One night last week I went to a book club with Blade. It was Blade's idea, actually. Captain America and Captain Marvel were there, so we were pretty much knee deep in captains. Blade had arranged the whole thing to spend time with Captain Marvel, but then the other captain overheard and wanted in too, and Blade was too shy to say no. We read The Art of War. It was Blade's pick. We talked about the strategies and wisdom in the text, and someone mentioned how funny it was that Blade's favourite book was written by someone named "Sun". Funny because Blade is a vampire, right? After the book club was done I went foraging for mushrooms with Iron Man. Incredibly, these are not the ramblings of someone who's just banged their head on a shelf.
This is Marvel's Midnight Suns, a game to be excited about because it's also Firaxis' Marvel's Midnight Suns. It's a tactics game in which you pick Marvel heroes and engage in turn-based, card-heavy battles against Hydra and whoever. But it's also a game about cementing the friendships of a bunch of disparate, bickering super-people, who have been brought together by the threat of ancient evil and forced to live outside of time and space in a mysterious abbey. It's XCOM and Fire Emblem. It's a blockbuster about the apocalypse, but it's also the story of a particularly taxing house share.
We will come back to stuff like the book club in a bit. Let's start with the action, with the tactics, the turns and the cards. Running through the middle of the game, as flexible and dependable as a spine, is a series of missions, some story-based, some optional, which see you grabbing three superheroes and heading out to smack baddies around. You choose your mission from a fancy pool-table in the Abbey, gather your gang, and then you're off - New York, the mid-west, other places that I probably shouldn't spoil. This is Firaxis, so there's a bit of theatre to just setting off. In XCOM you had the Skyranger and all of your guys wedged inside waiting for the LZ. In Midnight Suns, you race towards a cliff where Magick, a superhero with portal powers, slices a huge rent in the sky itself, which you obligingly dash into. It's lovely stuff.