On Christmas Eve last year, I took the kids out of the house so that my wife could wrap some presents without having to worry about who might come walking in on her.  I stopped into a local game store to kill some time and saw a game, DC Deck Builder, which I thought would interesting to try out.  On a whim, I decided to buy it and yep I’m definitely glad I did.

DC Deck Building game is, not surprisingly, a deck building game.  The goal of the game is to try and build a deck that will gain power and allow you to fight super villains to score victory points and gain better cards.  The game ends when all of the super villain cards have been eliminated.  There is only one form of currency in the game, which is power, and the only limit on the number of cards that can be acquired each turn, is the number of cards available.  Each turn, cards are turned over from the draw pile so there are at least five cards available.  There are times when there are more than five cards in the marketplace, and as long as you have enough power, you can buy them all.

The greatest strength of the game is it’s simplicity.  My kids both were able to understand the game after only a few minutes, and the same held true when we played it with additional family members over vacation.  As players start to build up their deck, there are lots of card combos that start to build up, but due to the straight forward nature of the cards, it never becomes hard to follow.  We played multiple 2, 3 and 4 player games and found them all to play really well.

The game is great for new players, but the more we played it, the less attractive it started to become.  There were several problems that we started to see as we became more familiar with the cards.

* Some combos are just plain broken and can result in crazy power being created that allows players to purchase the entire lineup available for purchase.  Which leads to …

* Games will snowball out of control which can lead to some very boring games.

* Due to some of the crazy combos and the eventual snowballing, it can lead to long turns without a lot to due for other players.  Many deck builders suffer from feeling like a solo game, and this one fits into that category.

Thankfully, some of these issues can be addressed simply by removing some cards from the super villain stack, which will shorten the game and prevent a lot of the stronger combos from ever developing.  Unfortunately, while that does address the problem of games getting boring for those on the losing end, it does make for a less fun experience for the player in the lead, who will never get to unleash their crazy 50 power combo that they were building up to.

Overall, I highly recommend this game for younger players, or anyone that wants to try out the deck-building genre and is hoping to start simple.  We have since played all of the DC deck-building games that have been released, and although the original is not my favorite, it is still the version we take out to play with new players.  If however you have already played and enjoyed the base game, then I would suggest picking up Forever Evil.  The gameplay is largely the same, but there is more player interaction, the snowballing is lessened slightly and overall it feels like a more balanced and fun version.  And you can be evil … who doesn’t enjoy that?