Fans of arena battlers and co-op board games should keep an eye on Marvel Crisis Protocol: Alliances, a new series coming from Atomic Mass Games later this year. I got an early demo of the first game in the series, Night of the Goblin, at Adepticon 2026, and was equally impressed by the gorgeous miniatures and the slick way it has repurposed the core rules of a miniature wargame into a co-operative board game.
The demo was too brief - and far too scripted - for me to make an accurate prediction about whether Marvel Crisis Protocol: Alliances (MCPA) has any chance of a place on our guide to the best board games when Night of the Goblin launches in August 2026. But I will be surprised if it's anything less than solid, and I think it's going to be a great tool for wargamers who already play the Marvel Crisis Protocol (MCP) miniature game to introduce that side of the hobby to their board game-only friends.
Let's start with those minis. Each MCPA pack will contain a team of four heroes, one villain, and a horde of henchmen. They'll be supplied in bits, though they're designed as 'push-fit' models that can go together without glue. I'm keen to test them to learn how easy they actually are to make, as push-fit kits aren't always that beginner friendly.
Other than the glue-free assembly they're of the same high quality as the heroes and villains in the main MCP miniature game - and they come with rules to use in that game as well. In the Night of the Goblin set you'll face off against the Green Goblin and his mooks with a team of Spider-heroes assembled from across the Spiderverse: Spidergwen, Miles Morales, Peter Parker, and Black Cat.
That's being followed up in early 2027 with Attack of the Sentinels, starring Rogue, Gambit, Wolverine, and Cyclops, against a bevy of Sentinel baddies; and after that the Avengers will take on three different forms of Kang in The Once and Future Kang. All the sets will be inter-operable, so heroes, villains, maps, and missions from one set can be used with any of the others.
The gameplay is really reminiscent of a classic side-scrolling beat-em-up, like 1992's X-Men arcade machine, or last year's MARVEL Cosmic Invasion. Enemies constantly respawn onto the board while your heroes attempt to complete a mission before they're overwhelmed.
Controlling a hero uses a stripped back version of the rules from MCP. Heroes need power to activate their most potent abilities, which they generate by using their regular abilities or by taking a beating. You'll gather experience points by pummelling enemies into submission, which lets you unlock juicier versions of your powers over the course of a game, though the booth team member running the demo stated that you'll likely only be able to get one or two of the game-altering level four powers across the whole team before a game ends.
Experience points tie into one of the systems designed to promote teamwork. Whenever you down a foe, you can gain a bonus experience point by giving another player a 'heroic assist', a small bonus that might make the difference in being able to use a power during their next turn, or position them out of harm's way before the next enemy activation.
Several heroes also have 'reactive' abilities which they can use on other players' turns, dragging an ally out of danger or distracting a foe so it can't target them. Some of the characters had an obvious role to play within the team: Black Cat's burglary skills made her more efficient at completing the fetch-quest mission objectives than the other characters.
The demo was very cleanly scripted to ensure that I saw all these abilities being used, so I can't say yet if they arise organically during normal play, nor how badly a team will get mauled if it doesn't co-operate. The game does seem to be balanced around using a full team - playing with fewer than four players simply means that some players will end up in control of more than one hero - which suggests that the intention is for teamwork to be mandatory.
It's promising. I'll admit that, as more of an X-MEN kid than a Spiderman stan, I'm more excited by Attack of the Sentinels than Night of the Goblin, but that's purely a matter of taste. As soon as I'm able, I'm keen to review the full game.
What's your favorite beat-em-up board game? Which Marvel heroes would you love to see in a one-and-done boxed set battle? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!