Best Marvel board games 2023

We profile the most super Marvel board games, from fast-paced family fun to intense strategy games where one wrong move can doom the world.

marvel board games - marvel miniatures fighting in a street environment

As Marvel continues to go from strength to strength on both screen and page, it’s no great surprise that Marvel board games aren’t far behind. If you can fight your way (kapow!) past dozens of cheap and tacky mass-market spinoffs, there are several super titles out there. They range from full-on action-driven miniature skirmishers to cerebral engine-building board games – this guide tracks the best ones we’ve tried.

In every Marvel board game, you’ll control your favorite heroes from the best Marvel comics in epic battles against evil, furnished with classic comic-book art. Unsurprisingly, a lot of Marvel games are cooperative board games, with players working together to tackle a foe, but there are plenty of great competitive strategy board games too.

The best Marvel board games in 2023 are:

Once you’re done with those, check out our landmark, fully tested guide to the best board games of all time – it’s a veritable Avengers line-up of tabletop titans. Alternatively, turn to the dark side with our picks of the best DC comics and best horror comics you can read. 

marvel board games - miniatures from marvel crisis protocol

Marvel: Crisis Protocol

Best miniatures game

If you’ve ever played or watched a Warhammer 40k match and wished you could replace the Space Marines with superheroes, this is the game for you. One of our favorite miniature wargames, Atomic Mass Games’ Marvel: Crisis Protocol comes with ten detailed sculpts of Marvel characters, including Iron Man and Ultron, and some urban scenery to set up which includes a Daily Bugle stand. Once assembled, it’s time to go toe to toe with some epic tabletop skirmish action.

Tactically, the game is about managing energy tokens: characters accumulate one per round, but their most spectacular and thematic powers tend to cost several. To get more you can either hang back or, in a curious flip, earn them by getting stuck in and taking damage from the enemy. If the battle bug bites you, then you can try painting miniatures or add more heroes and villains to your collection from a plethora of expansion packs. 

marvel board games - the cards and player pieces from marvel united

Marvel United

Best for chibi fans

Publisher CMON is famous for its plastic-packed productions, but when you crack open Marvel United you’ll either be delighted or appalled by the chunky but divisive chibi-style figures inside.

The game is a simple cooperative battler where your heroes work together to beat a villain controlled by an AI card deck. Its clever twist is that on the hero turn you each play one card into a timeline, and each card also re-activates the icons and abilities on the one before.

This turns the fight into a cool puzzle where you’ll need to plan carefully to make the most of each action chain to beat down the bad guy – before they do the same to you. 

marvel board games - cards from marvel splendor

Splendor: Marvel

Best Marvel re-skin

The original Splendor was a great card game about investing in gems to create resources that allow you to invest in even bigger gems. So it’s not a huge adjustment to turn that into a Splendor: Marvel, a game about fitting stones into Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet.

Both Splendor and Splendor: Marvel share a beautifully simple core of collecting tokens that you use to buy cards, which then count as a bonus towards future purchases.

It’s a race, essentially, and the winner is whoever can tune their token-buying engine to run with minimal wastage. This Marvel version adds some minor tweaks to gameplay and replaces the po-faced art with vibrant comic strip alternatives.

marvel board games - the board game marvel champions

Marvel Champions: The Card Game

Best for TCG fans

Marvel Champions is a ‘Living Card Game’, which is like a collectable card game such as MTG, but rather than blind boosters, you know what you’re getting in every box. Unlike most such games, deck construction is very simple: you combine cards associated with your hero with some representing a thematic ‘aspect’, like justice or aggression. Then you fill up the few remaining slots with cards of your choice.

Players then take their decks and work together to battle a villain, who also has their own deck representing their devilish scheme. A core aspect of the game is that players have to choose when to flip between their hero and their alter-ego, with different cards and effects usable by each. Heroes can attack, for example, but only alter-egos can rest and heal. 

marvel board games - the board from marvel legendary

Legendary: A Marvel Deck-Building Game

Best deck builder

Beware! The ‘deck-building’ in the title doesn’t mean constructing a deck before you play, as you do with a collectable or trading card game. Rather, it means that you build your deck as you play.

In Legendary, your initial SHIELD Agent cards can be used to recruit new cards to your deck, some of which give you additional purchasing power. Long term, though, you want to get cards with an attack value that you can use to start clobbering the villain and their sidekicks. These are controlled by a separate deck which includes not only the goons but various schemes to thwart and bystanders to rescue.

While players need to work together to beat the boss, and all lose if they fail, this is one of those co-op games where someone’s still the winner. 

marvel board games - cards from 5 minute marvel

5-Minute Marvel

Best for fast games

5-Minute Marvel is another cooperative Marvel board game, this time pitting you against the clock as well as a series of villains.

Essentially, defeating enemies requires players to play cards with matching symbols from their hands. Easy, right? Except the five-minute timer is very tight, there are no player turns, and there’s no time to politely check what everyone else is holding.

This means the game becomes a chaotic free-for-all as you blindly slap down cards in real-time while hoping your partners aren’t crossing off exactly the same symbols and wasting those precious, precious seconds. Featuring some unusual heroes like Squirrel Girl alongside lots of fun art and in-jokes, this is five minutes of guaranteed fun. 

marvel board games - components from marvel villainous

Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power

Best for lore lovers

No one expected the original Disney Villainous, a game about the antagonists in classic Disney movies, to be the big hit it was. But playing the bad guys can be very compelling, especially with a clever design that sees you trying to advance your wicked plans while throwing spanners into those of other players. In retrospect, Marvel Villainous was inevitable.

One of several franchised versions of Villainous (alongside the many Disney Villainous expansions) this excellent Marvel-ified version offers a choice of beloved Marvel evildoers, ranging from Killmonger to the mad titan Thanos himself.

It throws in some twists to the Villainous formula which add unpredictability and some complexity – which can be rewarding, frustrating, or (more often) both.

Instead of each player having one villain deck (which you draw cards from to recruit minions and advance your evil plans) and one fate deck (which others draw from to push pesky heroes into your path) Marvel Villainous merges the fate decks into one big shared one, leading to all sorts of multiverse-flavored shenanigans. Meanwhile, the new (technically optional) Events deck also throws randomised shared challenges at the players, to add another layer of strategy if desired.

Taken in combination, these experimental additions have made Marvel Villainous a somewhat contentious title in the series – some love it, some hate it – but it’s undeniably among the top Marvel board games available, offering lots of satisfying lore details, fan service, and strategic depth to enhance the rock solid Villainous core gameplay.

Tried these, and keen to double check you haven’t missed any key multiverse movie moments? Read our sister site The Digital Fix’s full guide on how to watch all the Marvel movies in order.