Marvel Snap: Hearthstone Designer has launched a new card game

With Marvel Snap, Hearthstone designer Ben Brode releases a new deck of cards. Closed beta has started.

Until 2018, Ben Broad was the lead designer for the face and lead designer for Warcraft, Hearthstone. Thanks in part to him, Hearthstone has achieved huge popularity in the gaming and esports community.

But then he left Activision Blizzard to found his own game studio, Second Dinner. The studio has been pretty quiet so far, and they’ve now introduced their first game: Marvel Snap.

With that said, Ben Brode and his new team are back where he feels most comfortable, in digital card games. Marvel Snap is a fan service and a super fast card game all rolled into a single card. You collect well-known Marvel characters in card form and use them to compete against other players.

The highlight of the new CCG is the lack of droppers. All movements are performed simultaneously. As Brode himself says in the video ad: It’s always your move.

At first glance, Snap seems a bit baffling. Unlike the classic TCG, your deck consists of only 12 cards. You can place it in one of the three lanes during a match. With this you fight with your opponents for regions, if you control two out of three regions, you win the game. First impressions remind us of a mixture of Artifact and Gwent.

Only that you don’t play as characters from Dota or the Witcher, but you send Marvel heroes like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Storm or Iron Man into battle. You can also see more specialized heroes like Moon Girl in the trailers.

Each game is only six rounds long, and as said before, the moves are done simultaneously. Writing it all down seems a bit confusing and the best way to learn the card game is to watch anyway. Accordingly, Second Dinner has also published a detailed walkthrough of the gameplay. Introduced by Chef Broad himself:

Marvel Snap will be available on mobile and PC, with a closed beta for Android users in America, Canada, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand starting in the next few days. More regions will be added later.

But as with all Android apps, other users will also come to be able to jump in sooner. It is not yet known when the closed beta will continue.