DC Crisis Expansion

So DC deckbuilding came out with another expansion and this time it's a co-op one. No, as in really purely cooperative surprising as it may be. 

DC DBG is probably one of my favourite DBGs from Cryptozoic. It's fun, it's fast, it's brutal. And now you have the chance to play it co-op, which at first wasn't a draw to me because I find co-op games tend to really really downplay the brutal part of the gameplay. However, Crisis still manages to retain that brutal spark. 

Let's get a bit into what's changed in the Crisis expansion. In addition to super villains, there are now Crisis cards. They add an extra layer of difficulty on top of the game and if I had to compare it with another co-op superhero DBG like Legendary, I'd say they're much like Scheme cards.  In order to defeat the villain, you need to defeat the Crisis, but in order to defeat the Crisis, you need to make sure there are no villains on board. Also, another thing to note is that unlike the normal games of DC DBG, when you buy a villain, it is destroyed and does not go into your hand. This may be a bummer because quite a few villains are pretty useful and go into quite a few combos. 

One of the things I like about the Crisis cards however is the fact that to defeat them, it's often not about beating them like you would villains or supervillains. Instead, they usually require another resource to beat them. Some would require all players to destroy a hero in their hand or maybe they all need to destroy a card with cost 2 or more or so on.They also have interesting effects that may say "All equipment cards lose their text and just have +1 POW" In way, this adds a bit of difficulty in the game as a lot of people tend to specialise in ONE card type. Obviously the person who has Hawkgirl and Hawkman are going to be Hero heavy but when it comes to a card that requires them to sacrifice equipment or turns heroes into useless +1s, they're kind of screwed. I find this alters the meta a bit as players now find themselves having to buy different card types, perhaps even non-optimal ones to make sure they don't get hosed IF certain cards show up. Plus, it's so much more interesting when things aren't just purely decided by power. 

Overall, the concept of the game is still fairly simple. Defeat all the Crisis, defeat all the villains and you win. You lose if the deck runs out. And trust me, it can run out. I was playing with a group of 4 and we lost several times. Actually, it was mostly the Anti-monitor that screwed us over because that requires everyone in the party to defeat it at least once and some of us (me) had very overpowered decks, the rest couldn't muster up the power to beat it before the deck ran out. However, the fact that there's a legitimate chance of losing makes it an even more fun game. 

If I had to compare this to Legendary, which is perhaps the only other established Superhero DBG out there, I would say this is more fun than Legendary due to the Crisis system as well as having a MUCH shorter setup time.