I’ll be the first to admit I deeply groan at every Marvel Games announcement event when I see three mobile games get announced for every one game like Spider-Man on PlayStation. Card battle games on their own have been something I’ve been indifferent to throughout my gaming years due to their often high cost of entry fences or over complicated rules. Marvel Snap is a new mobile card battle game that I’m delighted to say has made me eat my own words.
Developed by studio Second Dinner and published by Nuverse, Marvel Snap is as accessible as any game that uses a deck of traditional playing cards yet is as engagingly mythic as Magic The Gathering. You don’t play as a particular character in an often shoehorned story as most other Marvel mobile games, this is a pure player vs. player duel experience. Digital cards featuring known heroes from across the Marvel universe take the spotlight. Meaning there are no generic hydra goon or shield agent characters regrettably taking up your attention.
You’ll be able to collect dozens of digital cards featuring characters from the X-Men, Avengers, Inhumans, and villains alike but you’ll construct decks of twelve cards to play against others. A match consists of six rounds where the object is to play cards in one of three locations in each round. The winner is the player who has the most control in the three locations (the best 2 out of three often wins). Some cards have special abilities such as Jessica Jones gaining +4 power when no you don’t play cards in her area next turn. Cards also have an energy cost used to play them and you have a very limited amount of energy and time each round making… snap decisions crucial. Locations themselves have abilities or traps that can change the momentum of the game. There’s very little tutorial needed and good strategies for your own style of play are easy to develop as you are able to identify what the other player’s cards do after seeing them a few times.
Marvel Snap is fun, but it does lack some components that keep it from being a five-star game. While I didn’t feel as though a story or single-player campaign was necessary, it would be great if the game could somehow let me play locally or online with friends instead of just random opponents. Especially if your friends are Marvel files, they’d find much to enjoy here, and being able to share the experience tangibly would have gone a long way. The other issue I have with the game is the level progression for the cards themselves. Upgrading cards is simple enough, yet for the borderline grind of it, you only see cosmetic boosts. I haven’t pushed my cards past uncommon which I believe just turns the art three-dimensional. Perhaps powering up the cards themselves would have changed the balanced mechanics of the game but it is something worth looking into for the future of the game.
Ultimately there’s more to love about Marvel Snap than dislike. It absolutely nails the trial and sense reward aspect of a game. As you play the way the art comes to life combined with great sound design gives you as close of a feeling as you’ll get to playing a real life game of Duel Monsters. Second Dinner puts a lot of Marvel fandom into the game via the way special abilities for characters like Captain America work to power other cards. Then there are the variants. Different art for cards that comes from some bits of published Marvel pieces such as trading cards, comics, and posters by artists like Jim Lee and Art Baltazar. While the game may not be challenging enough for hardcore card battle gamers, it presses all the right buttons for Marvel fans.
Marvel Snap is free to download for iOS, Google Play, and Windows.
