Sinister Motives is a Spider-centric campaign. But Spider Man, at least the Peter Parker version, plays a mild mannered role. Instead of Peter, MJ, and Aunt Mary, we get Miles Morales, Billy Braddock, Gwen Stacy and other characters who came later in the Spiderverse. Strangely enough, however, they are still fighting Sandman, Mysterio, Vulture, Octopus, and other villains who... came earlier in the Spiderverse—right around the time of Peter Parker, interestingly. Something's crooked here—something sinister? Let's push on to see more of the contents.
As with all the Marvel Champions campaign expansions to date, Sinister Motives contains two new heroes playable out of the box, Ghost Spider and Spider Man (Miles Morales). Ghost Spider is a hero whose primary advantage is based on being able to ready after cards with “Response” or “Interrupt” are played. Her deck naturally contains more of these types of cards, and when played at the right moment are highly effective, including bouncing her out of exhausted after defending. Active through every phase, she feels like an acrobat. Her allies are predominantly different versions of Spider Man (versions that diehard comic book readers will be aware of but layman like myself need to be introduced to, e.g. Spider Man UK/Billy Braddock, etc.). Miles Morales is not the same as Peter Parker. He has two powerful actions that trigger when certain cards are played: one deals damage plus stun, the other thwart plus confuse. For players who enjoy hitting the villain and minions with those mini-cards, Morales is for you. There are a few repeat cards from the core box Spiderman set, but overall Morales' hero cards are powerful in their own right, giving him his own stun/confuse identity. Like Ghost Spider, his allies are also typically alternate versions of Spider Man known only to those deep in the lore.
The villains in Sinister Motives are complicated and tough. Sandman is perhaps the most thematic, with proverbial sand bogging the heroes down, often preventing them from delivering the big blows they want to deliver. Venom is straight-forward, his gimmick mostly dependent on a Retaliate-esque function that uses boost instead of +1. There is the now standard, multi-villain scenario, this time featuring the Sinister Six. Mysterio adds encounter cards to players' decks, making for an interesting challenge (less so if you use different color sleeves). The big baddy is Venom Goblin, which confuses the hell out of me. Is he Venom or Goblin? He possesses attributes of both, does not exist in the comic-world spiderverse (so I've read), and therefore muddies the waters.
Having played through the entire campaign, we're still wondering about Sinister Motives. There have already been four pieces of Spider Man Marvel Champions content released: 1) the Peter Parker hero in the core set, 2) Spider Woman in the Rise of Red Skull campaign, 3) Venom as a stand-alone hero, and 4) Green Goblin as a stand-alone villain pack. These capture their respective themes nicely, with Green Goblin being one of the best individual villain packs released to date. In fact, it makes the content of Sinister Motives sometimes feel forced and overmuch. Ghost Spider and Miles Morales, for example, just don't feel right going up against villains that laymen like myself have only ever seen the original Spider Man battling. What's more, the spread of villains doesn't seem to take advantage of the source material. One villain is essentially repeated, while an intriguing villain like Dr. Octopus has minimal presence, and Kingpin, zero. I'm no expert on game design, but I can't help but feel something could have been done with eight arms or a crime lord.
Where The Mad Titan's Shadow offered players a diverse and surprising campaign, Sinister Motives sometimes sees designers scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to keep things fresh and new. This typically means increased complexity. The amount of mental RAM required to keep a scenario's factors in balance (villain's effect, environment card, new keywords, community campaign effect, attachments, not to mention all of the effects players are putting into play with their hero cards) keeps the mind occupied with rules as much as fun. Where the villain phase goes quite smoothly in the core set and Rise of Red Skull, by the time we are here at the fourth campaign there are many new keywords and rules in play all at once. The Sinister Motives rulebook, for example, introduces no less than twelve new keywords. These are all built logically on top of the game's first principles, but again can really stretch those principles to their max all at once. “Steady”, for example, is when a character has two instead of one Stunned card. Will there be a “Steadier” keyword in the next expansion for three? Is that really exploring new design space? Yes and no. I would also argue that campaigns like Mad Titan's Shadow, with the Tower Defense and Hela scenarios, make use of the table as a physical space, giving players some sense of environment to aid immersion. Sinister Motives remains abstract.
In the end, Sinister Motives is a mixed bag. While offering what so many players crave (fresh content!) with new cards, new heroes, new actions, new keywords, and delicious new art, that content is not always as consistent or evolutionary as some of the other deluxe content released to date. The player can feel that developers tried to tap a vein which already had a lot of its resources mined, leaving enough to produce an expansion, just not enough to be entirely as fresh and expansive as previous deluxe expansions. Also, Spider Man purists may balk at the numerous versions of the web slinger included in the campaign, not to mention Ghost Spider can feel like she is checking a box (“Hero based on Forced/Interrupt abilities—CHECK”) rather than a hero with innate abilities and thematically matched cards. To be fair, she is fun. A couple of the villains also feel this way (“Villain with multiple main schemes”—CHECK). And the new rules overhead is noticeable, sometimes preventing players from fully immersing themselves in gameplay as they do plus-minus math, particularly during the villain phase. The whole is impeccably packaged and the art remains first rate. FFG did not let us down there. But I do wonder if the expansion wasn't forced into production later than it should have. Putting all of the previously released content into such a deluxe would have been better.
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