Collecting comic books has been a thing for as long as the comic industry has been around. There’s an almost irresistable allure to having that one issue featuring the debut of your favorite hero or the one where a lovable character dies. I have dipped my toe into the comic-collecting hobby from time to time, and that was why I had to have Comic Hunters, if for nothing other than all the official comic covers the Marvel-themed board game features.
Designed by Robert Coelho with Art by Diego Sa, Comic Hunters was initially released exclusively in Brazil back in 2020 but, thanks to Spin Master and Arcane Wonders, has now been released in the United States. In Comic Hunters, anywhere from one to four players compete with one another, traveling from flea markets to auction houses, in the attempt to snag those classic Marvel comic issues to make the most valuable collection of them all.
The core idea of Comic Hunters is that players draft cards to make the most valuable collection of comics. Each game allows you to set the market value either randomly or by hand-picking which heroes or types of comics are the most sought-after. To keep things interesting, drafting is done in five different ways, including players taking a card from a drawn hand of cards and passing the remainders to the next player, bidding on a blind pool of cards, and more. Once you have your new set of comics, you build your collections, paying for the cards you keep with the other cards you drafted but are opting to discard. The more of a certain hero or type of comic (first appearance, outfit change, epic battle, etc.) the more points you will get at the end of the game.
It’s a process that, once you’ve gone through it once or twice, you and the other players will fly through. It results in a game that doesn’t take long to play at all, but that initial time figuring out how all the different methods of drafting works can be a bit tedious as the rulebook doesn’t explain it very clearly. Multiple times during my first game, I had to stop and reread the rules to figure it out. Luckily, though, the whole game flow is quick and smooth once you wrap your brain around it.
With being playable solo or with up to four players, Comic Hunters feels like a different game depending on your player count. My favorite setup is playing it as a two-player board game against one other person. With two players, cards and player collections are manageable enough (each player’s sets are openly displayed in front of them) to make it a game where you can not only strategize what cards are best for you to expand your sets but also what could hinder your opponent too.
At three and four players, the number of cards out and around the table can get overwhelming and instead often changed into more of a solitaire experience where I was only focused on my own sets and not stopping others, which admittedly may be more attractive to many players. For me, though, I appreciate the addition of that little bit of conflict. Fair warning: Comic Hunters can trigger decision paralysis, so be wary if that’s an issue for you or the people you want to play against.
There are several avenues to score points come the end the game – the sets of hero comics you have, the types of issues you have, the star tickets you have left that you didn’t use during auctions – so depending on how many comics you’ve managed to get, counting up the various symbols and figuring out how to best organize your sets for the most points can be a bit of a chore. My best recommendation to alleviate this is to simply keep track as you play with tally marks on how much of any one type you have in a set at any given time and adjust after the end of each set-building phase.
Comic Hunters’ initial “WOW!” factor and draw is thanks to all of the classic Marvel comics featured on the cards. It’s longevity and how well it keeps your interest will depend entirely on how much you like drafting and set collection games. I had a fine time with the game (especially with the added adversary aspect at lower player counts mentioned earlier). I found the inclusion of having multiple drafting types helps the experience, but I never stopped wishing that there was another layer to the game. Maybe you could trade with others, or maybe there was a way to influence what the most desirable comics were midgame to try and swing things in your favor. Instead, you get drafting with a side of drafting, with a bit more drafting. The most interesting aspect of Comic Hunters is how you pay for the cards in your set with other cards you drafted, causing me to look for things I wanted and also chaff that I could snag to pay for the cards I wanted to collect.
While the art of all the covers is nice, and it was fun to stumble across issues featured in my own collection, the same can’t be said for the quality of the components themselves, with the gameboard being the only part that felt solid. The cardboard used for the player markers and comic-type tokens is incredibly thin, and even when I was punching them out of the board, they came on, I was worried I would tear them. The cards don’t feel much better; in my copy, the cards seemed to have an odd lip around them, with paper that’s stiffer than I would like. In an ideal world, I would love to have a bit larger and sturdier cardboard tokens or better-feeling cards, but with the game coming in at $25, I can give the lower quality a bit of a pass.
