Marvel Snap review – superhero showdown card game is utterly compulsive

iPhone, Android, PC; Second Dinner/Nuverse
Your favourite childhood heroes step up to help you conquer territory in this beautifully designed, strategic deck-builder for smartphones

Game designer Ben Brode talks about what's behind the sudden success of Marvel Snap

Eight years ago, Blizzard Entertainment launched Hearthstone, a free-to-play smartphone game that took elements of physical card battlers such as Magic: the Gathering and the Pokemon trading card game, and married them to the developer's Warcraft franchise. The result was a spectacular global success that inspired an endless slew of similar deck-building games, all based around the same idea: you start with a small pack of digital cards, each with different powers, and you place them on the board against an opponent with a different deck. The most powerful wins.

Designed by Ben Brode, one of the co-creators of Hearthstone, Marvel Snap is a fresh take on the genre, in which players build collections of superheroes, each with different power ratings, and battle with a human or AI opponent to control three locations in the middle of the game board. The beauty is in the stripped-down simplicity of the interface: there are only six turns in each game, and only four cards can be placed at each location. As rounds progress, participants are able to place more powerful heroes. The player whose cards dominate the greatest number of play spaces at the end of the sixth round takes the match.