Marvel Skirmish in New York

• Designer: Matthias Cramer
• Publisher: Lookout Games
• Players: 2
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 mins
• Amazon affiliate link: 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Old friends and enemies meet in the streets of New York, and an epic battle of good vs. evil erupts: Who will prevail? Doctor Strange and Hulk, or Ultron and Loki?

In MARVEL: Skirmish! In New York, each player takes one side of the battlefield in New York City, using their unique deck of either heroes or villains to control the landscape. Play your cards wisely, exploit the weaknesses of your opponent’s cards, gather valuable artifacts, and seize strategically important locations.

Place the board between the players – with one player playing as the heroes and the other player as the villains. Each player takes their deck of cards, shuffles it and discards 15 cards unseen into the box.  The battleground deck is placed in the Avengers tower, and 2 random artifact tiles are put on the spaces of the Sanctum Santorum.  The civilian markers are placed on the 3 areas of the city, and the score marker is placed in the central 0 space on the track in that area.

The Heroes player draws 7 cards for his starting hand.  The Villains player draws 5 cards for his starting hand and also gets the first turn.  In both decks, the majority of the cards are the main characters.  Each main character has 2 “regular” cards and 2 “empowered” versions.  There are also some side characters in each deck which are not as strong as the main characters.

Turns alternate – with three phases in each turn: Recruitment, Attack, Draw.

The Recruitment phase is optional – in this phase, you can play any number of cards from your hand.  To do so, you must pay the costs for that card by discarding cards that match the colors seen in the upper left of the card to be played.  The Heroes player can also discard civilian markers that they have collected.   Put the newly played card into an empty card slot on your game board.   If the card has an immediate effect on it (symbol of a lightning bolt) – resolved that effect as soon as you play the card.

You can also replace a main character.  You can only have one copy of any main character in play at any time, but if you are replacing one, there is no cost – you simply discard the previously played one (as well as any damage markers on it) and put the replacement in that spot. 

As you play the game, you may also acquire Battleground cards from the Tower area of the board. These cards are never played to the board; if they are played, they grant an immediate effect as well as granting some victory points.  The card is then replaced on the bottom of the Battleground card deck.  Otherwise, you can use Battleground cards to pay the costs of character cards from your deck.

Then, after you have played the cards that you want, you move into the Attack Phase – all the cards on your side with a strength of at least 1 now attack; always in the direction of Manhattan to the Avengers Tower.  If there is a card directly opposite your attacking card, that defending card takes damage equal to the strength of your attacking card.  If the amount of damage taken exceeds the health of the defender, the defender is defeated and discarded.  If there is no defender, you get to activate the bonus of the location where you are attacking:

• Manhattan (3 slots) – the Villain player always scores 1VP. The hero takes one civilian marker from the group in front of that card slot. If there is no civilian to take, score 1 VP.
• Sanctum Sanctorum (2 slots) – advance the Artifact marker one space towards you. If it ever reaches the space of the track closest to you, gain one of the 2 face-up artifact tiles, discarding the other.  Place 2 new random artifacts on the board for the next turn
• Avengers Tower – draw a card from the battleground deck into your hand

Finally, draw two cards from your deck into your hand. There is no hand limit.

The game ends if either player is able to move the score marker to their end of the track.  The Heroes player automatically wins if there are 2 or fewer Civilian markers left in Manhattan.  The game also ends if a player draws the last card from their deck; the player with more points at that time wins.

 My thoughts on the game

This game is a remake of Fight for Olympus, a 2016 release that I honestly hadn’t remembered when talking to the Lookout staff about this game at Spiel 2025.  So pretty much, I went into this game as a newbie.  The asymmetric nature of the game is nice, and honestly, each side plays out quite differently, so you can almost look at this as getting two games in one – as you have to approach each side with a new strategy.

The board is set up for as many as 5 head to head duels.  Much of the game revolves around figuring out how to play cards from your hand to the board.   And, once you’re able to play cards, figuring out which location is most beneficial will be the next big decision.

As the Hero, I prefer to play into Manhattan – trying to get the Civilian markers.  Not only are they one of my pathways to victory, but the cubes are also quite useful to help you play more cards from your hand.  As the Villain, I haven’t yet come up with a strategy I like to usually pursue other than trying to get my more powerful upgraded cards into play, using them to knock the stuffing out of my weaker Hero opponents and then get whatever bonus I can get for fighting in a slot unopposed.

The mechanism for replacing a card is clever, both in the sense that you can get a more powerful empowered card into play for the cost of the original AND being able to reset the damage on a card by simply playing a new version in the same slot.  Managing your hand to give yourself the opportunity to get the big cards into play is paramount.

The artifacts seem cool, but so far in practice, I’ve rarely seen them affect the game – in part because they rarely seem to be actually obtained and used.  Now, of course, that might just be groupthink on the part of me and my usual opponent, but for whatever reason, we never want to let the opponent get one.

Marvel Skirmish in New York is an asymmetric duel game that works well.  It is not uncommon for the Hero to be close in removing the required Civilian tokens while at the same time the Villain is close to pushing the VP marker to the final spot on the path.  This balance gives the game a nice sense of tension as players try to end the game in their favor.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.
• Neutral Dale
• Not for me…