Marvel Champions: The Explainening I

The Eternal Lowlander, Bookstooge MacLeod, realized that most of the “sheep” of his flock were dumb as stumps and wouldn’t understand a word he uttered. Which could be a problem as he had vast swathes of wisdom to impart. Thus the Lowlander, in his pursuit of the Championing, decided that some “splainin to do” was necessary. You all might not be named Lucy, but take these drops of wisdoms and cherish them.

Today, we shall be going over the Player Play Area, it’s various parts, phases and phrases used and some general “This is what it all means” kind o’splainin. That way, when I talk about things in future posts, there is at least a 10% chance you’ll know what I’m saying 😉

The most important part of the PPA (player play area) is your Hero and their Alter-ego. Both of these are on one card and you can flip between them once per turn. The next most important part of the ppa is the deck. From it you draw your hand, draw cards in general and use in a variety of ways.

The game is played in a series of Rounds, which consists of a Hero Phase and a Villain Phase. Today’s post will just be about the Hero Phase. During the Hero Phase, you can perform the following

• Change Form – flip your hero to alter-ego, or your alter-ego to hero. You can only do this once per round.
• Play an “Ally”, “Upgrade” or “Support” card. You can do this as many times as you have resources in your hand to pay for them.
• Use your alter-ego’s Recovery Ability, or your hero’s Attack or Thwart ability. You must exhaust your hero/alterego to do this (turn it sidewise. it can no longer “do stuff” until it becomes un-exhausted)
• Use an “Ally” to attack the Villain or thwart their Scheme. The same “exhaust” action occurs for allies as for your hero.
• Trigger an “Action” ability on a card in the ppa.

Once you have finished all of these steps, you declare you are done and complete the following steps

• Discard any number of cards in your hand (or discard down to your hand size if you drew a bunch of cards during the turn)
• Draw up to your hand size (as stated on the bottom left of the Hero/Alter-ego card)
• Un-exhaust all your cards

It is now the villain’s turn and we’ll be going over that next week, in this same format. I realize this is pretty much just an explanation of some of the rules, but the terms used are ones I’ll be using whenever I do more Playening posts. Hopefully it will enhance your understanding of the posts, if not your enjoyment. If it doesn’t, don’t worry. I’ll just send War Machine after you to put you out of your misery.

There Can Be…..
…..Only None!