This is the fourth in a seven part series on superhero games. This time it’s about Heroes of Metro City and the expansion Sidekicks and Storylines.
We’ve written about this game in a previous post.
This is another deck building game, but it isn’t tied to an existing superhero universe (like DC or Marvel). You’re “creating” your superhero. To start, you get to name your hero. Each player’s board has a place to write this in using a dry erase marker. Sometimes Energy Cards give an extra boost to characters with certain elements to their names (gender, animal, etc.), so you want to pick those before deciding on a name.
Each player is allotted a certain number of points to spend on cards at the beginning of the game to start building a deck. The fewer the points, the harder the game is going to be, but we’ll get to that. Some cards give you specific powers, some energy, and some give your character a “story” (hence the expansion name).
The goal is to defeat the Archenemy, but there are also Minions and Villains to deal with. Each of these has an attack that can trigger when you roll the dice. If the dice are always trying to kill you, this will be a rough game. If you’re really lucky at rolling dice, you just might save Metro City.
The premise of the game sounds awesome. I get to create my own superhero and fight bad guys.
The execution…
Unless you give each player A LOT of points to spend in the beginning of the game (20+), it’s ridiculously hard. I don’t mind games being difficult to defeat, and we’ve lost at other games before. The burning building has collapsed, the island sank, the castle was destroyed, everybody died! With Heroes of Metro City, whenever we play a standard game (5-8 points to start with), we lose. The last time we played, we didn’t even finish. We were running out of cards (if you can’t discard the type of card required, the Archenemy wins), and no one had been able to build a strong enough deck to take out the Archenemy, plus we’d been playing a long time, so we called it. The game is just really unbalanced, which makes it not so fun to play.
We haven’t entirely given up on it yet. We really want it to work and be fun, which means we’ll probably just give out a lot of points at the beginning to build a solid starting deck.
In the next entry, I’ll discuss Legendary.