One of Amazon’s daily deals recently was a set of discounts on a handful of board games, some of which I owned, but most of which I didn’t and hadn’t heard much about. One of the ones I had heard nothing about was the DC Comics Deck Building Game, which I promptly snatched up for a very reasonable price. I was skeptical, for some reason, about anything licensed by DC, maybe because they license a lot of crap, and because it stank of something that was not a labor of love created by an independent game designer nor a project benefitting from the expertise an established game studio with a proven track record, but its odor was instead of capitalization on the popularity of deck building games.

I mean, just look at the name of the game: “DC Comics Deck Building Game.” This is the name you give a project, because it very literally describes what it is that you’re making until you figure out just the right flavor later. This is symptomatic of a larger lack of vision for this game. You can almost see the meeting:

The Man: Johnson! Board games are popular these days, right?

Johnson: Yes, sir, they are.

The Man: Good. Let’s make a board game. What do the kids play these days?

Johnson: Google says that there’s a game called “Dominion” that our target demographic plays. It’s called a “deck building game.”

The Man: Excellent. We’ll make a DC deck building game too then. Get on it, Johnson.

Johnson: Yes, sir.

Now, I’m not against people making a little money off of their intellectual property, nor am I against adapting comic books into board games. Actually, it could be a lot of fun playing all your favorite comic book heroes, fighting your favorite comic book villains. It’s like it’s the game Sentinels of the Multiverse was pretending to be. The problem is that Sentinels of the Multiverse didn’t just make what is arguably a better game, their comic book theme is better than the theme created by the comic book company.

As my friend Erik—now that I’m in sunny Culver City, California, this is a different Erik from my colleague in New Haven for whom I bought Smallworld—and I read through the rules and played our first game, we repeatedly commented that the rules were almost exactly the same as Dominion. “Let’s see, the rules say we… Dominion… and then… uh-huh, Dominion… next we… Dominion…” I can’t really fault them too much for that. Dominion is an excellent game that has established and defined a genre, so it’s hard to blame poor Johnson over at DC for following the successful formula, rather than taking a chance with an entirely new vision.

But really I wish they had drawn on at least one success: their own! DC Comics has literally decades each worth of material for dozens of superheroes and villains and other characters, yet not once in the entire game is there any flavor text attempting to tell any kind of story. I was very disappointed. Playing Sentinels of the Multiverse makes me want to find the fictional comic books the characters are (not) taken from with little snippets of their stories provided in the rule book and the bottom of each card. But with DC Comics Deck Building Game, if you didn’t already know who Cyborg was, you wouldn’t have any better idea even after playing dozens of times.

When I saw that Doomsday was a “villain” and not a “supervillain,” which is an important distinction in the game, I wondered whether anyone from DC had even been involved in the game making process beyond Johnson telling them to make the game and put that hideous new DC logo printed large in the top right corner with a three line copyright notice at the bottom of every single card. Maybe no one at DC plays many games, and no one at the game company reads much DC. I mean, Doomsday kills Superman, and he’s a lowly villain, the same class of card as Clayface? Pft.

It wasn’t a complete loss though. The game did prompt Erik and myself back onto the path to make our own prototype for a deck building game themed around a dungeon crawl, something we discussed at length at the end of a previous game night a couple weeks ago or so. DC Comics Deck Building Game also has good replay value in the selection of superheroes and supervillains, and has a few elements that are unique enough from Dominion to make it a viable alternative. I’ll probably play it again, with complaints about the obvious shortcomings as my own homebrew flavor text.

Final complaint: Bad box interior organizer design. Just really terrible. I’ll probably trash it at some point and sleeve the cards anyway.