Marvel: Age of Heroes

Marvel: Age of Heroes Deep Dive

What the Community Thinks About Marvel: Age of Heroes

Marvel: Age of Heroes is a worker placement game from WizKids, designed by Rodney Thompson, one of the designers of Lords of Waterdeep. Almost every reviewer reaches for that comparison. Meeple University calls it Lords of Waterdeep 2.0 with an X-Men theme and named it the joint number one of its top games for March 2023. Rolling Dice & Taking Names enjoyed the game and praised its production, but found it ran long and said it would not be the first worker placement game pulled off the shelf. Watch It Played covered the announcement with real excitement, pointing to the watercolor art style, the X-Men of the 1990s animated series and the Lords of Waterdeep pedigree. The overall picture is a familiar, well-made worker placement game that adds personal combos and a lot of variety, at the cost of some length and card-text ambiguity.

Core Mechanics That Define Marvel: Age of Heroes

Worker Placement in Two Halves

Each player commands a duo of X-Men, represented by between three and six standees depending on player count. Meeple University explains that each round plays in two halves. In the first half, players place heroes at the top of the board to take actions immediately, or onto the X-Jet, a row of six spaces that sets the order in which those heroes later deploy to missions at the bottom of the board. Missions are where villains are fought, and unlike Lords of Waterdeep, where contracts are taken into hand, the targets here sit openly on the board on a first come, first served basis. That makes the choice of X-Jet position, and the timing of the few effects that let a player skip the queue, one of the most important decisions in the game.

Resource Contracts and Evolving Action Spaces

There are three resources: red for physical attack, yellow for mental attack and blue for willpower. Players collect combinations that match the scoring lines on enemy cards, then spend them from the X-Jet to claim points. The JestaThaRogue rules teach notes that a resource track can never go above 10. The board grows as the game goes on. Ally cards become new action spaces marked with their owner's color, and the owner earns a bonus whenever another player uses them, which Rolling Dice & Taking Names identifies as the building concept carried over from Lords of Waterdeep. Team-up cards offer alternative ways to defeat enemies, event cards give one-off effects, and evolution cards provide personal engine bonuses tied to a specific X-Man.

The Marvel: Age of Heroes Experience

Hunting for the Combo

Meeple University argues that the combos are what separate this game from Lords of Waterdeep. The goal feels like searching for a nearly broken combo that generates piles of resources and points, though other players can use the same spaces. Their example is Gambit, whose evolution card awards four points after Gambit is assigned and an event card is played, so a Gambit player keeps sending Gambit standees to play events. Rolling Dice & Taking Names describes the same pull from a Jean Grey enhancement that scored two points the first time Jean Grey visited a location, which led to Jean Grey being sent somewhere new again and again.

Tight Turn Order and Racing for Villains

The game is not cooperative, even though every player attacks the same villains. Rolling Dice & Taking Names points out that once someone assigns damage to a spot on a villain, nobody else can take it, so players race to the X-Jet for the spot they want. Meeple University found the early rounds felt like Russian Railroads, with two obvious first picks and a scramble for the turn order space, before the game opened up. A single misstep matters. One of the Meeple University hosts was comfortably ahead in a first game and lost by 30 points after one bad placement wrecked their turn order on the X-Jet.

What Makes Marvel: Age of Heroes Stand Out

Replayability Beyond Lords of Waterdeep

Meeple University admits the game is a basic worker placement design with nothing necessarily new. Their case for it is variety. The deck of cards is large, only part of it appears in each game, each X-Man has several different powers to mix, and three scenarios add different cards and different end triggers. They believe it has more staying power than Lords of Waterdeep and call it one worth keeping. The duos differ too: Gambit and Rogue, Jean Grey and Cyclops, Forge and Storm (with four Storm standees and two of Forge), Magik alone, Kitty Pryde with Lockheed, and Wolverine with Jubilee.

Production and Presentation

Rolling Dice & Taking Names says WizKids knocked the production out of the park. The punchboard is thick and almost plastic in feel, and the heroes are acrylic standees cut to the shape of each character, which the hosts prefer to miniatures because they are colorful, easy to move and take up little space. Watch It Played was drawn in by the art style, meant to show the Marvel Universe through the eyes of Cerebro in a watercolor, dreamlike look.

Potential Drawbacks

Length and Downtime

Rolling Dice & Taking Names played one scenario at four players and found it stayed on the table too long, with some downtime as players planned resources for missions. The box says 60 to 90 minutes, and the hosts could not see how it plays in 60, suggesting 60 to 120 minutes as a fairer estimate. Early damage is hard to deal before an engine is running, and players must defeat two minor enemies and a bigger villain before reaching the final boss, so the game length varies with how well players do. The hosts wished for a built-in clock and for more ways to gain extra workers, since students came from only one card that other players kept claiming first. Meeple University also found that games could stretch to two or three hours, and felt it could run a little longer at lower player counts.

Card Text Ambiguity

Meeple University flags a small challenge that comes from the size of the deck. Many cards let a player use the effect of another card, and wording that refers to this card and that card can be more ambiguous than they would like. With repeated plays, groups will either work it out or settle on a house rule, and Meeple University says it does not detract from the game once that happens. They also note a bit of chaos from the big deck, and that some cards on the board can sit there because nobody wants them.

If You Enjoy Marvel: Age of Heroes

The obvious companion is Lords of Waterdeep. Meeple University and Rolling Dice & Taking Names both describe the same resource contracts and a similar building mechanism, and Rolling Dice & Taking Names rates the two at about the same weight, though Age of Heroes drops gold and has a variable number of rounds. Rolling Dice & Taking Names says the game reminds them of Pillars of the Earth as a place-a-worker, do-something design. For players who most enjoy setting up combos, Meeple University compares the feeling to Whistle Mountain, where placed tiles create little combo sets to exploit while they last.