Nobody licensed, this whole roster is original, and that’s part of why it works, the designers could write heroes and villains built specifically to synergize with a card game’s mechanics rather than shoehorning an existing character’s powers into a system that doesn’t quite fit. The theme lands harder than any licensed superhero game I’ve played, campy flavor text, hero identities that actually feel distinct in how they play rather than just how they look.

Teaching the base rules is quick, each hero deck already comes fully built, so a new player is playing within ten minutes without a deckbuilding step slowing things down. What takes longer to internalize is the sheer amount of ongoing bookkeeping, hit points, one shot buffs, environment triggers, villain special rules that override normal turn order, and I will say plainly the companion app is close to mandatory at this point. Tracking damage modifiers by hand across a five player table with three environment cards active is the kind of thing that turns a fun combo moment into ten minutes of “wait, does that trigger before or after the reduction.”

When the combo engine actually clicks, and it does click, hero abilities chaining together to burst down a villain in one glorious turn is genuinely one of the best moments a cooperative card game can produce. The flip side is villain balance is all over the place, some bosses are a cakewalk with the right hero combination and completely unwinnable with the wrong one, and there’s a real exploit some tables run into where damage-reduction ordering against an area attack lets you protect your whole team in a way that feels like it’s breaking the intended tension. My group has a running joke at this point, someone always groans “why do we keep playing this,” and then we play it again anyway within the month.

Four stars. Get the enhanced edition or the app if you can, the bookkeeping genuinely improves with either. At two players, each controlling two heroes, games can run long and lopsided, so this shines brightest with three to five people who already know their decks. The theme alone makes it worth owning even on the sessions where the math gets tedious.