The Big Kang: Early Thoughts on The Once and Future Kang

By Chris Renshaw

I know. I KNOW. I am way behind on looking at Marvel Champions announcements and giving my thoughts. Heck, I never got around to talking about Rise of the Red Skull - at this point, I’m just going to wait a month and give my thoughts after playing it. As for all the announcements made at Gen Con, I’m super excited for all of them. However, FFG has told us that we will be getting more streams/information on each new product announced, so I will hold off my thoughts and look at each item individually.

It’s Kang Time

Before we get those cool announced products, there was another product announced a week or two prior to Gen Con: The Once and Future Kang. As is typical, I’ve read through the blog post and watched the stream, and I’m here to talk about this scenario pack, which will follow up Rise of Red Skull when it releases in October.

First of all, I’m really glad we are getting another one-off scenario pack. Some might think that it’s a bit much coming off of the 5 scenarios in the campaign expansion, but when you think about it, we will have 13 heroes by my count and only 11 scenarios in total after Red Skull releases. While I enjoy having a bunch of heroes to play, having another one-off scenario that I can break out that isn’t linked into the campaign box will be great. Also, jumping ahead a bit, I get the feeling that this is a scenario that will be more enjoyable with more players around the table.

King Kang

Let’s start off this preview by looking at the Kang man himself. I’m not overly familiar with Kang from the comics, other than he is a time traveling menace that has brushed up with the Avengers many times over the years. In this scenario pack, FFG has taken some of that time travel theme and incorporated it into the game. In the beginning, you fight (The Conqueror) version of Kang, where each hero will have to make a difficult choice when you fight him. Do you let him place a threat on the scheme? Or let him get more powerful on his attack? That’s already pretty ruthless, and we are still talking about Stage 1.

When (If?) you manage to get past Kang I, or if the scheme advances to the second phase, the time travel aspect of this scenario kicks in. Kang rips open the timestream and tosses each individual hero into different/alternative time periods, where each one will fight a different version of Kang. This aspect of the scenario throws the game for a loop, as normally heroes can help and support each other as they work on either the enemies or the schemes. This piece breaks that mold, where each hero will have to deal with both parts of their version of Kang without any help. If they can’t, then they need to hold out long enough for their partners to defeat their versions and tumble through time where they can help out again.

Honestly, this part of the scenario gives me serious vibes of the first scenario in The Circle Undone Campaign for the Arkham Horror LCG. It’s weird that I just played that scenario not too long ago, but it has a similar premise where the players have their own problems and cannot be assisted by the others for a while. If you are playing the game with 4 players, you will see all 4 versions of Kang. For smaller player counts, this helps add to the replayability as you will potentially see different versions of Kang every time you play.

The Kang Gang

Kang and his schemes would be tough on their own, but Kang is bringing a lot of help in this scenario. First of all, only with a time traveling villain would we get the “joy” of fighting up against a T-Rex minion (I’m having pictures in my head of Thor attacking a T-Rex now). Future Weapon and Temporal Shield seem very similar to other weapons and healing/prevent damage cards that we’ve seen before, but Past Machinations is where things get weird.

One of the other bits that Kang brings to the table is more “Obligation” cards than we are used to having in an encounter deck. The hero-specific obligation cards can be bad enough when they are drawn, but their only redeeming factor is that there is at max 4 in an encounter deck, so they aren’t seen all the time. Now, heroes will have the possibility of getting obligation cards far more often, with these cards equally as bad. What could be worse is drawing these cards while you are in the “separation” phase of Kang where you are having to deal with threats on your own. Getting one of these cards during that time could quickly tip a bad situation towards failure.

In Conclusion

We’ve gotten a lot of heroes up to this point, so I’m glad that we will have far more scenarios once Red Skull and Kang come out. In my opinion, this will allow much more replayability to the game, especially as we can try out all the previously released heroes in different scenarios in new combinations instead of just replaying the 5 we have currently and trying harder difficulties of those scenarios. I’m really curious to see what the difference is between a 4 player Kang game and a 2 player Kang game. As I’m thinking about it, I could imagine the 4 player game being more difficult as more players are having to deal with their own separate threats. Overall, the scenario seems to be much more difficult at the normal level, and I look forward to playing it (probably many times in order to beat it).

What do you think of Kang? Would you prefer we got the new heroes instead of another scenario pack? Let me know in the comments below, or on Twitter or Facebook.