The first Marvel Champions campaign box was formally announced by Fantasy Flight Games: the Rise of the Red Skull. A new product format, the campaign box will feature two new heroes alongside five new Hydra-themed scenarios, all culminating in a battle against the Red Skull himself.
Those five new villains players can battle against are Absorbing Man, Arnim Zola, Crossbones, Taskmaster, and the Red Skull. While each villain can be fought as a standalone scenario, just like all previously released, the campaign box will feature a new format, called campaign mode, where players will face the scenarios sequentially and, based on their performance, their decks and the villains’ schemes will change. Adding five new villains to the game nearly doubles the options for players, and anyone looking for a real challenge will be excited at the Expert Campaign mode which features some of the hardest fights to date.
To meet the new threat of this campaign, the Rise of the Red Skull will introduce two new heroes for players to enjoy: Hawkeye, a.k.a. Clint Barton and Spider-Woman, a.k.a. Jessica Drew
Hawkeye’s deck features the Leadership aspect and his trusty arsenal of trick arrows. Clint can always fetch his trusted bow, which will then allow him to play whichever arrow event card will get him out of whatever mess he’s found himself in. Hawkeye’s Bow also grants him Ranged, one of several new keywords in the box. Ranged allows him to ignore Retaliate when attacking, useful against a villain like Arnim Zola. Another new keyword is Pierce, which discards a Toughness card on an enemy, sneaking through the damage mitigation it provides. Finally, Hawkeye’s deck introduces six new allies — including the best Hawkeye, Kate Bishop — to help any hero trying to build a Leadership deck to take on Hydra.
While Hawkeye is a more straight forward addition to the hero roster, Spider-Woman sees a substantial departure from normal deck building. In most games of Marvel Champions, a player combines their hero’s specific cards with a number of cards from an “aspect,” like aggression (cards specializing in damaging enemies) or the aforementioned leadership (bringing allies with you to the fight), to complete their deck. Spider-Woman adds a new twist to this deck building premise, as she chooses two aspects to use instead of one. Her pre-made deck will feature both aggression and justice cards. Additionally, her special powers encourage you to use cards from multiple aspects, as Jessica herself grows stronger as you play a card from a new aspect each turn. To support this mechanic, each of Spider-Woman’s personal cards also have an aspect. Most heroes’ personal cards — like Hawkeye’s Bow, for example — have no aspect, but Spider-Woman’s do — like Pheromones above — meaning that she will have access to all four aspects every game, a powerful and interesting new mechanic for finding just the right combo to dismantle Hydra’s evil schemes.
Fantasy Flight Games is hoping that the Rise of the Red Skull Campaign Box will arrive in stores sometime in the third quarter of 2020, but will not commit to any date until normal printing and distribution operations can be safely resumed. Currently, all Fantasy Flight Games products are on hold until at least the end of April, though that may likely continue. When it does go on sale, the box will be available for $39.95 from anywhere hobby board games are sold.
In the meantime, players are encouraged to enjoy the teaser image below and speculate over a number of other releases coming in 2020. It looks like our heroes may be set to challenge someone across all of recorded history.
Below is a gallery from the live stream exclusive card images:
This comes to us from the gamesmaster Cory Bullock
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
