Forever Evil: DCDBG

The DCDBG must be Cryptozoics best selling range so far, at least judging by how many sets/expansions they've released and are going to release.

I'm not going to go into the gameplay of this latest core set since it's basically pretty similar to the previous sets in this line and basically every Cryptozoic deck building game ever. However, I will focus on what makes the game different imo. 

So what is the latest twist on DCDBG about? Well, this time you get to play as the villains instead of the heroes. And instead of beating super-villains, you beat...super-heroes. Thankfully, that's not all that's changed between Heroes Unite and Forever Evil though. 

While the last full stand-alone set for DC deckbuilding was Heroes Unite and focused a lot on discard pile mechanics, Forever evil focuses more on card destruction mechanics. And trust me, there is a LOT of card destruction in the game. Certain characters even have the innate ability to destroy cards. And you know what? The mechanic works, especially since there are certain cards that can play off cards in the destroyed pile. 

Another interesting mechanic they've added is the Victory Point system. Unlike the previous games where you only calculate the VPs at the end of a game, in FE, you can gain VP during the course of the gameplay. As such, Cryptozoic has added VP tokens to the game to allow you to keep track of how much VP you've gained. Just how much VP can you gain in a game? The highest I've gotten was 25 VP, which is about the equivalent of defeating 4-5 bosses in the game. And that's 4-5 out of 12, which is not an insignificant amount. But that was really due to being able to abuse several combos. 

Overall, the power level of the cards in the game is lower than Heroes United, which is why you'll need a lean deck. You generally can't afford to have chaff in your deck if you want to be able to defeat the bosses, although sometimes you won't really need to. The bosses; being super-heroes, are also a lot kinder in this game. In Heroes United, the wrong boss at the right (or wrong) moment could potentially just screw your entire game over. However, in FE, the bosses are generally much much kinder and to be honest, you could just ignore most of their attacks. They're that weak. 

Was this worth getting? Or rather does it differ enough from the previous games that you should get this? To be honest, I wish they did more to differentiate between this and the previous games, but considering they're in the same line, I don't think they can change the mechanic too much. I mean, Cryptozoic is obviously capable of coming up with new mechanics that substantially shake things up (look at the Naruto DBG for example) but it seems that at the moment, DC DBG is tied to the blander, base mechanic that Cryptozoic started out with. If you're a DC comics fan and you liked the previous games, you'll probably want to get this as well. Otherwise, you can probably afford to wait for a clearance sale.