Misfit Heroes

• Designer: Phil Walker-Harding
• Publisher: AEG
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30-45 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4xvABBQ
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

After a bizarre interdimensional event of massive proportions, Earth as we know it has been forever altered when a fantastic realm merged with ours. The result is a land called Absurdia, where magical beasts live among ordinary people and vice-versa. There’s no going back to the way things were in this place of improbable combinations from monster-accountants to cosmic wedding planners.

In Misfit Heroes, players are organizing crews in hopes of claiming influence to win over the hearts and minds of the citizens in nearby regions. The character cards players will use are different every time you play! Before a game, the cards you will use are created by placing each character transparency together with an attribute card in a card sleeve. You’ll never know which new characters are in the deck, and the combinations are almost endless!

During play, each character card gives a player special actions, such as earning money, drawing more cards, and (most importantly) gaining influence in the mountain, forest, sea, and city regions of the kingdom. When a player has collected 6 influence, they may claim a region of the corresponding type, which scores them points. The player who best uses their characters in combination and gains the most points wins!

When you first open the game, you set up the Hero deck by taking an Attribute card and placing a random transparent character card in front of it and then jamming the whole thing into a sleeve.  For later games, it’s recommended that each player take a few cards and swap the attributes and characters up.

These two cards combine to form a “unique” hero.  The recruitment cost is the sum of the values in the upper left.  There are two effects at the bottom of the card.  The higher one is the recruitment effect – which is triggered once a game, either when recruited or at the end game scoring.  The lower effect is the Activation effect which comes into play any time you are able to activate that particular card.

The hero deck is shuffled and placed on the table.  The Quest tiles are sorted by color and laid out in descending point order.  Someone is made the start player and they get 35 coins.  Each player later in turn order takes 5 coins more.  Players get a Reference card and a starting hand of 5 Hero cards. 

On a turn, the active player takes one of the four main actions:

1] Recruit a Hero card – play a card from your hand, paying the cost in the upper left corner.  The first card you recruit goes in the bottom left of a 4×4 grid, and each later card must be orthogonally adjacent to a previously played card.  You must be able to fulfill the white star activation fee or meet the green triangle Activation requirements in order to recruit a card.

2] Draw Cards – discard any number of cards from your hand and then draw that number of cards plus 2.

3] Gain 1 Influence – gain an influence token of any type from the supply

4] Gain 10 coins

Then, check to see if you can claim a Quest.  To claim a blue, tan or green quest, discard 6 influence of the matching color.  To claim a purple city quest, discard 2 of each of the three types.  Take the highest VP tile of the type you claim, and you can only claim one per turn.  Afterwards, discard down to 8 cards in hand, 8 of each influence type and a max of 80 coins.  The next player goes.

If a player has filled their entire array of 16 cards, they announce this and the current round is completed so that all players have the same number of turns.  Each player then calculates their score which is based on the cards in their tableau, points from recruitment effects on those cards, points from quest tiles, 1 point per influence token left over and 1 point per 10 coins.

My thoughts on the game

So I’ve lately been a huge fan of games with a “big ole mess of cards” and Misfit Heroes definitely fits into that genre.  In the game, you get cards from a huge deck of cards and you just try to make the most you can out of them as you play them into your 4×4 tableau.

The cards here are “crafted” – in the sense that each one is a combination of a job card and an adjective card.  So, the cards in my box of Misfit Heroes are almost certainly not the same as any other Misfit Heroes in existence.  And, from game to game, the cards are likely to change as the setup includes a rule where each player gets a handful of cards and is allowed to shuffle the halves around to make new cards.   

There’s probably no way to actually balance all the possible combinations, but it’s kinda just luck of the draw whether you get a card in your hand or not – so it’s not something I’d worry about. Also, as each half of a card has its own cost, the sum of the costs will hopefully balance out the power.

What I wish the game had was actually in-game crafting.  Once you start the game, the deck is static and you simply play the cards in the deck.  There are definitely plenty of combinations and synergies to explore with your cards, but there is no “editing” of the cards in the midst of a game.  There could have been so many fun effects if this were possible, but I suspect that this would also extend the game length longer than this game wants to be.

So back to the game itself, you’re trying to play cards into your tableau.  Many cards have bonus actions that help you get coins, other cards or influence markers.  The influence markers are one of the two big scoring chances.  You’ll trade in sets of 6 influence markers to pick up a region token – with scores being higher for the earlier trades; the earliest one gives you a +6 VP bonus on your 6 tokens, as they are each worth 1 VP on their own, while the latest one only gives you +1 VP bonus.  So, in short, players definitely want to collect as many influence tokens as they can as each is worth 1 VP.

The other way to score big points are with the special cards with endgame bonus scoring criteria on them.  These cards usually reward you for having certain cards in your tableau.  All other cards are essentially all worth a single point.  So, players shouldn’t look at them as a way to score but merely tools to gain resources or to set things up.  Points essentially only come from influence and the special cards.

Again, there could have been some interesting interplay if the cards had varying values, but the limitation of the decision space in the game is probably a good thing.  As it stands, the game runs just a touch long for me.  I think I’m already spending enough time reading the cards in my hand and figuring out what to do with them.  It would be too much if I also had to consider altering the cards or more advanced scoring systems.

As it stands, it’s mostly a race to the Influence scoring chits and then setting up a tableau to score endgamer bonus cards. It’s a fun challenge, and even if the cards didn’t possibly change between games, the deck is large enough that surely you’ll end up with a unique set of cards to deal with every time you play the game.    While it doesn’t scratch my card-crafting itch, it’s still a lot of fun to play, and I’m sure that it’ll hit the table a bunch this fall.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral. Mark Jackson, John P
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4xvABBQ