Misfit Heroes Game Review

Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.

From the rulebook: “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.”

Misfit Heroes is a customizable, ever changing, tableau building game. Each card in the game is composed of three pieces: an Attribute card, a thin acrylic Character card overlay, and the sleeve in which the card and overlay reside. When combined, the end result (which I will refer to as a card from this point on, even though it technically isn’t) will show a character with a unique name and character type, a unique ability, a unique trigger for that ability, and the gold cost to play the character.

Players begin the game with a handful of these cards and a little bit of cash. On their turn, after paying the cost, they will place a card from their hand into their tableau and use its ability to earn more coin, manipulate and/or put new cards in play, earn Influence tokens which can be traded in for points, set themselves up for endgame scoring, or some combination thereof. The game ends once one player has managed to complete a 4×4 grid of cards. And, once endgame scoring is completed, the player with the most points wins the game.

Of course, this is a high level view of the game. If you’ve heard enough or are already familiar with how the game is played and just want to know what I think, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Otherwise, read on as we learn how to play Misfit Heroes.

Getting Started

At first glance, Misfit Heroes appears to be a card-crafting game in a similar vein to games like Gloom or Mystic Vale. But it isn’t. The cards and their overlays function as a method for creating variety and replayability.

Before your first game, you’ll need to randomly pair every Attribute card and Character overlay and get them sleeved. For every game beyond that, the rulebook suggests dealing a handful of cards to each player before play begins and having them switch things around to their liking before gathering them back up. Then, all the cards are shuffled and five are dealt to each player.

Next, sort the Region tiles by type and arrange them in descending order. The rulebook suggests forming them into a grid. I recommend placing them into stacks to conserve table space. Either way, once you’ve done that, place the Influence tokens and money off to the side in a general supply. Determine the start player by some means and give them the Start Player token. Then, each player receives startup cash, related to turn order.

Now, you’re ready to begin.

The Characters

Every card shares some similar characteristics with every other card. In the top left are two gold medallion icons with numbers printed on them. These totals combined are the cost to put a character from your hand into play. Beneath this is a banner, which will be either solid pink (indicating the character is a Human), solid blue (a Beast), or a mixture of the two (a Misfit). In the top right corner of the card is a trophy icon with a number indicating the card’s endgame victory point value or an ‘x’ which indicates the card is worth an arbitrary amount of points at the end of the game, based on how well you’ve met the criteria printed on the card.

In the bottom middle of each card is the character’s name (a combination of something printed on the Character card and something else printed on the overlay). Beneath this is the Recruitment box and the Activation box. The Activation box does not do whatever it does unless the criteria of the Recruitment box are met at the time you ‘recruit’ the character (i.e. pay the cost to put the card into play).

There are four types of Recruitment boxes: hearts which trigger just for putting the character into play, green triangles which cause the card to activate if certain conditions are met, grey stars which cause the card to activate after paying a fee, and gold trophies which specify the card’s endgame scoring conditions and cause the card to activate immediately.

The Activation box specifies what the card actually does. For instance, the ‘Barker’ overlay specifies: “Gain 5 coins for each of your Misfit cards”. Coupled with the Swamp Attribute card (Heart: Gain 1 water influence, then:), you wind up with:

Swamp Barker – Cost 6, VP1, Type = Misfit. Heart: Gain 1 water influence, then gain 5 coins for each of your Misfit cards

Your first card always goes into the bottom left corner of your 4×4 grid. From there, every card you play into your tableau must be adjacent to a previously played card. Some cards, like this one, reward for having specific types of characters in play. Some are position-based, processing their activation ability if they are above/beside/beneath a specific type of character. Some may even cause previously placed cards to re-activate, providing their benefits a second time.

The Region Tiles

There are four types of Region tiles in the game—forest, sea, mountain, and city—and each tile costs a total of six Influence tokens to purchase. Forests cost six green Influence tokens. Seas and Mountains cost six blue and grey tokens, respectively. The city tiles cost two of each. At the end of a player’s turn, they will have the opportunity to pay the requisite tokens to collect the highest valued Region tile from its stack and add it to their personal area to be scored at the end of the game.

Endgame and Scoring

As mentioned earlier, once any player has placed their sixteenth character, the endgame is triggered. Once play returns to the player with the Start Player token, the game ends and final scoring is performed. Players earn the points printed on their characters in their tableau, points from collected Region tiles, one point per leftover Influence token, and points for leftover money. The player with the highest score wins.

Thoughts

What Phil Walker-Harding has accomplished here is nothing short of awesome.

For starters, the game looks great and the components are top notch. The character artwork rides a fine line between serious comic book art and cheeky satire with some combinations emerging that will cause you to burst out in a fit of giggles. The rules are extremely easy to grasp, and the gameplay is intuitive. At a brief 45 minute play time, it’s a game that respects your time. And, if you ask me, it’s time well spent.

The way the cards are crafted lends the game a high degree of variability and replay value. Once you’re familiar with the game, the rules suggest that each player be given a handful of cards before the game even begins to mix and match as they see fit. This presents a threefold benefit. Firstly, it changes things up, keeping the game fresh from one play to the next. Secondly, it gives the players the ability to pair up Attribute cards with the Character cards that can best benefit from them (as opposed to the completely random setup that occurs when you initially remove the game from the box). The third benefit—and this one is far less obvious—is that experienced players will then have the ability to break up pairings that they feel are too strong (the mirror opposite of my second point). Regardless of the pairings you make, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be the player that actually sees them. So, do you put together a strong duo knowing that someone else might draw it later, or do you try to create the absolute worst pairings possible with that same knowledge in mind?

Before you’ve  even placed a card onto the table, you’re already strategizing and making tactical decisions.

What’s interesting is that this very same attribute that makes Misfit Heroes stand out is simultaneously its weakest aspect. The act of having to remove the overlays from the card sleeves and swap them around between games is, for lack of a better word, tedious. Thankfully, if you go by the suggestion in the rules, you’re only going to have to do it just a few times per game. But, if you ever decide that the game needs a good mix up and that it’s time to resleeve everything, then I highly recommend you grab a friend to help you out. It’s a lot.

That being said, Misfit Heroes’s juice is well worth the squeeze. There’s never a wasted moment, never a time where you’re just sitting around waiting for someone else to finish their turn. Each hand of cards presents myriad possibilities. Each decision you make has far ranging consequences, tactics feeding into strategy. By nature of being a card-driven game, though, things may not go your way. Misfit Heroes rewards players who are able to quickly adapt when the cards aren’t cooperating. It’s a game that keeps you on your toes.

When it comes to gameplay, my only gripe (and it’s a small one), is that none of the cards offer any method for messing with your opponents. For instance, imagine that one of your characters had the ability to use Influence tokens to swap cards around in someone else’s tableau. I reckon I’d be willing to part with a few points to toss a wrench into another player’s carefully constructed works! Sadly, it doesn’t exist.This gives me hope that one day we might see an expansion that offers this kind of interaction. I’d gladly pay for that. In fact, I’d be happy with any expansion at all even if it doesn’t include it.

Misfit Heroes is a GOOD THING, and you can never have too much of that.