Marvel Snap review – superhero showdown card game is utterly compulsive

Eight years ago, Blizzard Entertainment launched Hearthstone, a free-to-play smartphone game that took elements of physical card battlers such as Magic: the Gathering and the Pokémon trading card game, and married them to the developer's Warcraft franchise. The result was a spectacular global success that inspired an endless slew of similar deck-building games, all based around the same idea: you start with a small pack of digital cards, each with different powers, and you place them on the board against an opponent with a different deck. Designed by Ben Brode, one of the co-creators of Hearthstone, Marvel Snap is a fresh take on the genre, in which players build collections of superheroes, each with different power ratings, and battle with a human or AI opponent to control three locations in the middle of the game board. The beauty is in the stripped-down simplicity of the interface: there are only six turns in each game, and only four cards can be placed at each location. As rounds progress, participants are able to place more powerful heroes.