The Guardians of the Galaxy for the Legendary Deck Building Game is the sixth release in this series, and the fourth expansion for the core game. This is the first expansion released in what is presumably trying to tie into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this expansion adds in new mechanics to the game while adding the core characters from the Guardians of the Galaxy – Star-Lord, Gamora, Groot, Drax and Rocket Racoon. Along with the new characters come new kinds of cards, infinity gems and artifacts. The game does play out pretty well, particularly focusing on what is to date the most powerful of the line’s villains in Thanos. The new scenarios also add to the overall challenge of the game, which has a tendency to be a little easy for most of the typical scenarios in a lot of the cases. In this sense this expansion is the best since the release of the Fantastic Four expansion which had introduced some harder scenarios and more challenging villains. Having only played this version as a standalone with the base rules, a player that was after a more challenging game could throw in the Heralds of Galactus into the villain deck for a near impossible challenge.

There are a few drawbacks to this game. Perhaps the most obvious is the natural evolution of deck building games. Most eventually come to resemble one another, and in so doing this expansion takes on aspects of other popular deck building games such as Dominion and the DC Deck Building Game. As well, this expansion had been rumored to include a sixth character, which is absent, but it feels as though the developers could have thrown another in there – Carol Danvers’ Captain Marvel or Nova – just to expand the game a little as well. Another problem is that with the introduction of artifacts, that fans are going to wonder why this was not include earlier as artifacts are essentially just equipment, and fans of the comics are likely to want to see a lot of artefact tie-ins in the future, be them web-shooters, Captain America’s shield or even Wolverine’s claws.

On the whole though, this is a good expansion and keeps the core of the game relevant while adding a bit of new mechanics to make the game just a little different. That this was released to closely tie into the movie is also hopefully not a coincidence, and is rather an attempt by Upper Deck to tie into all Marvel movies a lot more closely which means that we will see a steady progression in this series to include most of the Marvel Universe.

Score: 8.3