Big Trouble in Little China the Legendary card game
I had three games on my “to buy” list when I went to GenCon 2016. Marvel Legendary: Civil War, Legendary Encounters: Firefly and Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China. All three new installments of the Legendary Deck Builder system. So, you should know already that I really like the Legendary card games.
You may not know that I also love the movie Big Trouble in Little China, While it still seems like an odd pairing of Big Trouble in Little China and the Legendary card game, there was no way I wasn’t going to buy it. If you’re in the same boat as I was, let me sell you on this game right now — the Pork Chop Express is a character in the game.
If you are coming to this review from purely an interest of the movie and are unfamiliar with the Legendary games, here are the basics of how they work. Note this game, while being a stand alone, is NOT an Encounter version. It’s more like the Marvel version than the Encounter versions.
The game is a deck-builder. You will begin the game with a deck of cards based on characters from the movies with powers and triggered abilities. Some cards give you recruitment power which allow you to recruit better cards into your deck. Other cards give you combat power that allows you to take on low level henchmen and villains.
Each time you play the game you choose which Mastermind you want to face and which heroes you will play with. The Masterminds in this game are Six Shooter, Ching Dai, David Lo Pan and Sorcerous Lo Pan. Each Mastermind has their own henchmen that will be added to the villain deck based on using that mastermind. For example, Ching Dai always leads the Monsters and Sorcerous Lo Pan always leads the Warriors of Lo Pan. The Masterminds also have different power levels (making some easier or harder) and different effects that trigger when a Master Strike Card is drawn or when a player choose to fight them (using fight points from played cards).
The Masterminds, Sorcerous Lo Pan and David Lo Pan as well as one of the various Schemes.
You then choose a Scheme that this Mastermind is trying to achieve (it can be random, or you can choose one that’s thematic to the movie). Some of them include Kill Uncle Chu, Open the Hell Gates, and Enforce Villainous Hierarchy.
These cards help determine how to build your Villain deck which includes Scheme Twist Cards that trigger an action based on which Scheme you are using, Master Strike Cards which trigger an action based on what Mastermind you are using, various bad guys (villains and henchmen), and innocent bystanders who will get put in harms way. You shuffle all these together to create the Villain deck. At the start of each players turn you draw the top card of this Villian deck and then either take the action indicated or place it into the city.
The goal is to recruit better hero cards. Heroes, all characters from the movie, include, Gracie Law, Margo, Eddie, Jack Burton, Egg Chen, Wang Chi, Miao Yin and of course The Pork Chop express. Each Hero deck has 14 cards. These are powers and effects that can create combos allowing you to further recruit new heroes to your deck or cull out weak cards from your deck and ultimately have enough fight power to take on the Mastermind.
The number in the Star Symbol is your ‘recruit’ power and the three slash marks are your fight power.
The Big Trouble in Little China version has a couple twists on the regular game. For one, you only start with 10 of the basic cards (6 of the Chang Sing Strategists who give you recruit power and 4 of the Chang Sing Warriors who give you fight power). The other 2 cards which make up your starting hand are randomly drawn from a pile of ‘mediocre hero’ cards which are weaker versions of the hero cards. They are a bit more powerful than the basic cards due to having a triggered effect that may or may not trigger depending on which other heroes you have in your deck.
Examples of some of the ‘Mediocre Hero’ cards that are randomly added to your starting deck
Lastly we have Uncle Chu who takes the place of Maria Hill from the base Marvel Legendary game. He’s always available to recruit and has triggered effect that let you to cull out bad cards as well as triggering combos with some of the other heroes. When I played we had Eddie in the game and some of his cards have triggered abilities based on Uncle Chu.
Uncle Chu (actual card – sleeved)
This game comes with a play-mat which helps keep the cards in their respective places and designates two areas of the city ( the Streets and the Rooftops) as ‘Chinatown’ which can have trigged effects on some cards as they are played.
The game play was enough like Marvel Legendary that we were able to pick it up quickly and it felt basically the same. The game, like all the non-Encounter versions I’ve played, has a noticeable teeter totter feel where you start out with the game clearly winning. Over time you catch up and if you’re able to get past the game’s initial advantage, you can almost always be victorious. This does cause the most exciting part of the game to occur before the climax, but that’s never really been an issue for me.
The set up and take down of a Legendary game is the achilles hill of the system. It’s a lot of work to choose the cards you need/want. The rule book does have a handy chart to help you, but there is no quick fix for re-sorting the cards once you are done. The game does come with oversized dividers which helps keep the box nice and tidy. At 350 cards you’re looking at another $20 in sleeves if you want to sleeve them, and you do! I of course suggest you use green ones.
All in all, the game play is close enough to the game I love (Marvel Legendary) and themed well enough to a movie I love that I am extremely happy with my purchase. If you enjoy the Legendary game it might not provide enough of a change to be worth it, but if you love the movie AND enjoy the game then this is a no-brainer.
Trust Jack Burton ~ The check is in the mail.
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Card Sleeves are a must. I suggest Green for this game 🙂
Buy the Blu-Ray
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