Umbrella Academy Card Game

What Is This Game

The Umbrella Academy card game is based on the comics of the same name – you might be more familiar with the hit Netflix adaptation. The comics tell the story of a family of seven adopted siblings with unusual superpowers. Players each play as one of the seven siblings and must work together to defeat a line-up of villain attacks by playing cards on their turn. Each round brings a new villain and a new line-up of attack cards.

Both hero and villain cards have an attack value and a player must play a higher number to defeat the card and remove it from the line-up. Alternatively cards can be blocked by playing a card with the same value. This also removes it from the line-up but means the player has to take half of the card’s damage immediately. Players can also heal instead, leaving the villain card for that turn uncontested. Finally, players can use their character’s special power. This costs one life but can have powerful effects. At the end of the round the total damage from any remaining cards is distributed among all the players.

In this way players face a number of villains determined by the number of players. At the end of each round any undefeated cards are put aside under the “final battle” card. These are brought out again after the last villain is defeated and used to create a new line-up. On the flip side of the villains are stronger attack cards, and one of these at random is also added to the line-up. If the players make it all the way through this final round with at least one character left alive, they win.

How Does It Look

Personally I quite like a lot of the graphic design of it. Each deck explicitly states what it is on the backs of the cards, which is useful if a bit on-the-nose. The artwork looks like it’s taken straight from the comics (though I haven’t read them so I could be mistaken). This is a nice touch, but it’s a shame the colour palette doesn’t have a bit more variety across the different cards. The hero and villain attack cards look so similar it took me a couple of games to notice that one has a white corner and the other black. I also liked the design of the villains flipping over into attack cards for later.

How Easy Is It To Learn

Not as easy as I would like or expect for this kind of game. The rules that come with the game are quite light on detail. They do cover the main points of how to play, but you will probably quite quickly find edge cases that aren’t described in the rules. Additionally there seems to have been an update to the rules in response to player feedback. The newer rulebook clarifies a few things and tweaks a few rules. This does generally improve the game, but adds some confusion over which set of rules to use when learning the game. (Use the updated ones, you can find them on BGG). Unfortunately I still encountered some unanswered questions while playing with the newer rules.

You’ve Learnt It, Is It Any Good

It’s fine but not fantastic in my opinion. The basic gameplay goes by fairly quickly once you know the basic rules, but it doesn’t offer you many particularly interesting choices to make. Although some of the attack cards have additional effects, most really are just numbers. This means the decision on your turn often comes down to just “do I have a high enough number to beat this other number”. And because the attack decks both have quite a wide spread of values, the cards in the line-up often have quite different numbers to those in your hand. Unfortunately this means a frustrating number of wasted turns because the cards in your hand are just too low to do anything.

The theme is very light as well. In the show (and presumably the comics) the siblings are a dysfunctional group and don’t want to cooperate, but circumstances force them to. That feeling is absent in this game, with no reason to do anything but work together closely. In addition, the villains have a name and a number indicating the number of attack cards, but no other rules difference from one card to the next. All this can be fine – many lightly themed games are very good. But in a game that sells itself as a board game adaptation of an existing piece of media, you expect something that evokes it a bit more.

Umbrella Academy also feels like it’s supposed to be challenging to beat. You have quite a small hand of cards and often quite a lot of villains to defeat, so managing your resources effectively is important. It may not be an obvious comparison, but in some ways I was reminded of Gloomhaven. Gloomhaven is notorious for having useless turns. Perhaps another player took out the enemy you needed to stand next to, or used up the element you needed to make your spell work. On a somewhat smaller scale, Umbrella Academy produces some of that frustration. But Gloomhaven balances it with occasional bursts of magnificence. Turns where you can use all your resources perfectly and kill a dozen huge enemies. Success in Umbrella Academy feels far less impactful. It may be statistically balanced – I haven’t run the numbers. But there is a lack of emotional balance that makes it feel like the deck is stacked against you rather than feeling like an enjoyable challenge.

All that said, it’s a decent enough way to spend half an hour once you’ve got past the rulebook and as long as you don’t expect a record-winning gaming experience. It’s a fine-if-uninspiring lightweight hand-management game. But if lightweight hand-management game is what you’re after, I suggest you play Flamme Rouge instead. It’s quick, it’s easy to learn, the theme ties in better but doesn’t get in the way, and the strategy is challenging but much more satisfying.