fantasy roleplaying games, where the generic setting is pseudo-European, but there will be some other part of the map off on the edges where pseudo-Orientals hang out with pagodas and ninjas and serpentine dragons.



How "problematic" this is depends on the execution. Howard didn't really depict the Khitais as any more savage or sinister than anyone else — considerably less savage than Conan's Cimmerians, actually. Like the Picts, they were sometimes foes and sometimes friends. But yes, as an analog for China+Japan+Korea+Turkey+Mongolia+everything else Orient written as an indistinguishable horde of yellow-skinned foreigners by a pulp author in the 30s, they are hardly represented in the most sympathetic or egalitarian light.

Moving on...

And Hear the Lamentations of Their Women

Hornbeck takes great offense at this image, which is actually the cover of one of the Conan rulebooks.

Well, as I said before, half-naked women needing to be rescued is a feature of Conan. You can't really have Conan without 'em. Does that mean you shouldn't have Conan? (Hornbeck will later tell us outright that the answer is "Yes.")

To me, although perhaps not to others, it looks like Conan is going to rape her. Oh no, you, say, he’s going to rescue her. Well, why doesn’t she rescue herself? It’s not part of that setting, you say. So, why isn’t she conscious? Why is she naked? Why is she on some sort of rock bed/ altar and glowing, so that we the gamer focus on her physical beauty? To me, she looks like his prize, a reward for his violence with which he can do whatever he wishes- including grab her by the crotch and rape her before she’s regained consciousness. This cover is the scene of or before a rape. And you, my friend, are going to take on the role of the rapist.

While she acknowledges that maybe other people don't see this as a rape scene, clearly it is to her. Conan is about to rape her, and if you enjoy this picture, or play this game, you are roleplaying a rapist.

In Robert E. Howard's stories, Conan is generally heroic, even chivalrous, in a crude, barbaric way. Yes, he likes women, and women like him, but I don't recall any story in which it was even hinted that he forced himself on a woman.

Hornbeck's complaint that the woman in this picture (and in the "rescue the princess" scenario which is the first one in the game) is just an object to be rescued is true enough. It is, again, a feature of the genre. If you hate the very existence of such stories, Conan is not for you.

That being said, is Hornbeck correct that if you're insensitive enough to actually enjoy such stories, that you are actually fantasizing about raping helpless, unconscious women? That's a projection she has invented entirely on her own.

The Problem of Belit

But there’s a playable female character in the Conan core set, you say. There’s Belit! Well, her mechanical function is to make the men better. That’s literally all she does is follow Conan around and boost his abilities. Because that’s what women are good for in this world: being fucked by men and making those men feel good. That’s the world that you’re choosing to have fun in.

(To be fair, in the Kickstarter exclusives and in possible expansions there are other, stronger female heroes. That does not excuse the fact that they are all depicted in a sexualized manner and that the only female hero in the core set, one of TWO female figurines in that set, is limited to a support role.)

This is just flat out wrong. Let's start with Belit.

There are actually several alternate versions of Belit in the game - some of them expansions and Kickstarter exclusives, as Hornbeck says. But the base Belit character looks like this:



Her stats are decent — she is not quite as a good a fighter as Conan, but no one is. She can hold her own with any of the other characters. Her special skills are Swimming, Leaping, Leadership, Support, and "Attack from Beyond" (she gets a dying strike if she's killed).

Hornbeck claims "Well, her mechanical function is to make the men better. That’s literally all she does is follow Conan around and boost his abilities."

The Leadership and Support skills do indeed give extra actions and dice to her allies. Belit is not the only character who has those abilities (and not all characters with Leadership and/or Support are female). Belit, in the original stories, was in fact a leader — she had her own crew of pirates who followed her loyally into battle.

For Hornbeck to take a fairly standard game mechanic — the ability to give a bonus to other characters — and twist that into "That's all she's good for" is not just distorting things a little. She's being blatantly dishonest. Belit is a fighter who comes with her own troop of guards and several useful skills. And she's only "following Conan around" inasmuch as all non-Conan characters are following Conan around. (You don't even have to include Conan in any given scenario, though the game is named after him...)

The other female characters Hornbeck dismisses because they aren't part of the core game are likewise capable enough on her own (and not all the versions of Belit have Support and Leadership).

Conan is Stuff White People Like?

Conan is a fantasy of White male power. A fantasy in which White male power dominates and holds moral authority. And as Conan, you are the biggest, strongest embodiment of that White male power, able to ruthlessly cut down all your non-White enemies, surrounded by the lamentations of their women and by White women falling at your feet. Or passing out at them, whoever.

I don't think it can be denied that Conan is a male power fantasy. He holds this in common with most superhero comics. Where Hornbeck and I would disagree, I suppose, is whether this is inherently a bad thing. Hornbeck doesn't use the term "toxic masculinity" anywhere in her essay, but her tone makes it clear that there isn't much masculinity that she doesn't consider toxic, and certainly imagining yourself to be a mighty warrior with a Strength of 18 and naked princesses falling at your feet would qualify.

Again, debating whether or not it's "bad" for men to have fantasies of this sort would be a much longer essay, but yes, let's agree that part of the appeal of playing Conan is that not many of us are actually equipped to go pirating and cleaving Pict skulls with axes and that sounds pretty cool in a totally fantastic and not-something-I'd-ever-want-to-do-in-real-life way.

The addition of "White" assumes, I suppose, that since Robert E. Howard was white and Conan is white, it's also a white power fantasy. I don't know how many non-white people like Conan, but I'd guess it's a similar percentage to those who like fantasy in general.

Problematically for Hornbeck's argument, Conan exists in a pre-modern, pre-colonial era so it's kind of hard to accuse the character of having "white privilege." Nowhere in Howard's writings is it implied that anyone has "moral authority" by virtue of their ethnicity. As for being a fantasy about cutting down all your non-white enemies, it's true Conan kills a lot of Picts and Khitais and other non-whites. He also kills a lot of: Aquilonians (fantasy Romans), Corinthians (fantasy Greeks), Nemedians (fantasy Byzantines), Ophirs (fantasy Italians), and also demons, monsters, and wild animals. You get the idea. Conan is a killer and he has lots of enemies. Someone who's into pretending to swing an axe as Conan is more likely to be fantasizing about killing giant snakes than killing what Hornbeck imagines to be stand-ins for black people or American Indians.

That same fantasy is promoted by the campaign of now President-Elect Donald Trump. He will make America great again by expelling and/or imprisoning its dark-skinned enemies and grabbing its women by the crotch. Those men who have vocally supported Donald Trump envision themselves as modern-day Conans, perhaps more clothed and less strapping, but nevertheless warriors of righteousness seeking gold and glory, perfectly willing to, if necessary, spill blood.

Come again?

It's an intriguing idea, this theory of hers that Conan backers are all Trump voters, but this sort of post-modernist analysis of a boardgame, in which pretending to be a barbarian warrior hacking your way through a primitive age of gods and monsters is actually a celebration of voting for an entitled billionaire who will empower you to oppress minorities is one that Hornbeck doesn't come close to developing and justifying.

And let's be clear here: contrary to what her defenders have said, Hornbeck isn't just asking us to be more aware, more empathetic, to keep the problematic nature of our favorite things in mind and think about how they might impact others. That would be a fair request, even if still controversial given her presentation. But she explicitly tells us that if you like Conan, you are a violent sexist and racist.

The narrative promoted by Trump throughout his campaign and the narrative of Conan appeal to the same kind of people. They exclude and dehumanize the same kind of people. They endorse violence. They treat women as objects. And they have both contributed to getting us where we are today The narratives that we create, promote, and enjoy, from Conan to Star Wars to The Apprentice matter. They shape our deeds and perspectives. Even if the creators of Conan envisioned the game as being apolitical, there’s no such thing. Narratives create their own politics and sit within a political context –– in this case, a political context in which White power has just taken control of the United States. The fact that the Conan Kickstarter did so well should have been a warning. It should have made us realize how many people are still willing, if not eager, to buy into the racist, misogynist narratives of the early 20th century. How many people are willing to perform the violence against others that they’ve watched or played at. How many people are willing to complacently enable violence and hate in return for a bit of recognition and/or money.

There isn't much room for nuance or ambiguity there — she's telling us outright that, even if you don't personally want to rape women and kill minorities, if you play Conan you're fantasizing about it, or at the very least enabling others who do those things.

She finishes with "Start Fighting."

As a gamer, start refusing to purchase or even play a game that objectifies women, excludes women, excludes non-White people, makes non-White people the enemy, etc.

Conan doesn't exclude women or non-white people (there are women and non-white playable characters), and there are both white and non-white enemies. But let's pretend she was talking about other games here.

I think it's perfectly fine to refuse to play a game that offends you or that you do not enjoy. If you find that a game like Conan objectifies women (and yeah, it does, even with Belit and Valeria and Red Sonjathe Vanyr Valkyrie) and that bothers you, it is totally your prerogative to want nothing to do with it.

There are wargames covering recent conflicts, from Vietnam to the War on Terror, that might well offend people. There are also light party games like Cards Against Humanity that have offended people with their cavalier treatment of, well, pretty much every PC hotbutton there is. And it's fair to not want to play those games if they bother you.

But Hornbeck isn't just defending a personal choice not to support games she doesn't like. She is arguing that Conan, and games like it, are inherently bad, and you're a bad person if you don't join her in opposing them.

If you don’t do any of these things, you won’t be helping anything to change, no matter how much you allege that gaming is for everyone and that this industry is inclusive. In fact, you’ll continue part of the problem. You can either have Conan or you can have a better industry and better world. But you can’t have both.

You can't have Conan if you want a better world.

There's a lot wrong with Cynthia Hornbeck's essay. It's intellectually dishonest, it's full of assumptions, projection, and unsupported parallels drawn between things she doesn't like, but she's certainly entitled to her opinion. But in the reaction to it, and the reaction to that reaction, I've seen a lot of people saying "But you need to listen" or "But she's just asking you to..."

I am listening. I have tried to keep in mind what might pass as a legitimate point or two buried in her hatred of all things maleConan. But she very clearly is not just asking us to. She's telling us that Conan is bad, that people who play Conan are bad, that if you are a good person who thinks rape and racism and violence is bad, you have to be actively working to purge the world of games like Conan. There can be no nuance here, no tempered enjoyment of problematic things, no attempt to reconcile your desire for social justice with your desire to have fun playing a pulp fantasy game about killing bad guys (some of whom might happen to be non-white).

You can have Conan, or you can have the world Cynthia Hornbeck wants.

Three Comic Book Universes on the Table: Comparing Superhero Deckbuilders

I may have mentioned a time or two that I am fond of superheroes, and have been a comic book geek since way back when.

Combine this with my gaming hobby, and that means of course that I am always down to try out a superhero game.

I actually own a Super Deck! starter pack. Super Deck! was one of the many CCGs published in the 1990s, trying to capitalize on the Magic craze, but Super Deck! was worse than most. Actually, it's probably a contender for Worst CCG Ever Made.



Fortunately, the game industry has moved on. While CCGs still exist, there are also collectible dice games, cooperative games, and deckbuilders. Most of the latter are trying to capitalize on the popularity of Dominion, and as usual with copycats, the quality ranges from very good to horrible. But when you're dealing with big money licenses, you usually get something at least decent, and here's where I start.

For those who have never played a deckbuilder, the basic idea is that each player starts with a small deck (usually a dozen or so) of relatively weak cards, and by various mechanisms is able to add new cards to his deck. Selecting the right cards to get powerful combination effects, managing your hand in such a way that you don't wind up with worthless or unusable cards, trying to thin the weak and useless cards out of your deck, are all elements of a typical deckbuilder. This is very much like most CCGs, the difference being that you start with a fixed set of cards.

Marvel Legendary: In which we get two Wolverines but no Kitty Prydes

Marvel Legendary is, you guessed it, a deckbuilder based on the Marvel Universe. At this time, there are five expansions (of which I own all but one), plus a companion game, Legendary: Villains, plus a game using the same engine but based on the Aliens franchise: Legendary Encounters. Supposedly these are all combinable, with some tweaking, so you could in theory have Wolverine and Dr. Doom teaming up with Ripley to defeat the Alien Queen and the Heralds of Galactus.

Sticking to Legendary, a game consists of a random (or semi-random) combination of heroes and villains, with a single Master Villain and a Scheme defining the unique conditions for the game. The players' decks consist of superheroes, each player drawing from the same hero deck. Every turn you can "recruit" new heroes and/or fight supervillains (which are drawn from the villains deck) while trying to build up cards powerful enough to fight the Master Villain. You start with mere S.H.I.E.L.D agents, but soon can acquire hero cards who have more recruiting ability, thus allowing you to recruit more powerful hero cards, which allow you to lay some serious smack down on the bad guys.

In a typical game, the hero deck has five different heroes (with five different cards for each hero), and your deck will work best if you try to concentrate on recruiting two or three of them.

So for example, a Legendary game might consist of Wolverine, Storm, Spider Man, the Hulk, and Mr. Fantastic trying to defeat Dr. Doom in his Scheme to Unleash the Legacy Virus, aided by Doombots, Hand Ninjas, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and the Sinister Six.



Thematically, the cards and the player mat do evoke the Marvel Universe, though actual game play often becomes an exercise in combo-optimization (but this is true of all deckbuilders). One can actually feel like you are "recruiting" Wolverine and the Hulk to go kick Dr. Doom's ass, while the Legacy Virus is constantly knocking heroes off the board. The combinations are variable but well-balanced; you start out slow but by the end game may well be able to dish out enough damage with one hand to knock out Galactus. Sometimes there isn't that much strategy involved, since you will buy the best hero card you can afford each turn, and the optimal order to play your hand is usually fairly easy to determine. There are a fair number of decisions to make, though.

Legendary is "semi-coop," meaning that players are in competition for the highest final victory point total (scored mostly by the number of villains you defeat), but you must collectively defeat the Master Villain before the Scheme ends the game, or else everybody loses.

The challenge level is variable, but I've played very few games in which the Master Villain won. Some Master Villains are harder to fight than others, and some Schemes are fairly easy to beat, while others impose a very challenging ticking clock for the players. Some combinations are brutal, while others are a bit silly. (If you generate your scenario completely randomly, you can theoretically wind up with Galactus and a Scheme to Rob the Mid-Town Bank...)

I've played a couple dozen games of Legendary and have not gotten tired of it yet. However, the expansions add dramatically to the variability and the challenge. The base game comes with Marvel's biggest heroes (the Avengers, the X-Men, Spider Man, and a few others), while the expansions add the Fantastic Four, Marvel Knights, Spider Friends, X-Factor, and others. Notably missing so far is Dr. Strange, and some of my personal favorites like Kitty Pryde, Dazzler, and Nova. There is also (as yet) no She-Hulk, or Captain Marvel. And yet there are two versions of Wolverine, which reminds me of the 90s when Wolverine was Marvel's most popular character and so he was guest-starring in every other series practically every month.

For game play and theme, Marvel Legendary scores very high. I will note that, in addition to the expense of collecting all those expansions, there are a lot of cards to sort out for each game, so the setup and breakdown time is considerable; it's not something you can casually whip out for a quick game.

DC Comics Deck-Building Game: In which you throw the kitchen sink at random villains

I tend to be biased in favor of Marvel over DC, but I still have fond memories of the Wolfman/Perez run of the New Teen Titans and John Byrne's Superman. (I also seem to be the only person I know who prefers Superman over Batman.)

So anyway, I finally got a chance to play the DC Comics Deck-Building Game recently.

The problems with this one start with the title. "DC Comics Deck-Building Game." Really. That is the name of the game. Could they possibly have come up with anything more generic and less exciting?

The same thing seems to be true of all DC licenses, from movies to card games: their marketing sucks.

Unlike Marvel Legendary, in the DC game, each player pick a single hero. Well, supposedly. What this means is you start with one DC hero card — Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Cyborg, or even good old Aquaman.



Each hero has one starting power. The Flash gets to draw extra cards, Superman gets a power bonus when using multiple superpowers, and so on. So far, so good — that much is thematic.

However, the common deck that everyone "buys" from consists of an undifferentiated mix of superpowers belonging to all heroes in play, equipment, additional heroes, and supervillains. So for example, as Superman, you can wind up with the Batmobile, Kid Flash, Harley Quinn, and Marine Telepathy in your deck. In theory, trying to purchase all the Superman powers that come up would make for a more thematic (and efficient) deck, but in practice, this seemed difficult to do. (In our game, the player with The Flash did manage to pick up most of the Flash/Kid Flash cards, which meant his deck was cycling at... well, super-speed.) The idea is supposedly that, as in the Marvel game, you are "recruiting" other heroes to join you, but this doesn't explain why you add supervillains to your deck.



Instead of a single Master Villain to fight, there is a stack of them, and they are basically just more expensive cards that you can buy like any other. Each one does something nasty when he or she first appears, but after that you just add them to your deck when you have enough power. The game ends when the master villain deck is empty, and everyone counts victory points (more expensive cards are generally worth more points, with a few cards granting special ways to add bonus points) to determine the winner.

Whereas playing Legendary does evoke some of the feeling of playing a team of superheroes trying to defeat a supervillain and his minions, the DC Deck-Building Game evokes the feeling of trying to buy random cards with pictures of DC characters on them to accumulate the most victory points in the end. Being non-cooperative, there is more opportunity to screw with other players' decks, which is a mechanic I personally dislike in games; it makes it harder to plan your next turn, and thus to my mind, more random and luck-based.

I was glad I got to play someone else's copy of this game, as now I won't have to buy it myself.

Sentinels of the Multiverse: In which you kind of need an app for that

Sentinels of the Multiverse is an independent game, unconnected to any existing superhero franchise. It has all the good and bad features of independent comics: it's fresh, original, fun, and a little unpolished, with art that is... well, if not exactly up to Marvel and DC standards, captures the four-color vibe very effectively.

There are already a ton of expansions available, but I've only played with the base set so far.

Sentinels is a fully cooperative game; all the players are working together to defeat the villain, and you either win together or lose together. There are four starting supervillains to choose from, helpfully ranked according to difficulty. The base game also comes with ten heroes. The designers have actually written up fairly detailed "origin" stories for all of them, making you feel like you are actually entering into an established superhero universe.

Unlike the Marvel and DC games, in Sentinels each hero has a unique deck, so everyone is drawing only from their own set of cards. This makes the theme much stronger, as all of Ra's cards are fire powers, Tachyon's cards all relate to her super-speed, Bunker gets a bunch of equipment cards and "modes," and so on.

Each round, players go around the table, each chooses one card to play and one power to use. Their objective is to defeat the villain by damaging him, knocking his health down to zero, at which point the villain card is flipped over, usually to a berserk or a diminished form which has to be defeated again.

Then comes the Environment phase, in which a card is drawn from the Environment deck. Usually this is something bad, an effect that will persist until the heroes do something to end it, either by destroying the card, discarding cards from their hand, or something else. Then comes the villain's turn, in which a card is drawn from the villain deck (each villain having his own deck, like the heroes). This is always something bad: either the villain acquires a minion, or a device, or a new power, and usually it involves doing damage to the heroes and/or making him harder to defeat.



As a superhero-themed game, it works wonderfully. I love Sentinels of the Multiverse. It comes the closest of all three games to feeling like you are a team of superheroes battling a master villain, with defeat always imminent. Some of the villains are especially brutal if they get the right combination of cards, so defeating them feels like an actual accomplishment. There are constant choices to be made — attack the main villain, or knock out the runaway monorail that's doing damage to the heroes every turn? Take out a minion while you can, or use a power to buff your defenses or heal before the next Environmental hazard knocks you down to zero health?

Like all cooperative games, there is a slight danger of an "alpha player" taking over and telling everyone else what to do. What may be a bigger problem for some players is that as powers, environmental effects, and villain tactics accumulate, the game requires an awful lot of bookkeeping. Although lots of "+1 Damage Dealt" and "Immune to Damage" counters and so on are provided, the mid to late game slows down as each player must carefully tally up all cumulative bonuses and penalties to figure out how much damage he can actually inflict on any given target. Since there are different types of damage and every hero and minion and villain may take more or less damage from different effects, the game is, again, quite good at simulating unique power effects, but it's no surprise that many players use an app to track numbers during play.

Rating the games: Which one is best?

Although I like Marvel Legendary very much, and it does have the most polished game mechanics, for sheer fun and superhero action Sentinels of the Multiverse is my favorite.

Legendary would probably be my pick if I had to choose one game to teach new players, especially if they are not familiar with deckbuilders (or if they love the Marvel movies). On the other hand, Sentinels is going to appeal more to true genre geeks, especially the sort who have played the Champions RPG or similar games.

Legendary and Sentinels both play very well in solitaire mode, and are almost as much fun in two-player mode as they are with three or four players. I've played Legendary with up to five players, and while it works, it starts to become a much longer and slower game.

The DC Deck-Building Game, alas, just doesn't make the cut for me in any respect. In fairness, I have only played it once, but that was enough to convince me I had no desire to get a copy for myself. It's not a terrible game, so if someone else brought it to the table, I would be willing to play it again, but it's not as fun as the other games, and of the three, it does the poorest job of capturing a theme or exciting interest in "playing your heroes."

This time we pulled Flying Buffalo's Berserker off the shelf.

I know for a fact I never played this before, because the cardboard counters were still uncut.



This game, designed by Michael Stackpole and Rick Loomis, is based on the classic novels by Fred Saberhagen about implacable planet-destroying robots waging a genocidal campaign across the galaxy, long after their creators were destroyed. The books predate the Star Trek episode Planet Killer, and while Saberhagen may not have originated this trope, he was certainly one of the first to popularize it.

Flying Buffalo also still runs the venerable play-by-mail game Starweb, in which one of the player options is the Berserker.

The board game is basically Ogre in space. One player plays the Berserker; the other plays Earth's defenders. The Berserker's objective is to reach Earth and destroy it; the defender's objective is to destroy the Berserker.

The Berserker has a number of robots with which to man guns, repair damage, and repel boarders. The defender gets a set number of points with which to build a fleet consisting of cruisers (able to slug it out with the Berserker, though they are much smaller and weaker), "c-plus" ships (which hurl long-range projectiles that "skip" across the map but do massive damage to the Berserker if they hit), and ram ships (which ram the Berserker and deliver space marines who board it and attempt to destroy it from the inside).

In the three games we played, using the recommended beginning fleet setup for the defenders each time, we found that it was almost impossible for the Berserker to win.

In the first game, my opponent played the Berserker, who adopted a "charge directly at Earth" strategy and was blown apart by my c-plus ships before even reaching the main body of my fleet.

In the second game, I played the Berserker. This time I tried outmaneuvering the defender's fleet, taking particular care to try to stay out of the line of fire of the c-plus ships. I was only partially successful, and I might have had a bare chance if not for a particularly awful string of bad die rolls. I did manage to get close enough to Earth to do a little damage before being destroyed, but even with better rolls, I don't think I could have won.

In the third game, my opponent played the Berserker again, and this time used the option to split off a Berserker cruiser to engage my fleet, while trying to copy my maneuvering strategy. A lucky shot from a c-plus gun took out the cruiser, and by the time the Berserker got close to my fleet, it had managed to destroy all my cruisers, but I then swarmed it with enough ram ships to obliterate it even before we started rolling for boarding combat.

Reading this account of the game, I really wonder how they ever managed to score a Berserker victory. We didn't even use the optional Earth industry rules.

Berserker was a bit of fun, but there is nothing novel about its mechanics and it seems extremely unbalanced to me, making it unlikely we'll try the campaign version.

Its rating on BoardGameGeek suggests my opinion is not unique. Nice to have if you are a Saberhagen fan (no doubt why I bought it way back when), but not really a winner.