Origin Story
- Board's Eye View
- 11 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Origin Story is a surprisingly modest game from Stonemaier Games in that it's essentially 'just' a card game. Designed by Jamey Stegmaier and Pete Wissinger, it's themed around superheroes and villains in that, over the five rounds of the game, you'll be selecting 'story cards' that set out potential powers or attributes for your comic book character that will affect how you play and/or score in the round. Each of the attributes you select go into panels on your player board so that, over the course of the game, you will have a fully developed superhero or supervillain with their complete 'origin story'. Thematically it reminded us of the M Night Shyamalan movie Unbreakable.
Origin Story is a trick-taking game for 2-5 players. Cards are numbered 1-13 in each of four suits and, as in most trick-taking games, you always have to follow suit. Unusually, the trump suit in Origin Story is fixed - it's always 'love' (yellow). When you're dealt and look over your eight-card hand, and after you've shared which powers your character will have access to this round, players simultaneously reveal whether they are playing the round as a hero or villain. If you play as a hero, you'll score a victory point for every trick you win. If you play as a villain, you score 4 victory points if you win zero tricks... The dials used by the players to track scores are double-sided and these are used to indicate players' hero or villain choice.
The various powers and attributes have to be activated at the start of a round by 'charging' them with one or more stamina tokens; you usually won't be able to activate all of them so, at the start of each round, you'll have to make a choice about which powers you'll allocate stamina to.
Tho' we'd have preferred art more reminiscent of our experience of DC or Marvel comics, Origin Story makes a fine job of encapsulating its comic book theme while making a very playable trick-taking card game with twists that will differ in almost every play because of the different balance of charged attributes and powers. The supervillain strategy is likely to be a better bet in games with higher player counts: you're more likely to be able to finesse a zero-trick round in a game with five players than one with just three. And players may be able to further increase their scores with charged powers that synergise with their supervillain objective; for example, by awarding points for winning two or fewer tricks...
There are special rules to enable Origin Story to be played as a two-player game. With two players, each player has a 'sidekick' in the form of an unseen dummy hand where the top two cards are revealed. Albeit subject to the requirement that they must follow suit, players choose which of the two revealed cards to play for their sidekick. Tricks won by sidekicks don't count towards a player's score. Again, this makes for a fun and engrossing game, tho' with different dynamics to the 3-5 player game because there's an additional luck factor over which two cards will be drawn for your sidekick.
The Board's Eye View team have played a lot of Origin Story since the game first appeared. No doubt Stonemaier Games will publish more story cards to add further to the experience - tho' in an already packed box they haven't left a lot of room for expansion, especially for those of us who sleeve our cards.
