Last night, tabletop gaming company Upper Deck surprised us all with an announcement that they will be releasing Legendary Encounters: An X-Files Deck Building Game in summer 2018. Legendary is a well-known name in tabletop gaming circles. The original version of the game (and its many expansions) was based in the Marvel comics universe and several other versions have since been released based on various sci-fi/fantasy properties including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alien, Big Trouble in Little China, and Firefly.
For those unfamiliar with the game, Legendary and Legendary Encounters are cooperative deck building games. This is a genre of tabletop card games in which players begin with a set hand of weak cards, then use these cards to buy more powerful cards from the main deck, each round strengthening their own hand. The stronger the players become, the more capable they are of defeating an increasingly powerful set of villains. Players work together as a team to take down all the villains before the villains themselves take over the game and win.
If you want to get a better idea of what's in store with this new game, take a look at the Nerd E short guide to playing Legendary Encounters: Firefly, or if you have an hour to spare, you can watch Ant Lab Games play through three episodes of the game in full. These should give you a reasonable idea of what the X-Files game will play like, after a significant re-theme has been applied.
Since the announcement yesterday, one of the key concerns for this release in tabletop gaming groups is surrounding the artwork. The Firefly version of Legendary Encounters in particular received terrible reviews for its inconsistent and often low quality artwork, while the Buffy edition went for using stills from the show itself. Personally, I would love to see some new original artwork for the show rather than the comic artwork which was used in the X-Files Board Game which came out a few years ago. Hopefully, the developers have learned from the problems surrounding Firefly and we can look forward to higher quality artwork in the X-Files game.
I have enjoyed playing the original Legendary and even found myself thinking at the time how great a fit the game's mechanics would be for The X-Files. I can't wait to see how the game is adapted to fit the X-Files universe, which characters we will get to play as (besides the obvious - I'm rooting for a Reyes card here) and which villains we will get to defeat. With ten, soon to be eleven, seasons to work with, there is ample source material to create a fantastic version of the game, and even to add expansions later on.
I think I might be more excited to play this than to watch the new episodes next year!