[Games] Legendary: Dark City

Our continued efforts to collect all the different Legendary expansions has accelerated to a point where we're building a pretty respectable collection and we're going to fully catch up with the state of the game franchise soon enough. It represents quite the sizable investment of course, but the amount of fun we've been having with the game certainly makes it all worth it.

Now this is actually one of the earliest expansions but also one that took us the longest to find. And of course that generally makes sense given supply and demand and general concepts of rarity, but dang it's been quite the search. And initially we figured it wasn't that big a priority in terms of this franchise, but I've learned to regret this notion soon after playing a few games with the set.


Legendary: Dark City is a big box expansion for the Legendary Marvel deckbuilding game created by Devin Low. The game continues to support 1-5 players and this expansion requires the base set in order to play.

The game adds 350 new cards to your game experience and focuses largely on X-Force and the Marvel Knights related characters. Thus you get heroes like Angel, Bishop, and Cable for the mutant side of things and all your classic street heroes like Daredevil, Blade and Punisher. And to face them, the game includes 5 new Masterminds - Apocalypse, Kingpin, Mephisto, Mr. Sinster and that classic 90's villain, Stryfe. To support them we have 6 new villain groups, these being the Emissaries of Evil, the Four Horsemen, the Marauders, the MLF, Streets of New York, and the Underworld. Lastly it adds something we never seem to have quite enough - more Henchmen! But it only provides the Maggia Goons and the Phalanx, but that's still not too bad.

One of the unique things that began with this expansion are the addition of Special Bystanders that add a bit more flavor to your Bystander draws. The game provides the News Reporter, the Paramedic, and the Radiation Scientist, which all have special effects that trigger when you rescue them. It may not seem like much, but it certainly adds some interesting diversity to things as opposed to just drawing a 1-point card. But of course characters that take advantage of Bystanders may better appreciate the extra abilities granted by these cards.

The game also provides 8 new schemes to things that celebrate various comic book events like Capture Baby Hope and the X-Cutioner's Song. The difficulty level on some of these scenarios is pretty tough and I find that playing with 2 players or 5 players can be pretty tough. The sweet spot for the game remains to be within 3-4 players, but you're generally going to have fun either way.

I really like the diversity of play styles that the game ends up encouraging. Daredevil has a card mechanic that clearly inspired Wall Crawl, which we saw in Paint the Town Red. His Backflip card lets you seed the top of your deck, which is important for his other cards that are related to his card effect triggers. This set also brought in Teleport, particularly for Nightcrawler. And that power makes more appearances in later expansions.

The game helps some of the insufficient aspects of the first game in terms of character mix. Sure, the core game mechanic remains the same regardless of cards, but the comic book fan boy in my certainly wanted to be able to explore more games with different heroes in the mix. And this expansion really goes a long way towards making sure you have a healthy representation of the Marvel Universe when combined with the base set.

Legendary: Dark City is an essential addition to any Legendary set in order to really explore a lot of fun game types. It gives some pretty essential villains and the addition of even more scenarios really pushes your fun factor. And thus the game gets 5 times you try to defeat Apocalypse out of a possible 5.