Legendary is my most played game ever. With a whopping 320 plays under our belts this game is a firm favourite at the table. That being said, I need new content every now and then to keep things fresh and interesting. Civil War delivers that in spades!
The Civil War Expansion adds 370 new cards, 16 new heroes, 7 new villain groups and 2 new henchmen groups along with 5 new masterminds to give us a whole bunch of new big bads to face. Along with all of this there are 8 new schemes and new cards for the wound, bystander and sidekick decks. With all this content we were able to play the game without using any material from the core game with the exception of the starting hands.
So far we have played seven games with the new cards across three different schemes and masterminds.
Unregistered Superhumans is a straightforward scheme which requires 3 KO’d bystanders for the mastermind to win. The scheme requires some careful planning but is mostly not that difficult. We combined this scheme with Maria Hill who looked to be the easiest of the included Masterminds with a Fight of 7. However, you can’t fight Miss Hill if there are any Shield Elite or Shield Officers in the city and you have to be able to discard two Shield heroes to be able to fight her at all. All this make Maria a more elusive mastermind to fight.
Predict Future Crimes is a villain crime wave style scheme where you just have to keep the villains contained. We combined this with Ragnarok who gets pretty hard to hit. He starts the game on 6 Fight but gets +2 for each Hero Class in the HQ. With the Divided cards this basically meant he was always 16 Fight. In addition his Master Strike was a pain in the butt, causing you to discard all your cards that cost zero or all the ones that didn't cost zero. Either way you ended up hamstrung.
Reveal Heroes Secret Identities caused us a few problems with the Divided cards. You see the Divided cards feature two heroes on them and this scheme unmasked ‘a’ hero placing them by the scheme. If it unmasked a divided hero, did that count as two heroes (towards the villain win of five?). After a quick google didn’t reveal the answer we settled on the answer that Divided Heroes counted for one. We combined this with Iron Man who is easily the hardest of the Masterminds we’ve faced so far. When his strikes come out Iron Man enters the city and adds +3 to any villain stacked on top of him. As more strikes come out he moves towards the sewers meaning he almost always has a villain on top of him. Worse still you can’t fight him if he has a villain protecting him. Each time we brought him down to his final life but the deck would run out before one of us could finish him.
So, lots more content still to explore. The heroes in this set are interesting, even if some of them are a little obscure. The new keywords are ho-hum in my opinion. The new villains and masterminds add a lot to the set. The new wounds go largely unnoticed. Both new bystanders are good if a little too powerful and the new sidekicks add some variety to that deck, if at the expense of dependability.
If you’ve stuck with Legendary this far then you probably already bought this set. If you’re new this one is easy to integrate, has some recognisable heroes and with the exception of Divided cards doesn’t over complicate the core rules.