Origin Story

Origin Story Deep Dive

What the Community Thinks About Origin Story

Origin Story is Stonemaier Games' five-round trick-taking game about building a superhero from scratch, and reviewers generally agree it is a genuine hybrid rather than a simple reskin of the genre. Brains On Games opened its review by pointing out that trick-taking already fills roughly 30 pages of listings on BoardGameGeek, then asked what Origin Story could possibly add to that crowded field. Its answer was enthusiastic: everyone who played the game with host Dr. Brian McDonald immediately started looking up where to buy their own copy. One Stop Co-op Shop, reviewing from a copy the publisher sent, landed in similar territory but with more reservations, praising the solo mode and the variety of story cards while flagging several pieces of the box as decorative rather than essential to the experience.

BigPasti took the most contrarian position of the group, arguing that Origin Story is pulled apart by two opposing impulses: a Stonemaier-style desire to make players feel good about a personal narrative, and a trick-taking core willing to demolish that narrative without sympathy. Where Brains On Games and One Stop Co-op Shop treated the game's randomness as a manageable trade-off, BigPasti framed that randomness as the entire point of the design, comparing the feeling to chasing an overpowered combo rather than playing a tidy, balanced system. Designer Jamie Stegmaier and his co-designer Pete discussed the same tension from the inside during an interview on the mill, describing the ongoing challenge of layering dozens of interacting powers onto a trick-taking base without overwhelming new players or letting any single power ruin someone else's round.

Core Mechanics That Define Origin Story

Must-Follow Trick-Taking With a Hero or Villain Twist

Origin Story runs on a must-follow trick-taking structure across four suits, which Brains On Games identified as speed, brains, strength, and love, with love serving as the trump suit. Before each round's eight tricks are played, everyone secretly chooses to be a hero or a villain for that round: a hero scores one victory point for every trick won, while a villain scores four points only if they win zero tricks, and nothing at all if they win even one. One Stop Co-op Shop likened the villain option to shooting the moon in Hearts, but felt the payoff could not compete with that comparison, calling it swingy and, at some player counts, "both too difficult and also not rewarding enough" next to what Spades or Hearts offers for the same kind of gamble.

Charging Story-Card Powers With Stamina

Each round, players draw story cards, keep one, and spend stamina tokens to charge the abilities on their tableau, a system Brains On Games summarized as adding powers to a player board round after round until a final reveal in round five. Those charged abilities can bend the basic trick-taking rules in specific ways, letting a player draw extra cards, reverse turn order, discard instead of playing, or score bonus points for sweeping a suit. Round three adds a drawn event card that changes that round's rules for everyone, such as the "moral crisis" event Brains On Games encountered that forced players to flip alignment from whatever they had chosen the round before, and round five has each player reveal one of two secret superhero identity cards for a single powerful late-game ability.

The Origin Story Experience

Telling a Personal Superhero Arc

Each player starts with a randomly dealt, asymmetric player board and slowly fills it with story cards that are meant to read as chapters in a hero's backstory. Co-designer Pete told the mill that he loves games with asymmetry where everyone can do different things, and specifically pointed to the hero-or-villain choice each round as one of his favorite parts of the design, along with the two-sided score dials the team built so the same number shows whether a player flips to hero or villain. Jamie Stegmaier added on the Stonemaier Games livestream that the two-player mode uses thematic "sidekick" hands played by each opponent, calling it very streamlined, and relayed that Pete considers it one of his favorite two-player trick-taking modes in any game.

When the Trick-Taking Turns Cruel

BigPasti's core argument is that the pleasant, narrative side of Origin Story keeps getting overridden by its trick-taking half. As BigPasti put it, players can "tenderly choose your powers, craft a narratively perfect character arc, and the game will absolutely let you crash and burn," because winning or losing tricks depends on card draws the story cannot control. The round three event and the round five hero reveal amplify that swing further, since both can hand a huge advantage to one build while leaving another player's carefully assembled hero unable to do anything about it.

What Makes Origin Story Stand Out

A Genuinely Novel Fusion

Both Brains On Games and BigPasti singled out how unusual it is to see engine building, tableau building, and trick-taking combined this directly, especially with a superhero theme layered on top. BigPasti called it "a fusion of trick taken, tableau building, and superheroes," describing that combination as a trifecta that should have been an easy hit for a publisher known for polished, approachable design. Brains On Games reached a similar conclusion from the opposite direction, framing Origin Story as a trick-taking game that finally answers what an engine-building layer can add to the genre.

Clementine's Watercolor Superhero Art

The look of the game traces back to watercolor superhero paintings by artist Clementine, which Jamie Stegmaier said he discovered years before the game existed and specifically asked her to illustrate with original heroes rather than licensed characters. Brains On Games admitted the art style was divisive online at launch but said it grew on him, and he singled out the flip-number point counters as a small touch that every player at his table appreciated. On the mill, Jamie pointed out that Clementine's card art was designed to make higher-numbered cards visually feel more powerful than low ones, a detail he said he still notices every time he plays.

Potential Drawbacks

Randomness That Can Overwhelm a Round

BigPasti's central critique is that Origin Story offers "a huge amount of luck" layered on top of its skill expression, arguing that a villain's four-point bonus does not scale with hand size or player count and can swing from essential to useless depending on the table. One Stop Co-op Shop raised a related concern about the story cards themselves, warning they "can feel horribly misbalanced, especially at certain player counts," and found the solo bots even swingier than head-to-head play, since their random draws could occasionally hand them exactly the cards they needed to win.

A Tightly Packed, Content-Limited Box

Brains On Games noted the box ships with only five player boards and ten superhero identity cards, which he called a limitation on long-term variety even while praising the base game, adding that he wished there was a little more included. On the Stonemaier Games livestream, Jamie Stegmaier confirmed the box has no insert because the team packed it as tightly as possible, and acknowledged sleeved cards will likely cause some lid lift. He also noted that an international release depends on a translation partner reworking every text-heavy story card, a step that has not been finalized.

If You Enjoy Origin Story

On its own reveal livestream, Stonemaier Games named several trick-taking games as direct touchstones for the design. Designer Jamie Stegmaier cited TrickTakers (Kings Trick Takers) as an inspiration for its abilities that create different win conditions, and listed Cat in the Box, Skull King, and Fellowship among his favorite trick-taking games, noting that Origin Story's villain scoring specifically borrows Skull King's idea of rewarding a bid of zero tricks. BigPasti drew a different kind of comparison, likening the thrill of drafting story-card powers into an overpowered combination to the Ability Draft mode in Dota 2, calling Origin Story "the distilled board game version" of that same chaotic appeal.