Atomic Mass Games just launched Marvel: Crisis Protocol, a superhero skirmish miniatures game based on the Marvel IP, so this seems like a good time to check it out. As you can probably tell from some of my other article, I like to look at more than just the surface-level stuff for games, so we're not just going to be looking at the gameplay, but also the game design behind it. That also means that, at some points, I'll pose a game design rhetorical question to the reader to give you something to ponder and give you an idea as to how much thought goes into designing a game like this.
The Hobby
Before we really get into the game itself or the design, we have to briefly look at the hobby aspect since this is a miniatures game. Unless someone gets a store demo, their first experience with a miniatures game will simply be putting models together. This is easily the weakest aspect of the game at this point.
The first issue is, I believe, an oversight. That is, the assembly instructions don't include part numbers. The reason why I'm pretty confident this was just an oversight is that the sprues themselves have part numbers and Atomic Mass Games put assembly instructions up day 1 that also has part numbers. It'll likely be fixed in future releases, but does mean that, if you just pick up the box and don't think to look for additional instructions online, you may run into assembly issues.
Speaking of assembly issues, M:CP currently has a lot of 2-3 part arms and legs, which can get tedious and is somewhat compounded by the lack of part numbers on the instructions because parts like forearms and upper legs look very similar. The models do use a lot of geometric connection points i.e. square peg for square hole, but not all of these connection points have good "positive" connections, especially smaller parts like Captain Marvel's arms and sash where the geometric connection is very shallow.
One thing that Atomic Mass Games has done with some of these models, is to include multiples of small parts that are very easy to lose (Zemo's shoulder pads or Captain America's pouches for example). This shows at least some foresight, but I can't help but feel that at least some of these parts could be rendered unnecessary with slightly different orientation and posing without the loss of detail. That being said, model design when dealing with someone else's IP under license is...unique...and I can fully understand if some aspects of the designs are outside of AMG's control.
Once you get them assembled though, the models really shine. The posing is spot on and gives a good sense of character, the bases are great along with the optional "base litter" pieces i.e. cups/cans/bottles and, even thought the detail pieces can be annoying, they produce a good finished models without some of the weird stretching you'll run into if you have models with fewer parts. I'd liken Atomic Mass Games' models to models produced by Wyrd in that they're trying to make detailed and dynamic models that have a clear aesthetic, however, until AMG starts making beards as separate pieces, I would still put this assembly well ahead of Wyrd. I'd also say that, for a skirmish game where you won't be assembling 50+ models for a list (current standard for M:CP is 10 models for a normal game and you won't even use all of them at any given point), it's acceptable for assembly to be on the weak side, even if it's not ideal.
The Cards
I'll preface by saying that I hope AMG doesn't mind me showing their cards because there are some cool things to look at. In the top we have health, movement, height and threat. If you checked out my last article on card layout, you'd know my general thought is that stats should go from most relevant -> least relevant and that's basically what's going on here as health and movement will come up a lot and even height will come up for things like throws and movement and threat only matters for list building, so that's dead last. If you drop down to the resistances, Physical, Energy and Mental, this also runs the same pattern as Physical attacks are super common, Energy less so, and very few Mental. Indeed, if you look at Cap, all of his attacks are physical...
Game Design Rhetorical:
The symbol on Cap's Physical Attacks are different from the symbol for his Physical Resistance. What is the difference and why do you think they did that?
For the attacks themselves, it gives the stats of range, strength and their power cost (incidentally, the fact that the strength symbol is a barbel amuses me). Normally, I wouldn't like this just because cost is something you'll need to know early, but look at the layout again. If you just look on right hand column going down, what stat do you see for not just attacks, but also the superpowers listed below them? Exactly, it's power cost because what is the first thing a player will do when they have a lot of power built up? See what they can spend it on. Having all power costs in a single column is pretty good and intuitive design.
When a character is dazed i.e. takes damage equal to their health, they basically become uninteractable for the rest of the turn, then their card flips to the Injured side. The injured side could be the same as the healthy side or it could have different abilities or stats (Hulk is currently the only character without an injured side), incidentally, this is Captain America's injured side where he gains "I can do this all day"
Game Design Rhetorical:
A Day Unlike Any Other, Captain America's leadership ability, is on the top of his powers, while I Can Do This All Day, his always on ability, is at the bottom of his powers. Why are these two abilities in the places that they are on this card?
The only part of the cards that I dislike is the size. At first I thought they were tarot card-size, but they're actually 4" x 6". This is one of those cases where I can't tell if it just my experience with other games that generally use standard card game sizes (X-Wing, Warmachine, Malifaux, etc) that makes this size feel bulky and awkward or if it would feel the same if I had no experience with games that used stat cards. Exactly why the cards are this size, I can't say. As they do use the whole "Injured" and "healthy" side thing (in other words, you can't just put rules on the back) and each character has to have enough room for putting all the rules and stats for attacks and abilities unique to that character, it's possible this was the best way to do it without putting all the rules in tiny eyestrain-o-vision.
The only minor issue I've had is that the Mental symbol and number are fairly dark and difficult to see in person, but that's, at worst, a minor annoyance and I overall find the cards are well organized and formatted.
The Dice
If you've played games by another Asmodee company, Fantasy Flight Games, you'll be used to using custom D8's made specifically for that game, however, Atomic Mass Games has a different spin with the M:CP dice. The same type of dice are rolled for both defending and attacking and there are a total of 6 different results. Hit, Block and Blank results should be self explanatory, but we also have Critical, Wild and Failure results. Wild and Critical add to both attack and defense rolls with Wilds usually triggering special effects and criticals adding a die to the roll (but only on the initial die roll, crits generated later by re-rolls or the extra die from the crit itself do not add a die). Failures are not only bad, but cannot be modified.
Game Design Rhetorical:
What would you want to differentiate Wilds from Criticals?
The obvious advantage to this is having a lot of design space to work with in terms of abilities dealing with specific results. We've already seen Captain America's I Can Do This All Day where he uses blanks on Defense, but you also have abilities like Ultron's All Will Be Metal where his wilds are two results against Mental Attacks or Captain Marvel's Energy Absorption where she can add to her own power when defending against energy attacks.
One unusual feature of M:CP is that both the attacker and defender roll dice before any modification. I'm not really sure why they went this direction. It does add some design space like we see on Ultron's Analyze and Annihilate ability, but it's so counter to most other games that it just feels a little awkward to have both dice pools active at the same time.
The disadvantage to using a single dice for everything is that you have to mentally switch between looking for hits and blocks quite frequently which I have observed throwing people off. I've even found myself making this mistake on occasion. This means M:CP isn't getting from one of the primary benefits of custom dice i.e. being able to quickly read and parse results with very little cognitive load placed on the player, as your players are still having to devote brainpower to translating results.
I don't find the the decision to use the same dice for attack and defense bad, but it's definitely unusual and could take some adjustment especially if you're used to games from Fantasy Flight.
The Setup
In order to set up a game of M:CP, you first have to establish your objectives by using Crisis cards. You'll always have one secure (where you have to control part of the map) and one extraction (where you have to pick up objectives). The big number on the top is the threat level for the mission (the player that has priority picks which threat). Once you have your mission, you build a team of characters up to the threat and also a hand of 5 tactics cards.
Game Design Rhetorical:
What is the advantage of having variable squad size and what is the advantage of always having a secure and an extraction objective? Hint: both of them do similar things, but in different ways
The standard game size is a pool of 10 characters and 8 tactics cards to pick from and, incidentally, the starter set includes 10 heroes and 8 tactics cards meaning a full size game of M:CP can be played with just the contents of the starter set. The setup does have one minor annoyance in that the game uses measuring sticks similar to third party ones for Warmachine or Guild Ball. This means that in order to setup an objective in the middle of the table, you have to use the range 5 (10") + the range 4 (8"). You can have up to 9 different objectives to set up which can get tedious using multiple measuring sticks. For general gameplay, I prefer the sticks (there's a good reason why these are so common third party items), but for setup, I find a tape measure much faster.
The general setup + missions remind me of a mixture of Star Wars: Legion and Malifaux. Much like those games, it would be fair to say M:CP is objective-focused as it's much easier to win by points than the to table the other player and if you ignore the objective, you may very well find yourself in a position where you cannot win despite killing more models.
I find that the objective-focused nature of gameplay serves the whole comic book feel of the game as, even when arch nemesis are fighting, there's usually something at stake other than the fight itself and, from a gameplay perspective, it creates a game where raw combat stats aren't necessarily the deciding factor in victory.
The Gameplay
The gameplay itself happens in a series of activations alternating from one player to the other. Each character gets two actions during their activation...stop me if you've heard this one. However, Atomic Mass Games did change up the formula in two ways. First, if you have fewer unactivated characters than the other player, you can pass instead of activating a character. Second, if you activate last and have priority, you pass priority to the other player. This solves one of the big problems with traditional alternating activation games of Last-First where a player gets to activate last one turn, then first the next turn resulting in two unanswered activations. It also reduces the impact of activation advantage where you have so many more acviations than the other person that you can stall them out.
Game Design Rhetorical:
What is the core problem with Last-First outside of the obvious gameplay advantage?
Character movement in this game will be very familiar if you've played Star Wars: Legion. You take a movement tool, put it in contact with your base and then put your base on the other side. You can always use a shorter than normal movement tool in case you need to cut a corner sharper or something like that. The game handles terrain in a very simple fashion, you can move through other characters or over terrain the same height as you with no penalty and you can use climb actions where you count as height 5, but always use a small movement template. Incidentally, the movement templates are Small, Medium and Large...
Game Design Rhetorical:
Why would you use "Small, Medium, Large" instead of "Speed 1, 2 3" or "Slow, Medium, Fast"?
Now we get to talk about the power mechanic. In my opinion, this is the strongest part of the game design. Let me briefly pull Captain America back up, so you can easily reference this:
At the start of each turn, every character gains 1 power. You'll notice, Captain America's first attack generates more power based on how much damage he deals, but the second attack doesn't generate any and the third attack costs 2. This means that what attack Cap uses may not be a simple question of "what is the most powerful?" Additionally, and this is great game design, when a character takes damage from an enemy effect, they gain power equal to the damage dealt. This means that generally the person taking the most damage has the most power to use on abilities and attacks. This gives M:CP a built-in catchup mechanic that helps to prevent snowballing an early pick into an easy win which is a problem with a lot of other skirmish games. This also generally means that even when you're losing, you get to blow off some steam with the "super mega attacks of eternal spite". This was the number one thing that I noticed in demos was that, even losing, the extra power the player was getting and the extra options that power provided still kept them engaged in the game which is one of the hardest things to achieve.
If you are designing a game that involves characters that can throw a building at people, you also kind of need a way for them to do it. The game has a robust system for throws (of both characters and terrain) and pushes that's thankfully easy to resolve and let's you do enough civic damage to defund several public schools. That being said, throws and pushes aren't general things that anyone can just do and are reserved for characters and attacks where it makes sense i.e. Captain America doesn't just randomly throw cars at people, but Captain Marvel totally does. In this, I do want to look at the terrain included in the starter because this game just wouldn't be the same with some felt or repurposed 40k terrain. The fact that you get a small building, two cars, two dumpsters and four lightposts in the starter alone is pretty crazy and both improves gameplay (also the sizes of terrain is conveniently on the bottom of the terrain) and also just makes games look better to a random passerby. This, combined with how easily characters can navigate terrain makes it feel like less of a chore to have terrain on the table than it can feel in other games.
Closing Thoughts
The game has the right "feel" for a superhero game and just has well thought-out mechanics for a skirmish game in general. Even the small things that occaisionally annoy me, like dice reading, assembly or the large cards are a far cry from dealbreaking. It also flows well, good interest curve and favors players interacting. If you like the Marvel IP, give it a shot. If you like a good skirmish game that stands on it's own, I'd also recommend it. As one fo the few games where a starter not only gives you a full list, but also a good selection of terrain, It's a an easy game for me to recommend.