What’s new in Marvel United: Multiverse?

Hello everyone! Andrea Chiarvesio here, designer of Marvel United, Marvel United: X-Men, and I’m proud to say, Marvel United: Multiverse! Today, we’re covering the much of what’s new in this new core box of the game, apart from, of course, new Heroes and Villains to play.

We will cover 3 things: Equipment cards, Solo mode, and a few characters making a comeback! When we approached designing the second season of Marvel United, the main questions in our heads were “what is the game still missing?” and “What are our players asking for that could make the game better?”.

A very vocal request was, “we want each hero to feel more unique.” People wanted to see Captain America throwing his shield, Spider-Man using his webshooter, and Thor flying with Mjolnir. We tried to represent these through special powers in the previous season, but it’s a huge challenge to represent all the iconic special weapons, equipment, and gear in three or four special cards, while still wanting to also show the hero’s true nature and superpowers.

After a lot of brainstorming and a long trial and error design process, the solution came almost naturally to us. Why don’t we add Equipment cards to Heroes? Instead of being part of the Hero deck, they would work like the Training cards that we introduced in the Marvel United: X-Men – First Class expansion. We could finally address exactly what players were asking for. Many heroes in this season will come with their own Equipment cards and start the game with these.

As a classic example, Captain Carter will start the game with her signature Shield that can be either thrown to attack an adjacent Location or used to ignore 1 damage dealt to a Hero in her Location. Cosmic Ghost Rider can use his Hellfire Chain to attack enemies in his Location and use his Hell Cycle to fast travel to an adjacent Location. And that’s just two of the many examples. This increases the feeling of playing a unique Hero with not only their powers but also their signature gear. But as our smarter readers might have been thinking already, this idea brought some serious balancing issues with it. The extra power and flexibility provided by Equipment would make games a lot easier when playing without Challenges. The best way to make sure the new Equipment was properly balanced was to play the game in Hard Challenge mode, so removing the double wild from the Heroes’ deck when using Equipment cards proved to be the perfect way to preserve game balance.