Avengers assemble! - Updated 16th of Jan 2021

 Diving headlong into Marvel Crisis Protocol

My first born daughter is a big time Marvel fan and I've tried to get her into painting miniatures and gaming with me. She has artistic drives, but miniatures have not ignited her interest, to my disappointment. Late 2019 I bought the MCP starter set from our FLGS and we did some painting and gaming in early 2020, but then her interest dropped and my focus went elsewhere, as there was also nobody else at our club playing this. As I was finishing my 2020 painting projects in December 2020 I also finished starter set models and of course I had to get a game with them - I don't think I have any painted miniatures, that haven't seen the battle field. Soon I had ran couple demos with my mates and several guys were buying and ordering starter sets and reinforcements - community was born!  

Paint jobs

Miniatures for this game are 32mm in size, hard plastic and put together from sprues. This makes for awesome looking dynamic models, pleasure to paint and behold!

Starter set...

is a real bargain (compared to additional sets) coming with two leaders - Captain America and Red Skull and many other notable Marvel characters.

Spiderman is painted by my daughter

Reinforcements

Santa brought these add-ons to my two younger daughters...

but eventually I did the painting

The Fan

This is my daughters former beanie, she was kind enough to sell it to me!(not the one lurking in the background)

Squad building

I think the concept for building a roster and then setting up a game is really smart in MCP. First you build your roster of 10 characters. That's were you plan what kind of squads - with affiliation - (chosen for each game) you want to build out of this roster and is there a theme for your rosters. An obvious theme is to build a roster of good guys (combining for example Avengers and Wakanda) or bad guys (like Cabal and Black Legion) or you can build more on synergies, mixing and matching. Here's an example roster I built:

• Two leaders: Redskull (Cabal affiliation) and Cap A. (Avengers affilition)
• Hulk for smashing! Good synergy with both leaders - Redskull to move him extra and Cap to make his gamma leap ability cheaper
• Vision and MODOK to SAP energy, like Redskull does (mental note to self: make the target stunned first)
• MODOK for psychic attacks
• Vision and Hulk for the capability to move on top of buildings (flight / Gamma leap)
• Black Widow, Hawkeye, Baron Zemo and Winter Soldier for cheaper choices
• Baron Zemo for long -movement and tactical support (rerolls)
• Winter Soldier and Vision for range 4 and 5 attacks.
• Winter Soldier to make it easier to get affiliation qualified; he has "Rogue agent", that makes him count what ever the needed affiliation is - more than half of your models in the squad (not roster) need to be of the same affiliation to gain the leader affiliation bonus 

So with Winter Soldier it's easy to build either Cabal or Avengers, while also choosing some non affiliated models (with good synegy) to the Squad. Here's a squad I built for my latest game:

  Squad is built after the scenario and terrain is setup. Your roster also includes 8 pre-chosen team tactics cards, 5 of them are chosen for each game. For this game I chose cards, that gave me the opportunity to heal, move my characters and to drag enemies towards me... Hulk smash!

Resources 

Atomic Mass Games is doing what I really like, their "Living rulebook" is available online and gets updates. Here are links to some relevant resources

• Rules & other documents (FAQ etc.) here
• MCP Database with cards for all characters etc.
• Good podcasts:
• Fury's Finest - so far I've only listened to this podcast. They have a good combo of lore (both from comics and MCU).
• I will add more when I've found them

Games

What I really like about this game is the fact, that you can play it with “beer & bretzels” mindset - heroes and villains battling it out and doing cool things, but there is also a huge tactical depth in the game, figuring out your roster & squad, priority, synergies etc.

So far I’ve demoed the game for two mates and now they both have their starter sets. As soon as the COVID lockdown ends at our club, I’m planning to run a game night & demo sessions there. I think this game would work as a tournament game too - as long as everybody knows their team and the rules. In all games we have played so far, we’ve always had new characters in our squads and there’s been quite a bit of rules before and during the game.

Face off!

Crossbones eventually won this duel

Heroes all dazed

Black widow on the roll

Don't go eat there!

Black Panther drags a bigger box around then Redskull

Ragnarök!

I told you so...

Face me!