The Ex-Heroes find more survivors, with an obligatory superhero brick battle.

The spectacular fifth adventure in the genre-busting Ex-Heroes series.

The heroes are overjoyed when they discover another group of survivors living on a manmade island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But there's something very, very wrong with this isolated community and its mysterious leader - a secret that could put every survivor in the world at risk.

( The fifth book in a series that seems to be settling in for the long run. )

Also by Peter Clines: My reviews of Ex-Heroes, Ex-Patriots, Ex-Communication, Ex-Purgatory, 14, The Fold, and Paradox Bound.

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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."

The Inscrutable Machine goes into space, fights aliens and Mad Science.

Supervillains do not merely play hooky.

True, coming back to school after a month spent fighting - and defeating - adult superheroes is a bit of a comedown for the Inscrutable Machine. When offered the chance to skip school in the most dramatic way possible, Penelope Akk can't resist. With the help of a giant spider and mysterious red goo, she builds a spaceship and flies to Jupiter.

Mutant goats. Secret human colonies. A war between three alien races with humanity as the prize. Robot overlords and evil plots. Penny and her friends find all this and more on Jupiter's moons, but what they don't find are any heroes to save the day.

Fortunately, they have an angry eleven year old and a whole lot of mad science!

( Puppeteers, Conquerors, and Jovian colonists descended from Victorian supervillains. )

Verdict: Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon is a fun book and I'm still looking forward to more adventures of Penny and her friends, but it did not have the consistent worldbuilding and character development of the first book. It reads a bit like a second draft, with too much story and not enough polish. 7/10.

Also by Richard Roberts: My review of Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain.

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Three middle-schoolers p0wn the superhero community — if you liked The Incredibles then this book is for you.

Penelope Akk wants to be a superhero. She's got superhero parents. She's got the ultimate mad science power, filling her life with crazy gadgets even she doesn't understand. She has two super powered best friends. In middle school, the line between good and evil looks clear.

In real life, nothing is that clear. All it takes is one hero's sidekick picking a fight, and Penny and her friends are labeled supervillains. In the process, Penny learns a hard lesson about villainy: She's good at it.

Criminal masterminds, heroes in power armor, bottles of dragon blood, alien war drones, shape shifters and ghosts, no matter what the super powered world throws at her, Penny and her friends come out on top. They have to. If she can keep winning, maybe she can clear her name before her mom and dad find out.

( A superhero novel for the true superhero fan. )

Verdict: A fun, light-hearted adventure for anyone who loves superhero comic books, especially those aimed at the younger set. Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain surprised me with how much I liked it; I plan to get the soon-to-be-published sequel as soon as it's out. 9/10.

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I'm not one of those prudes longing for a pristine, wholesome Golden Age of Comics when superheroes were morally unambiguous and nobody swore or died.

I liked it when superheroes first started getting a more "adult" treatment. Now there are numerous superhero novels. Like 'em or hate 'em, they have made it a distinct if niche sub-genre. Some authors treat the genre and its conventions at face value, others try to be subversive. But it's cool and interesting to explore questions like "What if Superman wasn't so nice?" or "How would the world really deal with superpowered people?"

I do, however, believe that the heart and soul of the superhero genre is heroes being heroic. And villains being villainous. And a generally optimistic tone in which we have reason to believe that Good will eventually triumph over Evil.

It's not terribly realistic, and it's not terribly nuanced, and a lot of people don't like superheroes, or think the whole idea is stupid, for precisely that reason. Fair enough. I don't get the appeal of paranormal romances or steampunk. We all like what we like. But I think what draws fans to the genre is the expectation of tales of heroism.

According to some, superheroes are modern myths retold, and there's some truth to that. But I think they are mostly power fantasies. Specifically, we look at a deeply dysfunctional broken world with mostly insoluble problems, injustice and atrocities that cannot be easily fixed with individual action, and imagine how satisfying it would be if we could just run around punching out bad guys.

Mix it up a bit with some moral dilemmas, the occasional "anti-hero," sure. I was as big a Wolverine fan as anyone, back when he first became the hot new icon that everyone copied and parodied. And while Alan Moore's Watchmen is an ugly, cynical deconstruction in a lot of ways, it's also clever and it respects the conventions it's deliberately breaking. And it was a limited, self-contained story, not an ongoing bloodbath in which all the tropes of superherodom were repeatedly shat upon.

Which brings me to the "Free Comic Book Day" issue of DC's The New 52 Future's End:



Basically, the whole issue is a bloodbath in which all the DC heroes are hacked apart and assimilated by some Borg-like Big Bad who's taken over the world. Bruce Wayne, mortally wounded after having his arm graphically chopped off, sends his protege back in time to fix it.

First of all, Marvel has already done this. Repeatedly. It was even made into the most recent X-Men movie.

Once again, DC is trying to capture what has been a winning formula for Marvel without any sense of what makes it winning. Some people did not like the "Days of Future Past" or "Age of Apocalypse" storylines in the old X-Men. They were kind of grimdark. I liked them, but in the 80s and 90s when they were first published, Marvel was experimenting with their most popular and contemporary heroes, and they did, unfortunately, then go through a long dark period of X-Force, X-Factor, X-cetera, and the completely worthless character Cable. I know this legacy is still around, but notice the winning Marvel movies, even Days of Future Past, were "darkness before the dawn," not darkness all the way through.

I assume that DC, also, intends for "Future's End" to end with the heroes victoriously hitting the reset button. But everything I have seen in their new line indicates that they're just kind of clueless about what draws readers to superhero comics.

"Free Comic Book Day" is supposed to attract new readers to the genre. So what the hell makes DC think the best way to do that is by putting Wonder Woman's head on a spike?

A superhero trilogy fizzles into the sunset.

Jo Tanis is still recovering from her near-death experience in Las Vegas when she receives a mysterious postcard from Harris Limox, who claims to have a promising lead on the whereabouts of the Controller. Over her boyfriend/guardian Hunter's objections, she sets off to a sleepy Oregon town to ferret out the truth.

The Controller is more than just a disgruntled super. He's a rogue Guardian who was presumed dead and is now armed with a slew of high-tech hardware that not only makes him physically superior to the supers—and therefore almost impossible to destroy—he's got the ability to detonate the implants in the back of all supers' necks.

In Oregon, Jo meets a surviving Alpha super, Kit Masters, whose wild plan to capture the Controller could put an entire town of innocents at risk. But instead of successfully talking her former idol out of his disastrous bid to regain former glory, Jo finds herself betrayed and trapped in her worst nightmare.

Fight her former teammates, or die.

( Melodramatic quirks and trite superhero tropes do not always translate well on the page. )

Verdict: For superhero fans, this trilogy is a moderately entertaining series with a variety of supers and lots of fights, decent characters, mediocre writing, and a good start at worldbuilding, but Heroes Lost and Found is a bit of a flop at the finish. Your enjoyment will depend largely on your love-of-all-things-superhero to dislike-of-romance-masquerading-as-superhero-fiction ratio.

Also by Sheryl Nantus: My reviews of Blaze of Glory and Heroes Without, Monsters Within.

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In the second book in the Grimnoir Chronicles, the U.S. government is the enemy and the author gets his digs in on FDR.

Dark fantasy goes hardboiled in Book II of the hard-hitting Grimnoir Chronicles by the New York Times best-selling creator of Monster Hunter International. The Grimnoir Society’s mission is to protect people with magic, and they’ve done so—successfully and in secret—since the mysterious arrival of the Power in the 1850s, but when a magical assassin makes an attempt on the life of President Franklin Roosevelt, the crime is pinned on the Grimnoir. The knights must become fugitives while they attempt to discover who framed them. Things go from bad to worse when Jake Sullivan, former P.I. and knight of the Grimnoir, receives a telephone call from a dead man—a man he helped kill. Turns out the Power jumped universes because it was fleeing from a predator that eats magic and leaves destroyed worlds in its wake. That predator has just landed on Earth.

( Correia's allegories are none too subtle, nor is his writing, but this is still damn entertaining. )

Verdict: An entertaining action adventure with pulp sci-fi robots and evil super-powered samurai against hard-boiled American wizard-superheroes. This is not a deep series, but it's much more entertaining than all that alt-Victoriana steampunk crap.

Also by Larry Correia: My review of Hard Magic.

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Hard-boiled magical superheroes vs. the Japanese Imperium's war-dirigibles in an alternate 1933.

Jake Sullivan is a licensed private eye with a seriously hardboiled attitude. He also possesses raw magical talent and the ability to make objects in his vicinity light as a feather or as heavy as depleted uranium, all with a magical thought. It's no wonder the G-men turn to Jake when they need someone to go after a suspected killer who has been knocking off banks in a magic-enhanced crime spree.

Problems arise when Jake discovers the bad girl behind the robberies is an old friend, and he happens to know her magic is just as powerful as his. And the Feds have plunged Jake into a secret battle between powerful cartels of magic-users - a cartel whose ruthless leaders have decided that Jake is far too dangerous to live.

( Mislabeled! This ain't urban fantasy and it ain't steampunk, but it's hella fun. )

Verdict: Larry Correia is obviously a big dorky aficionado of guns, B-movies, superheroes, and "America fuck yeah!" politics. He's packed Hard Magic full of enough tropes to power an alternate Marvel Universe, and yes, I could tell he was thinking in movie frames when he wrote his action scenes. Don't be misled by the title or the cover: Hard Magic is more "pulp-era X-Men vs. a Japanese Magneto" than it is urban fantasy, noir, or steampunk. There's world-saving to be done, and this is the first start of a series I've read in a while that really makes me want to read the next book.

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Not everyone can be Dr. Doom. Or even the Crimson Dynamo.

"Being a supervillain means never having to say you’re sorry - unless it’s to the judge or the parole board. Even then, you don’t really have to. It’s not like it’s going to change the outcome or anything." Those are the words of Calvin Matthew Stringel, better known as Mechani-Cal. He’s a down-on-his-luck armored villain. Follow his exploits as he gets swept up in a world domination scheme gone wrong and ends up working for these weak willed, mercy loving heroes. Immerse yourself in epic battles and see what it’s like to be an outsider looking in at a world that few have ever experienced. Climb into Cal’s battlesuit and join him on his journey. Will he avoid selling out his principles for a paycheck and a pardon? Can he resist the camaraderie of being on a super team? Does he fall prey to the ample charms of the beautiful Olympian Aphrodite? How will he survive the jealous schemes of Ultraweapon, who wears armor so powerful it makes Cal’s look like a museum piece?

See the world of “righteous do-gooders” through the eyes of someone who doesn’t particularly care for them. Revel in his sarcasm and hang on for one wild ride! Just remember: losing an argument with a group of rioters isn’t a good excuse to start lobbing tear gas indiscriminately at them. You’ve only got so many rounds and it’s going to be a long day, so make sure you get as many as possible with each one.

( A non-Gary Stu wish-fulfillment fantasy. )

Verdict: Self-published. Superhero novel. I have not always had success with that combination. But this one works. It's short, action-packed, true to the genre, and strikes the right balance of humor and sincerity. Confessions of a D-List Supervillain is nothing new or brilliant, but it's fun for those who like superhero novels.

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Superheroes are the bad guys in Brandon Sanderson's rewrite of Mistborn.

Ten years ago, Calamity came. It was a burst in the sky that gave ordinary men and women extraordinary powers. The awed public started calling them Epics.

But Epics are no friend of man. With incredible gifts came the desire to rule. And to rule man you must crush his will.

Nobody fights the Epics...nobody but the Reckoners. A shadowy group of ordinary humans, they spend their lives studying Epics, finding their weaknesses, and then assassinating them.

And David wants in. He wants Steelheart - the Epic who is said to be invincible. The Epic who killed David's father. For years, like the Reckoners, David's been studying, and planning - and he has something they need. Not an object, but an experience.

He's seen Steelheart bleed.

And he wants revenge.

( Brandon Sanderson writes entertaining Brandon Sanderson fanfic. )

Verdict: Steelheart was a fun read. Brandon Sanderson doing superheroes will appeal to you if you like superheroes and/or Brandon Sanderson and are willing to overlook the limitations of both. It is not his best work, nor is it his worst, and likewise it's neither the best nor the worst superhero novel I've ever read (I have read quite a few).

Also by Brandon Sanderson: My reviews of Elantris, The Mistborn trilogy, The Alloy of Law, and The Way of Kings.

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