Crisis on Infinite Bookshelves: A Multiverse of Expansions for Marvel United

I see board games in the store and they always look so cool and then I buy them and bring them home, I’m so excited to open them, and then I play them, like, twice… This column is dedicated to the love of games for those of us whose eyes may be bigger than our stomachs when it comes to playing, and the joy that we can all take from games, even if we don’t play them very often.

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A surprisingly long time ago (have I really been writing this column for so long?) I wrote about Marvel United, a co-op board game from column regular CMON, a company that may no longer be a regular soon, since they have recently announced massive losses in 2025, even before the full impact of tariffs kick in.

Like a lot of the games that I write about here, Marvel United was funded by Kickstarter, which means that even the core game had a dizzying array of (often Kickstarter exclusive) expansions offering new heroes, villains, and so on.

When I wrote that initial column, I had missed the original Kickstarter, but backed the X-Men themed one that was the most recent iteration at the time. Since then, there has been another. In February of 2023, the Kickstarter for a Multiverse-themed edition superfunded, raising over $4 million. It also brought the largest and most dizzying array of options the game has thus far ever seen.

Each edition – the original Marvel United, as well as the X-Men and Multiverse expansions – are both standalone and completely compatible with one another. So, as long as you have one of the three base games, you can play with pretty much any of the other expansions, characters, or variations that you might have in your collection. And if you backed any of the Kickstarters, your collection has a very real chance of being bookshelf-breakingly huge.

As befits a game built around capes-and-tights superheroes, the most common thing added by various Marvel United expansions is new heroes for you to play as. There are, at the time of this writing, around 200 heroes available for Marvel United, many of them Kickstarter exclusives.

These range from familiar favorites like (several versions of) Iron Man, Captain America, and Spider-Man, to obscure weirdos even I have never heard of. (In the Multiverse expansion, they finally added Man-Thing, so you know that I will never be playing as anyone else ever again.)

The Multiverse edition brings a few fun wrinkles as well, including several larger-than-life heroes represented by massive versions of the game’s chibi miniatures, among them characters like Goliath, Stature, and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. Various expansions also offer a variety of new ways to play with your heroes, from themed Team Decks to the addition of pets such as Goose, Cosmo, Alligator Loki, and Jeff the Land Shark.

Ultimately, though, as I mentioned in my last piece, while your choice of hero has certain thematic impacts upon your experience with Marvel United, it is the villains who really alter the playing field. And the various expansions offer a similarly intimidating selection of villains (as well as anti-heroes, which can be played as both heroes or villains) for your heroes to overcome.

More than merely a numbers game, however, the assorted add-ons for Marvel United also present an array of different villain experiences. One of the earliest of these was the Sinister Six add-on for the original Marvel United which, as the name implies, introduced six classic Spider-Man villains who could all be fought individually, but also added in an optional play mode where your heroes go up against all six villains at the same time.

Subsequent releases have included variations on that approach, but have also released other villains who buck the standard play style in different ways. Some of these are obvious. There’s an Infinity Gauntlet expansion that lets you gather your own Infinity Stones and go up against Thanos and his emissaries. The Civil War expansion turns the tables by pitting heroes against heroes.

The Multiverse Kickstarter brought along probably the most ambitious of all of these in the form of The Coming of Galactus, which not only introduces the big-G himself (the game’s largest model so far) but also several of his heralds, including personal favorite, Terrax.

Galactus is a massive mini, and his play style is suitably grandiose. When you go up against him, the usual locations that make up the game board are replaced with cards representing the continents, and Galactus himself doesn’t move from place to place but simply turns, so that the relevant continent is merely the one that has his attention at the moment.

Defeating Galactus is a big undertaking – as it should be. The guy eats planets, after all.

If you’re me, though, the most exciting of the various new villains introduced in the Multiverse Kickstarter required you to go all in to get it. This was giant dragon and classic Jack Kirby monster Fin Fang Foom, another impressively large miniature whose unique play style involves two states, one where Fin Fang Foom is sleeping, and a more unpleasant one for all involved where he is awake.

Of course, if you did go all in on the Multiverse Kickstarter – never mind having the various games, expansions, and Kickstarter exclusives from previous editions – you may have another problem. With so many minis, game pieces, and so on, Marvel United takes up a lot of shelf space. And if you have (or want to have) the complete experience, you can say goodbye to an entire shelf of your bookcase, at least, not to mention lots and lots of money, especially if you missed the Kickstarters and are trying to pick things up on the secondary market.

Of course, no one is likely to ever have the complete experience, anyway, even if they have it available to them. With so many heroes, villains, and play options available, you would have to play Marvel United a whole lot more than, like, twice to ever see it all.

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.