First Game of Marvel Crisis Protocol

I finally got around to playing a game of Marvel Crisis Protocol [MCP] thanks to a friend, who provided the know-how as well as an excellent collection of minis and terrain. I have painted some MCP myself, but you'll have to wait out the backlog to see them. I was going to record this as an AAR, but got too distracted, so look upon this as more of a commentary of my first game.

Like many, I was initially put off MCP by the odd scale, especially as I have a great many superheroes of all varieties in 28mm already, and an awesome table for big games. Add in the price point, which is pretty high per model and the patchy quality of those models and I can't say I found MCP more attractive than SuperSystem and/or Super Mission Force. Also, and this is really a "me" problem, I'll admit, the game is just Marvel; no DC, Image, Shonen Jump, Malibu, Boom, IDW, King Features, Frew, webcomics, video games or Dyanamite. Still, I want to play more supers games, and a team for MCP wouldn't cost me all that much, so maybe it would be worth it?

I was playing as the Avengers, Hawkguy, Black Widow, Thor, Iron Man and Cap. This gave me a good spread of range and melee, heavy hitters and fast units, so I would get to experience most of the breadth of play available. My opponent/teacher had Red Skull, MODOK, Bullseye, Baron Zemo and Crossbones. Like many supers games, I found that some of the characters didn't really function how I expected them to, which was clearly a balancing move for the game, but left me wondering what the point of certain characters were. Black Widow, for example, was pretty useless, even her stealth abilities just didn't come into play all that often.

What I did really enjoy about MCP was the core mechanics, the dice matching was fast and easy to get my head around, and thanks to the character cards, there wasn't too much clutter on the board. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it here before, but I'm never fond of too many cardboard tokens on my nicely finished gaming surface. I've actually done tokens for other games, including Reality's Edge and Sludge that are as much playing pieces and/or terrain to better tie in with the table and figures. If I'm going to be playing more MCP, I'll have to come up with something for "activated" markers that I like.

There is, of course, the 'measuring stick' issue, which combined with the weird scale and specific terrain, is exactly the kind of thing that could turn me off the entire game very quickly, regardless of how fun it actually is to play. Of course, having played now, I can see myself using some of my existing terrain, more Knights of Dice stuff and even some toy cars of the right size. Much like SuperSystem or SSUA, MCP uses terrain size rules to govern damage and Super Strength, to this end, most pieces have a size number underneath. This is pretty easy to get around with some home-made or 3rd party kits and a marker really. Mind you, the official terrain is quite nice, I'll probably grab a Sanctum Sanctorum for my own table at some stage.

Also, and it seems I have to keep saying this to people, Superheroes can fight ANYWHERE! Yes, city tables are cool, but they're also a lot of work and hard to transport. Evil Base interior, Savage Land Jungle, ancient temple, Moon Base, all of these work and aren't as much work. Hell a few of those can be used for other games in other scales if you're really clever, so there's no need to shell out for all the official Atomic Mass Games stuff if you don't want to. I'll probably be doing something with some 3x3' boards I'm working on for other games, as they're pretty scale neutral already.

Ok, here's Clint, so let's talk about this. During the game, Hawkeye sat on an objective and shot at people. Now, in miniature wargames terms, that makes sense for that kind of character, but, to my mind at least, it doesn't really reflect Clint Barton in the majority of comics. He's a scrapper and something of a brawler, but in MCP, I wouldn't have used him like that at all, because I would have lost the model and Victory Points. Captain America has a fun ability that essentially lets other Avengers use a free power each turn, so I think having a combo-move with Hawkeye and Black Widow would have been doable and make both more useful in the overall game.

Finally, the choice of available characters is a little off to my reckoning. There are around 100 on the market currently with some odd inclusions and odd exclusions. For example, I can buy Brother Voodoo and Angela, but no members of the Fantastic Four are being produced, and there is currently only Hulk and She-Hulk, no variations. I'm sure there are game, contract and market reasons for these release decisions, but from a consumer perspective I'm left wanting a few of my favourites more often than not.

Despite my criticisms of MCP, I like it and I will play more. It's currently popular, so I get to play Supers more often, I'll be stocking it at work soon, so knowing how to play is professionally helpful and some of the minis are really nice. Given the huge amount of proxy options available though, I'll probably be doing more "counts-as" figures for my own play and sticking only to the official ones when demonstrating for work. So it may be a while, but yes, there is more MCP to come on this blog, True Believers!