The Fantastic Four expansion for the Legendary Marvel Deck Building game is the first one with a strong thematic outlook.  The base game and Dark City have focused more so on an overall approach to the Marvel universe, including various characters from various inspirations.  This expansion narrows that field of view considerably by looking at Marvel’s number one family.  This is a smaller expansion, and bodes well for Marvel’s approach moving forward, to focus on smaller corners of its universe while allowing fans to pick out the pieces that interest them the most.  In this case even most non-fans are likely to be interested because of the potential of the characters involved, the core of the team plus their main hanger-on – Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, the Thing and Silver Surfer.

As a game that has been defined by either the street level scenarios and villains being rather easy to beat versus the power scenarios and villains being harder to beat, this game definitely is more in the second category.  In fact some of the scenarios and combinations are downright impossible to beat (required over five run-throughs to defeat) as the challenges are that much stronger.  Interestingly this fits thematically with the group as well, as the team itself, although powerful in a sense, has gone up against some ridiculously powerful opponents and managed to walk away victorious.

As this is a smaller expansion it does not do much to help some of the previous problem with the game.  While Dark City helped expand on the concept of the bystanders, there just isn’t enough room in this small boox to add more to the bystander deck.  Instead there are the five heroes, two new masterminds, their schemes, two villain groups and nothing else.  As opposed to Dark City which was mostly a full game without the board (though it still required the base game to play) this feels like much more of a true expansion, especially as it is smaller in scale and priced to sell as such.  The combination of theme and in-game mechanics make this the best of the series so far, dependent on the main game, but refining it to be much better with its inclusion.

Score: 8.8