Another ‘small box’ expansion for Legendary, Paint the Town Red, as you can see, is very much Spider-Man focused. It comes with five new heroes, two masterminds, two villain groups and some more schemes. Spider-Man is my favorite superhero and he has one of the best supporting casts, so I was always going to get this expansion. But what does it add to the game and is it worth getting? Let’s find out.
As with the other expansion (Dark City and Fantastic Four) Paint the Town Red introduces some new mechanisms.
Wall Crawl
This is the big one for the heroes. Almost all of the hero cards in this expansion have this ability, and what it means is that when you recruit a hero you may put it on top of your deck. This can lead to some good combos as many of the cards have abilities that let you draw cards, so you can conceivably recruit a card and pretty much play it immediately. This adds much more of a deck-manipulation element to the game, and it’s important to remember when to use it, because otherwise you won’t make it through to the other cards in your deck!
Feast
And this is the big one for the villains. This is a fight effect that happens after your fight Carnage or someone from his villain group, and it means you have to KO the top card of your deck. With the deck manipulation element this is quite fun, as you always have to be careful which card you put on top of your deck, and it can also be useful to thin out worthless cards. It can also be incredibly frustrating to have to get rid of a powerful card.
Now let’s get onto the heroes. It’s funny because although this is a Spider-Man expansion, there isn’t actually Spider-Man in the box. There was Spider-Man in the base set but many people think he is under-powered. In this set we have -
Symbiote Spider-Man
Scarlet Spider
Black Cat
Spider-Woman
Moon Knight
I’m not sure what Moon Knight is doing here really, but oh well. I like most of the heroes. Black Cat has a fun card called pickpocket, which allows you to reveal the top card of any deck and use the attack printed on that card. This is cool as you can either put a card with a high attack on top of your deck, or pay attention to see what cards other people have. Symbiote Spider-Man is similar to the base set Spider-Man, but more powerful. I like Scarlet Spider; he has some fun cards. Spider-Woman is fun as well. Her rare card allows you to recruit any hero in the HQ for free, so it’s possible to easily get other rare cards, and if you play a card with a Spider-Friends affiliation before you get to add that card to the top of your deck. Moon Knight is quite cool as well, but again he doesn’t really seem to fit in with the others. But with the drawing potential and Wall Crawl it’s possible to cycle through a lot of cards each turn, and when mixed with other heroes it’s possible to get very powerful combinations.
Now onto the Masterminds and Villains.
Carnage comes with the Maximum Carnage villain group, and these are focused on feasting. When facing these it’s very important to keep track of your deck, although Carnage’s masterstrike is particularly nasty. When it occurs each player has to KO the top card of their deck, but if Carnage feasts on a 0-cost card then that player has to get a wound. If they hit early they can be awful and you can quickly find yourself being stuck with plenty of wounds. He’s pretty fun to play against though and I like the added risk that comes with Feast.
Mysterio is the other mastermind and he leads the Sinister Six. Mysterio is one of my favorite villains from the comics and I think he’s vastly underrated. I’m pleased by the rumours that he’s going to make an appearance in the Sinister Six movie. In this game he’s not that powerful, but he is annoying. When a Masterstrike is drawn it gets shuffled in with his Mastermind Tactics, and counts as one, so you’re going to have to defeat him more times than usual. One of the tactics is also annoying as it takes a Masterstrike from each player’s victory piles and puts it back in the Tactics pile. So while he’s not the strongest villain he does prolong the game, and this can be dangerous as the hero and villain decks may run out.
The Sinister Six have some fun effects as well. Sandman’s strength is equal to the number of villains in the city, which can make him extremely powerful. Chameleon has a cool thing where when you defeat him you get to use the stats and effects of the hero card in the space below the one Chameleon was in.
The expansion also comes with four new schemes. They’re alright. One of them gives every card in the HQ the wall crawl ability, another one is the Clone Saga, where you have to show two cards with the same name when a scheme twist occurs. That one is pretty fun. There aren’t any that are extremely challenging, it’s just nice to have more variety!
So what do I think overall? I think at this point any expansion for Legendary is going to be a must-buy because it’s going to add so much more variety to the game, and that’s always a good thing. I like how the heroes work together and also combine with the base set Spider-Man. It’s always fun to draw loads of cards and cycle through your deck quickly, although sometimes it’s hard to summon a lot of power, but this does mean that these heroes work well with the rest of the heroes. Since this is a Spider-Man expansion I do wish we had a more powerful version of Spider-Man rather than Moon Knight, who feels out of place. Spider-Man has always been one of the more powerful heroes in the comics so it’d be nice to get one with some decent attack!
I like the villains and schemes. Carnage can be really frustrating, and Mysterio is just plain annoying. I think all the schemes and villains work well with each other and also with the other cards in the game. What I love about Legendary is that each expansion can just slot in with the rest of the game and you can pick and choose from everything, and it pretty much all works out well together. The only downside is that my big original box is now almost full up, and I don’t think I’ll be able to fit another expansion in there, so I’ll have to try and sort out a way to store them all when the next expansion hits. But I’m just so in love with this game. The sheer variety is amazing and no two games are ever going to be the same.
I do hope we get some more henchmen soon though, and it’d be nice to get some more specialist bystanders. I’d really love to see character bystanders as well, like J. Jonah Jameson or Mary-Jane. That’d be cool to flesh out the universe a little bit and give the game even more flavor. Another thing I’d like to see is specialized SHIELD agents, maybe with Agents of SHIELD we could get Coulson, May etc instead of the generic agents and troopers that are in the game at the moment. I do hope that some of the concepts introduce in the expansions are carried over. I’d love to see more teleport (introduced in Dark City), focus, burrowing, cosmic threat, feasting etc.
All in all it’s a good expansion and one that you must buy. If your budget is stretched and you can’t afford all the expansions then I’d say that Dark City is the one you should get first, but out of this and the Fantastic Four expansion it depends on which characters you like the best. From a gameplay standpoint I think I’d suggest getting Paint the Town Red over Fantastic Four.