Professor X. Nick Fury. Magneto. What do these people all have in common? They assembled their superhero (or villain) teams. Much like playing Kickball in grade school, someone needs to be the captain and put the team together.
That’s your job in Assemble!. In this quick filler game from publisher AEG, you’ll be assembling a team of heroes over the course of 7 rounds.
Gameplay Overview:
Playing Assemble! is very easy. Each player starts with one hero card in their hand. Each round, you’ll draw a card from the deck and choose one card in your hand to add to the offer row (containing El Número Uno and a card drawn from the deck).
Then, in turn order, each player will draft one of the heroes in the offer row. If a player drafts El Número Uno, they will take a card from the top of the deck and return El Número Uno back to the offer row at the end of the round. However, they will also claim the first player marker.
After 6 rounds of drafting, each player will have a 7-card hand. They then total up their points, and whoever has the most points is the winner.
Game Experience:
Assemble! is super simple, which makes it an excellent filler game. You can explain the rules while you are shuffling the deck and be playing in minutes. Draw a card, offer a card, draft a card. Easy peasy.
For the scoring, most cards will score based on what hero group they are in. For example, the Alphabots score for each other Alphabots card you have, with bonus points if you have cards with bots named in alphabetical sequence. The Fruit Fighters, who are definitely not a Power Rangers riff, score bonus points by having other Fruit Fighters in your squad. Xenia’s X’s score as a team by having the majority of them.
For the most part, you’ve seen all of the scoring types before. The most unique is probably the Magnates, who score fewer points the more that players collect of them. But in general, scoring the cards will be pretty intuitive.
I did like how El Número Uno worked. It acted both as a way for someone to take the first player token and also as a way to draft a card from the top of the deck if nothing in the offer is really interesting to you. In most of our games, he was drafted quite often.
Overall, I enjoyed playing Assemble!; my wish would be for more variety in the scoring. For the most part, it’s standard set collection, or flat points per hero. I’d love to see expansions where the designers branch out into some really unusual ways to score, more player interaction, and even some things that change up the drafting. There is one card in the deck now that does that, so I’d love to see more of that.
Final Thoughts:
Assemble! is a solid filler game that you can play in about 10 minutes. We’ve played it a few times at the end of the night when we are looking for something that’s not going to bust your brain. While the theme is pretty pasted on, I do enjoy anything involve super heroes. In a way, this feels like a much lighter Marvel Remix. So if you enjoy that game, Assemble! works well as a filler game with a similar theme and gameplay.
Final Score: 3 Stars – A great little filler game that you can teach quickly and play in about 10 minutes.
Hits:
• Easy to learn rules
• Compact size makes for a good travel game
• Fun theme
Misses:
• You’ve seen the card scoring before
