We have all seen heroes in popular media in recent years. Whether you have brightly coloured quirky characters performing spectacular feats on the big screen, or dark and moody creeping characters in the shadows, but on overly husky voices, nothing beats a good hero… well… most of the time. Enter the Umbrella Academy.
The Umbrella Academy is a fictional family/school of adopted super-powered siblings, born on the same day and brought together by Reginald Hargreeves. This unconventional group get into all kinds of messes and are not your typical heroes, in fact they are a dysfunctional mess. The graphic novels & comics were written by Gerard Way and illustrated by Gabriel Ba, before being brilliantly adapted for tv by Netflix. I am a massive fan of both the stories & the series, so jumped on the crowdfunding for the collectors’ edition of the game immediately, and I am very glad I did.
What is the game about
Umbrella Academy is a co-operative game, where you each play as a sibling (with their individual deck of cards & abilities), trying to defeat an enemy, such as Hazel & Cha Cha, or the White Violin. You need to work together to remove hazards, using wits, fight or power abilities. If you fail, you take damage or could permanently devastate a location. Too many wounds – your hero dies and you lose the game. Too many hazards or devastated locations – your heroes die and lose the game. Like many co-op games, this one is a challenge…
What’s in the box
The board game is heavily based on the graphic novels; the artwork & miniatures are excellent, but don’t expect to recognise Tom Hopper or Elliot Page! (Also, Hazel & Cha Cha are the opposite way around in the original stories, so they haven’t got it wrong!) The book guides you through a tricky set-up, but each deck of cards (characters, hazards, villains etc) are easy to identify. I bought the Collectors’ Edition, so I have many, many, many miniatures, but otherwise players will use cardboard counters to represent allies not used as playable characters in your game.
Time to save the world
Each player starts by choosing one of the heroes. They then take the respective characters cards, which contain their skill cards and shuffle in two feud cards, to create the hero deck. You will then draw a set number of cards, based on player count. All the cards in your hand are dual use, either discarding to move or play them for actions such as fighting or special moves.
You will create a main deck. This is quite a drawn-out process, creating stacks of cards, adding the all-important “save the world” card to the middle stack, shuffling them independently then stacking them from left to right. This main deck includes advantage cards you want to collect and hazards you need to defeat.
At the start of each round, these cards are placed randomly in locations around the board. Each location is familiar to the fans of the graphic novels and maybe even fans of the show, such as the moon, or the mansion. They are all connected where appropriate (e.g. places in the city are linked, but the mansion & Moon are separate) and movement is restricted between places, at the cost of a card in your hand. This means you must plan carefully whether to use cards to move or fight a hazard.
Each round is split into four phases; the play phase, draw phase, effect phase, and crisis phase.
In the play phase, this is where players take turns to perform actions such as move or perform actions against villains or hazards.
Communication is key, as you need to fully defeat a hazard for it to be removed from the board. For example, a hazard might need 2 wits & a power to be defeated. If you have a card with 2 wits, your sibling needs to get to the location & play a power card. You also have the villains’ special hazards and abilities to contend with – their hazards might return to the deck, rather than being removed from the game, or your hero might take damage if they enter the villain’s location. It’s tough!
Once all players have passed, you move to the next phase, the draw phase, where players draw cards until they have replenished their hand.
Following this, in the effect stage, this is where that typical mayhem you know and love from the comics and show happens. Starting from the moon, players work around all remaining cards to resolve their effects. This is when you might get devastated locations, which you definitely don’t want. Too many of these and the heroes find themselves defeated!
If you are lucky enough to reach the crisis phase, and let’s not be shy about… this game can be really cruel sometimes, you then draw more cards to all locations, except those devasted. Cards run out? Oh no… you lose. If you haven’t lost, you then move on to the next round and play repeats.
Final thoughts
This game is hard. I have lost way more times than I have won but I still love it, and that for me is the mark of a good game – I can enjoy it even when I lose. It feels beatable. You know it’s doable and you immediately want to go again. However, be prepared that set up and tear down time is long. I need the instruction book in-front of me every time to sort the cards needed – it takes around 20 minutes to get it all ready to play – but I don’t mind. I’m an Umbrella Academy fan girl, with collectors edition books, spin-off comics, Pop figures, signed pictures, jewellery etc, and this game gives me all the feels I was looking for, with lots of beautiful nods to the source material. Et malum pluvial indeed.
