Disclaimer
This entry contains Marvel superheroes, deck-building, unnecessary mathematics and fairly compelling evidence that I have developed a cardboard-related problem. No actual supervillains were harmed. Loki, however, has been held responsible for several things for which there is currently insufficient evidence.
There are, broadly speaking, two sides to our son.
There is the child who plays tennis, cricket and martial arts, spends substantial portions of the weekend being transported between sporting venues, and apparently regards the family calendar as a logistical puzzle designed specifically to test his parents.
And then there is the other version.
The board gamer.
This side is slightly less physically exhausting but potentially far more dangerous financially.
His fondness for board games is, of course, well documented on this blog. Once a month he plays at the library, where he has now progressed beyond merely playing games and occasionally finds himself teaching things such as Pandemic to other people.
This is quite an achievement.
At his age I was playing chess tournaments and moving wooden pieces around a board with an expression suggesting I was negotiating a particularly difficult Warsaw Pact treaty.
Our son is apparently running community gaming outreach.
Naturally, the highlight of his board-gaming year remains the UK Games Expo. While I spent three days “working” for Czech Games Edition — quotation marks included because explaining board games to enthusiastic people while surrounded by thousands of other board games occupies a somewhat ambiguous position within the traditional definition of employment — my wife somehow managed to spend three consecutive days playing games with him.
I remain unsure how.
I love board games.
I love our son.
I am not convinced I could combine both activities continuously for three days without requiring intravenous fluids and a quiet room.
During UKGE he even managed to win a copy of Dice Hospital: ER – Emergency Roll, the roll-and-write incarnation of Dice Hospital, through a board-game design submission. They also encountered Cat-a-comb—sorry, Cat Earth—at the Expo, played it, liked it, and subsequently bought it, because apparently merely attending a board-game convention without returning with additional board games would constitute a catastrophic failure of planning.
So, yes.
Board games are very much established within the household.
Meanwhile, at Stephen’s…
During the summer holidays I have also continued my reasonably regular board-gaming meetings with Stephen.
We recently finished our Roll Player campaign, which had become one of those reassuringly permanent fixtures where every few weeks we would return to the same characters, attempt to remember what on earth we had been doing last time, and then continue making decisions whose consequences would become apparent approximately three sessions later.
We had actually started the prequel as well.
Then summer arrived.
People went on holiday. Children appeared. Calendars disintegrated. Sport happened.
Essentially, civilisation collapsed.
Our ongoing campaign therefore entered the traditional British summer state of we will definitely get back to this soon, which is the board-gaming equivalent of putting something somewhere safe.
It may never be seen again.
On one of the available days, however, I suggested something different.
Marvel Legendary.
More specifically, I was hoping Stephen would agree that we could introduce it to our son.
Our son wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with deck-building. My wife and I have played Dominion, and he has seen that mechanism before: start with a mediocre collection of cards, acquire better cards, shuffle them into your deck, gradually create something considerably more efficient and then become disproportionately annoyed when the precise card you need is at the bottom.
Legendary, however, does things rather differently.
And it has Marvel.
Which apparently helps.
So What Actually Is Marvel Legendary?
Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game was originally released by Upper Deck in 2012 and designed by Devin Low. It is essentially a cooperative deck-builder with a small competitive knife concealed behind its back.
Everyone is trying to stop a Marvel Mastermind from completing an evil Scheme. If the Scheme succeeds, everybody loses.
Together.
Very wholesome.
If you defeat the Mastermind, however, everyone counts the Victory Points earned from defeated Villains, rescued Bystanders and Mastermind Tactics, and one player can still emerge as the individual winner.
So it is teamwork followed by performance comparison.
Essentially NHS multidisciplinary working with superheroes.
The game supports one to five players, although BoardGameGeek’s community voting currently places three players as the best count, which pleasingly confirms my own completely unbiased scientific assessment.
Five players is technically possible.
So is doing a ward round with nineteen people.
That does not mean either should routinely happen.
A typical three-player game uses five different Heroes. Their cards are shuffled together into one Hero Deck, and five cards are displayed in the HQ for everyone to recruit. Each player begins with a distinctly unimpressive personal deck of basic S.H.I.E.L.D. cards.
At the other end of the table sits the Mastermind — Loki, Magneto, Kingpin, Apocalypse or one of an increasingly absurd number of other people who apparently woke up that morning and decided Earth needed destroying.
The Mastermind is trying to complete a Scheme.
Below all of this is the Villain Deck, containing Villain Groups, Henchmen, Bystanders, Scheme Twists and Master Strikes.
A turn is beautifully straightforward before approximately fifteen expansions start adding sentences containing words such as Berserk, Teleport, Hyperspeed, Piercing Energy and Cross-Dimensional Rampage.
First, you reveal the top card of the Villain Deck.
Usually something unpleasant happens.
A Villain might enter the city. A Bystander might be captured. A Scheme Twist advances the evil plan. A Master Strike makes the Mastermind do something broadly antisocial.
Then you play the cards from your hand.
Cards generate Recruit points, allowing you to buy better Heroes from the HQ, and Attack, allowing you to beat up Villains or eventually attack the Mastermind. Those newly recruited cards go into your discard pile and eventually become part of your deck when you reshuffle.
Your pathetic starting deck therefore gradually becomes something rather magnificent.
In theory.
In practice it sometimes becomes seven S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents, three Wounds and one extremely expensive Thor card you have inexplicably failed to draw for four consecutive turns.
Upper Deck’s current rules retain the same basic rhythm: reveal from the Villain Deck, play your Hero cards, recruit and fight, then discard and draw a new hand.
Simple.
Addictive.
Dangerous.
Marvel Knowledge: Apparently Optional
Our son has not actually watched much Marvel.
Apart from Captain America, most of the films remain untouched.
This did not appear to matter.
He knows most of the Avengers anyway because it is practically impossible to exist in Western civilisation without eventually identifying Hulk, Thor and Iron Man.
He also knows Venom.
Specifically Eddie Brock.
Of course he does.
I am increasingly convinced children absorb pop culture through osmosis. Somewhere between school, YouTube thumbnails, friends, toys, books and standing in supermarket aisles, entire fictional universes are downloaded directly into their brains.
Therefore, when we sat down at Stephen’s a couple of weeks ago, the absence of twenty-eight Marvel films’ worth of background knowledge created precisely no difficulty whatsoever.
Stephen produced cards.
Many cards.
Actually, this requires some explanation.
Stephen owns approximately 96.8% of all Marvel Legendary expansions.
I have not independently audited this number.
It feels correct.
His collection has reached the stage where selecting a scenario is less like choosing a board game and more like accessing an archive.
“Which Heroes shall we use?”
opens box
“No, the other box.”
opens another box
“Masterminds are over there.”
gestures towards what appears to be an additional filing system
At this point I half expect him to introduce barcode scanners.
Approximately Infinity Games or the Math behind the Marvel Multiverse
The math was helped with google
The great advantage of playing Legendary at Stephen’s is therefore variety.
The game is extraordinarily modular.
A contemporary fan database, Master Strike, currently catalogues 289 Hero sets, 104 Masterminds, 126 Villain Groups and 188 Schemes across the enormous pre-Second-Edition Marvel ecosystem.
This naturally raised the important question:
How many different games of Marvel Legendary could you actually set up if you owned everything?
This is where things become ridiculous.
For a conventional three-player game, you normally choose five Heroes.
From 289 Heroes, there are already:
16,225,641,432 – over sixteen billion
different five-Hero combinations.
And we haven’t selected a villain yet. Now add a Mastermind. Then a Scheme. Then Villain Groups. Then Henchmen.
Using a deliberately crude calculation in which we choose five Heroes, one of 104 Masterminds, one of 188 Schemes, three Villain Groups from 126 and one Henchman Group from the roughly 44 available groups, you arrive in the region of:
4,543,564,862,590,161,408,000 – potential standard combinations.
Approximately 4.54 sextillion.
This is not, importantly, an exact legal-game total. Legendary refuses to cooperate with mathematics quite that neatly. Many Masterminds “Always Lead” a particular Villain Group. Some Schemes add or remove Heroes, Villain Groups, Henchmen or even other Masterminds. Some introduce extra decks. Epic Mastermind sides alter encounters further. Certain scenarios fundamentally change the setup itself. The official three-player structure is normally five Heroes, three Villain Groups and one Henchman Group, but Schemes are specifically allowed to interfere with that.
So the technically precise number of every possible legal setup is not one neat combinatorial figure.
The scientifically acceptable answer is therefore:
Loads.
Even if Stephen played one unique configuration every minute, abandoning sleep, employment, nutrition and all meaningful human relationships, the Sun would probably become problematic before the randomiser asked him to repeat one.
Therefore his 96.8% collection should provide sufficient replayability.
I expect he will buy the remaining 3.2%. Obviously.
Loki: Educational Services Department
Our first game was against Loki.
This seemed sensible. Our son was learning.
Stephen and I knew what we were doing.
What could possibly go wrong?
Loki won.
Quite comfortably.
We therefore immediately activated one of the most important mechanisms in modern board gaming:
That was a learning game.
This is a remarkably powerful phrase.
You can lose by an embarrassing margin and simply declare retrospectively that victory was never the objective.
Chess players should consider adopting it.
After receiving our educational beating from the God of Mischief, we set everything up again.
Different Heroes. Different Villains. Different Scheme. Different Mastermind.
This time we faced Kingpin, who comes from the excellent Dark City expansion.
And this time things went rather better.
Our son began understanding the rhythms of the game remarkably quickly. Recruit early. Look for synergies. Don’t simply buy a card because the character looks cool. Build Attack. Keep an eye on what the Scheme is actually doing rather than discovering three turns later that Earth is approximately six seconds away from destruction.
Most importantly, he worked out the deeply satisfying part of any deck-builder:
COMBOS
One card makes another card stronger. That card triggers a third ability. That draws another card.
Suddenly a hand that initially appeared to contain six fairly harmless pieces of cardboard generates enough Attack to assault a small nation.
This pleased him enormously.
Eventually we defeated Kingpin.
And when the Victory Points were counted, our son had collected the most.
He was therefore officially the Legendary Hero.
Stephen and I had successfully taught an eight-year-old a game we had both played many times and were then promptly beaten by him.
Excellent.
Parenting remains deeply rewarding.
And That Should Have Been That
Two games.
Nice morning.
New game learned.
Return home.
Move on.
Perfectly normal.
Except something happened.
That particular afternoon has subsequently become what historians may one day describe as THE INCIDENT.
Because since introducing our son to Marvel Legendary, I have logged nine games in eleven days.
Nine.
Including the original two at Stephen’s.
This is not a revival.
This is an outbreak.
If this were happening on an Upper GI ward, someone would by now have started an incident timeline.
Most of those games have been with our son.
Fortunately, I own only the original Core Set and Dark City.
I say “fortunately” because those two boxes already provide enough Heroes, Masterminds, Villains, Henchmen and Schemes to create an entirely unreasonable amount of variety.
Dark City alone added seventeen Heroes, five Masterminds, six Villain Groups, two Henchman Groups and eight Schemes when it released in 2013.
So currently there is absolutely no requirement to buy anything else.
I want to make that statement very clear.
There.
Recorded permanently on the internet.
No requirement whatsoever.
An Excellent Time Not to Start Collecting
Conveniently, this particular resurgence has occurred during a slightly awkward moment in Legendary’s history.
Upper Deck has now moved the game into Second Edition in 2026.
And this is more than merely putting the same cards into a shinier box. Upper Deck has redesigned substantial portions of the original Core Set, introduced completely new artwork, added content and rebalanced older cards. The Second Edition contains 550 playable cards compared with 500 in the old Core Set, with roughly 250 cards redeveloped.
Crucially, Upper Deck has confirmed that Second Edition remains backwards compatible with all previous Marvel Legendary expansions.
This is excellent news if, like Stephen, you own enough Legendary cards to construct a modest extension on the house.
It is slightly more irritating if you have suddenly rediscovered the game and think:
Maybe I’ll just pick up one or two older expansions.
Because older First Edition stock is now patchy.
Some expansions remain readily obtainable. Others occupy the peculiar board-gaming twilight zone where the original retail price becomes merely an amusing historical fact before someone on eBay asks £94.73 plus postage.
So for now I shall demonstrate restraint.
I have the Core Set.
I have Dark City.
That is plenty.
Stephen has everything else.
This is effectively a shared-resource model.
Possibly communism.
The Return of Legendary
What I particularly enjoy, though, is that Marvel Legendary has returned because our son was ready for it.
I have owned the game for years. It has sat there. Occasionally played. Occasionally ignored.
One of many games in the collection waiting patiently for its moment.
Then suddenly a child who previously would have been too young to manage the deck-building, card interactions, cooperative discussion and tactical decisions can sit down, understand it, enjoy it and immediately ask to play again.
That changes an old game completely. The same cards are there. The same board. The same Masterminds.
But the experience is different.
Now there are discussions about which Hero to recruit.
Arguments about whether we have enough time before the next Scheme Twist.
Negotiations about who should defeat which Villain.
Occasional unsolicited strategic advice from an eight-year-old.
And, inevitably:
“Can we play Legendary?”
Again.
Apparently yes.
Nine games in eleven days suggests the evidence is fairly conclusive.
The sporting calendar will eventually restart properly. Tennis tournaments will return. Cricket will continue. Martial arts will reclaim its part of the week. School will begin again and the endless summer-holiday flexibility will disappear.
The current Legendary epidemic will probably settle.
Probably.
But something tells me the game has now moved from one of those games we own into the much more dangerous category of games our son asks for by name.
And once that happens, things tend to stay on the table.
Which is lovely.
Although I remain slightly concerned that we have introduced him to a game with approximately sextillions of theoretical setups while having a friend who owns 96.8% of the available content.
Because I know exactly where this leads.
First it is:
“Can we play Legendary?”
Then:
“Can we try some different Heroes?”
Then:
“Does Stephen have Venom?”
Of course Stephen has Venom.
Stephen has everything.
And somewhere, quietly waiting in a box, are another 3.2%.
I fear this story is only beginning.
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