The Old King’s Crown - Will Hare

As we put away The Old King’s Crown, there were two seemingly incongruent but true sentiments coming from my play group. The first is simply… that first play was a mess. Total mess. Constant takebacks and missed triggers, being blindsided by some shocking thing you didn’t know your opponents could do, or having your carefully planned turn totally upended by some bonkers, cartoonishly evil play made by another player. The second sentiment, however, was that we all wanted to play again immediately.

Almost everyone agreed that playing with the full four players really escalated the hijinx, so I’d be curious what a three player game would be like. The teach was shockingly smooth, though the real complexity and weight of this game lies in the overwhelming number of abilities and effects printed on the 50-something Kingdom cards, 20 special faction cards, and 16 tactics abilities. I am immediately smitten by this game and want to peel back the layers, while also fully aware that nobody’s first game of this is going to feel super great.

Ease of entry?
★★★☆☆ - There were a few questions
Would I play it again?
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

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(Last updated July 2026.)

Let's get the obvious question out of the way: yes, it's a miniatures game, and yes, that phrase alone is enough to send some board gamers running for the hills. I get it. I was one of you. The idea of assembling tiny plastic limbs with tinier plastic glue, then learning a ruleset that looks like it was fully written for people who already know what a "beam attack" is, felt like I was trying to translate the Necronomicon or something.

Marvel: Crisis Protocol is Atomic Mass Games' skirmish game built around Marvel's absurdly deep bench of heroes and villains. "Skirmish" is doing real work in that sentence: you're not commanding armies or pushing platoons around a table. You're fielding a handful of named, iconic characters and throwing them at each other across a comic-book landscape. This means the game is about how Juggernaut specifically behaves in a fight as an unstoppable wrecking ball, not how many identical soldiers you can cram into a formation. If you've ever wanted Hulk to pick up a dumpster and throw it through a building, this is the game built for that exact impulse.

Here's the game, stripped all the way down. You build a roster of characters ahead of…

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Excelsior, heroes, and welcome to a Meeple Mountain article for Marvel: Crisis Protocol! Today, we’re here to talk about the newest wave of releases for MCP, as your favorite evil robots join the battle. But that’s not all—we have not only fresh models to enjoy, but a whole new set of missions that aim to shake up the meta game! As we say goodbye to the previous 1.5 years of missions, these new ones promise to change the game entirely.

Quick refresher if you've never picked up MCP: this is a skirmish game where you build a squad of Marvel characters - usually four or five, pulled from a larger roster you build ahead of time—depending on how much "threat" (basically their power level and cost) you can afford, and throw them at each other across a comic-book cityscape. You win by controlling objectives called secures and extracts, not by wiping out your opponent, though plenty of games end with someone getting tabled anyway (losing every model on the table). Power is the currency that fuels your abilities, and you earn it mostly by dealing and taking damage, which is why a change to how power works can ripple through the entire game. Got it? Good, because that's exactly what just happened. And that ripple effect is exactly why this…

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