Monsters on the Prowl: How Jack Kirby Monsters Lured Me into the Vs. System

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.

———

In 2004, Upper Deck Entertainment launched their Vs. System, a collectible card game intended to compete with the dominance of Magic: The Gathering. (This was long before Upper Deck’s current troubles as they recently announced licensing the Harry Potter IP and, in so doing, rightly made a lot of people very angry for their implicit support of transphobia.)

Unlike Magic, which was originally designed to mimic wizards casting spells and summoning creatures at one another (long before it turned into its modern Fortnite-ish incarnation where everything from Transformers to Warhammer 40,000 to Spongebob Squarepants has a place), the Vs. System was initially conceived to recreate battles between superheroes, with most of the cards in the line’s early releases divided between Marvel and DC characters.

While comic book characters would remain the meat and potatoes of the Vs. System through its eventual retirement in 2009 and its relaunch in 2015, post-relaunch sets would follow the Fortnite model of pulling in other franchises including Aliens, Predator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, and Mortal Kombat.

From its earliest iteration, one of the selling points of the Vs. System was that cards from one set could be mixed and matched with cards from any other set, though team alliances meant that only certain cards played well with one another. This mostly gave potential players the opportunity to do things like pit Spider-man against Batman – the kinds of mental exercises that comic book geeks have always engaged in, now in CCG form.

Despite the fact that there was a Hellboy set in the game’s history, the only Vs. System installment I ever owned was the Monsters Unleashed expansion, which came out in 2017 to tie in with the comic book event of the same name that took place that year, driven heavily by the writing of Cullen Bunn.

The purpose of the Monsters Unleashed comics was to bring back to the fore many of the classic Jack Kirby monsters that were technically a part of the Marvel universe but had primarily existed across non-superhero comics from the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Those who know me at all know that those old Jack Kirby monster comics are some of my favorite things. So, naturally, if anything was going to draw me into the Vs. System, it was going to be big, lumpy Jack Kirby monsters.

Even before Bunn’s Monsters Unleashed storyline, many of these critters had already crossed paths with various costumed heroes, with Fin Fang Foom being perhaps the most well-known. But Monsters Unleashed dumped them into an all-out kaiju brawl, alongside familiar capes-and-tights characters as well as newly created heroes (such as Kid Kaiju) and new monsters.

Unfortunately, the Vs. System expansion seems to know where its bread is buttered as far as merchandizing is concerned, and it offers only a handful of classic Kirby creatures. There are four new “Teams” introduced by the expansion, including a team of new monsters called Leviathons. Of those, only one is made up of classic Kirby monsters. The others are superheroes of various stripes, including the Inhumans.

The “Monsters Unleashed” team does offer some familiar monstrous faces, however, including Fin Fang Foom, Goom, and Devil Dinosaur as Main Characters, plus a variety of monstrous Supporting Characters such as Tim Boo Ba, Googam, Monstro, and Zzutak.

To make heads or tails of all that, you’ll have to know a little something about how the Vs. System works. Unlike Magic: The Gathering, where you (the wizard) have an existence separate from your cards, in the Vs. System you’ll always have one (or occasionally more than one) Main Character.

Main Characters are powerful cards, and they can “level up” to become even more powerful. However, when they get taken out, that’s bad news for you. (Usually, it means you lose.)

To prevent this from happening, you play Supporting Characters who can take the brunt of enemy attacks while also dishing out damage of their own. You also deploy your characters in two ranks; the front rank can deal damage more easily but is also more vulnerable to attack, while the back rank is more limited in their actions, but better protected.

Getting into the weeds of explaining all those various monster names I dropped a couple of paragraphs back, though, would require more space than we’ve got here today.

Despite never reaching anywhere near the ubiquity of Magic: The Gathering or some of its other CCG peers, the Vs. System has continued through more than two decades of sporadic expansions and releases, notwithstanding the aforementioned gap in production from 2009 to 2015. Recent expansions include the Protectors of New York and Children of Lilith expansions from 2024, though I wasn’t able to find anything from 2025.

Along with its other challenges, the Vs. System had to vie with competition from another Upper Deck release: Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game released in 2012. Unlike the Vs. System, Legendary is closer to a classic deck building board game than a CCG, with perhaps the biggest difference being that Legendary is co-op, while the Vs. System (as the name implies) is played head-to-head.

Despite the name, Legendary has also branched out since its release, including expansions for James Bond, The Matrix, Game of Thrones, and even Big Trouble in Little China, not to mention lots and lots of Marvel-based sets. To the best of my knowledge, however, none of those expansions have been themed primarily around Jack Kirby monsters. So, thus far, I’m safe…

———

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.