SNAP Review – Marvel Battleworld: Fend off Thanos in Style!

Captain Americat and Croctor Strange are rescuing Goose (the cat) from a Thanostone? What’s going on here? We’ll tell you about Marvel Battleworld: Mystery of the Thanostones in just 5 minutes.

Game

Marvel Battleworld: Mystery of the Thanostones is a die-rolling combat game published by Funko Games. Battleworld supports 1-4 players ages 6+ and game usually lasts between 10 and 30 minutes. In Marvel Battleworld you play as some really unique heroes, trying to uncover the mystery of the Thanostones and free your friends! You do this through die-rolling combats. Don’t let those enemies win!

Art

Artistically, Marvel Battleworld is a departure from the more mature-themed Marvel super hero content we’ve seen recently. The characters are almost chibi representations of the heroes you know and love, but what’s really cool are all the alternate characters in the game. From Spider-Ham to Zombie Mysterio, Croctor Strange to Valkyrie Gamora. But this weirdness plays well into the art and design style of the game. It’s funky and cool! Every character has an inch-and-a-half tall figure along with a card with its abilities. The production quality is great!

Mechanics

The game is made up of a series of hexagon locations that players move their characters to. They’re placed essentially randomly to start the game. Once a player moves their character to a location they fight whatever is there (it’s printed on the tile). Fighting is as simple as rolling a 12 sided die and adding or subtracting based on the modifiers on the locations and characters that affect the fight.

It’s very basic and mostly luck, but that makes it a fun game to play with your kids, or for kids to play together! This is an opportunity to trick your younger gamers into learning some basic arithmetic skills!

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Expectations

Despite the deeper plays into the board game space Funko has been making lately (with titles like Pan-Am), it’s clear from the get-go that Marvel Battleworld straddled the line between toys and games.

In fact, they straddle the line so well, we thought the Thanostone blind boxes were just that – blind boxes. Our kids tore into them once we opened up the game. Don’t let them do this! Releasing heroes from the Thanostones is part of your first few games!

We could tell right away that this game was going to be a much more tongue-in-cheek take on the Marvel universe. Characters like Howard the Duck and Goose showing up are a good hint that might be the case. We expected a relatively light play experience with these adorable characters, and that’s exactly what we got.

Struggles

We mentioned the blind box Thanostones. Don’t open them! When you first defeat a Thanostone tile, only THEN are you supposed to open the box!

Once both heroes were rescued from the Thanostones (or, in the case of our kids, mercilessly torn from their styrofoam cocoons the second the package was opened) there wasn’t a lot more to discover in the game, which made the subtitle: Mystery of the Thanostones, feel a little hollow. It doesn’t take away from the cooperative battle nature of the game, but there really isn’t much narrative here.

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The box for Marvel Battleworld isn’t good for storage. It’s flimsy plastic designed to display the game on a store shelf, not keep the items afterwards. You’ll need a storage solution for Marvel Battleworld, especially if you buy more than one set. Cynically, Asher says this will make you want to keep collecting and collecting, since you don’t have a defined space to fill with characters and cards.

As parents, we also have to mention the fact that you’re buying characters in blind boxes. There are 30 heroes with varying rarities, and that’s just for series one. If you’ve ever had a collector in your family, you know what this means. You can buy a two-character blind box for $10, or you can buy a six-character mega pack for $25.

And the characters are well made, suitable for play with or without the tiles and the actual gameplay, and the game itself is fun, if not deep.

Rating

For a nice cooperative, entry level battlegame with high quality figures that represent interesting and unique characters in the Marvel universe, we give Marvel BattleWorld: Mystery of the Thanostones 3 unopened Thanostones out of 5.

And that’s Marvel BattleWorld, in a SNAP!

Find it on Amazon, direct from Funko Games, or at your local games and comics store.

The Family Gamers received a copy of Marvel Battleworld: Mystery of the Thanostones from Funko Games for this review.

This post contains affiliate links, which do not change your price, but help support The Family Gamers.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?