Marvel Crisis Protocol – Alliances: Night of the Goblin is a streamlined, fully cooperative board‑based experience that distils the cinematic energy of Atomic Mass Games Marvel: Crisis Protocol miniatures game into a more accessible format.
It trades range rulers, complex scenery rules and skirmish‑game granularity for hex-based movement, simple mechanics, and a brisk turn structure. Even in Alliances: Night of the Goblin‘s simpler form though, it keeps the throws, the chaos, and the comic‑book drama that define the MCP universe. It’s fast, thematic, and occasionally quite tense, offering a cooperative experience that feels pretty unique.
The first thing to understand is that Marvel Crisis Protocol – Alliances is its own product line, not an expansion to standard MCP (even though the characters contained within include cards to be used in mainline MCP). Where MCP is a competitive miniatures skirmish game built around precise positioning, ranges, and nuances like base size or height advantage, Marvel Crisis Protocol – Alliances: Night of the Goblin is a cooperative board game played on one of two double-sided maps..
Everything is designed to be simpler, cleaner, and more welcoming to players who don’t necessarily play miniatures games. You activate a hero, choose whether to move or take an action, and resolve effects with intuitive rules rather than granular measurements. It’s a different rhythm (not least because its cooperative) but the number of enemies and their aggressive rules makes it feel very much like an MCP game.
The structure is classic comic‑book escalation. Players work through two distinct stages before confronting the Green Goblin in a final showdown. Each stage introduces new threats, objectives, and environmental hazards, forcing the team to adapt and communicate. You’ll always use all four of the included heroes no matter what the number of players, and I think this means that the design itself is streamlined without the need for variance based on player count.The cooperative format really shines, and the player(s) are constantly weighing up which character should move, who should attack, who should go after an objective and who should set up for the next turn.
The turn‑by‑turn gameplay is clear and simple once you get used to it. On your activation, you either move or take an action — such as an attack or a special move. It’s really that simple. The hex grid makes positioning readable at a glance, and the action economy keeps the pace brisk. There’s very little downtime and perhaps most critically, no need for prior MCP experience. It’s pretty much just a tactical puzzle right from the outset, and players soon get into a rhythm.
One of the unique rules for Marvel Crisis Protocol – Alliances that really enables the cooperative model is the “Heroic Assist” and this is a rule I really like. After a hero defeats an enemy, they are allowed to perform a Heroic Assist action. This is really quick and simple in practice — and all they do is give another character 1 health, 1 power or a movement of 1 space. This sounds minor, but in Marvel Crisis Protocol – Alliances at least a couple of heroes will take 1-2 damage a turn, whilst spending power is necessary not just for abilities, but also for interacting with tokens on the map. Because movement is your whole action, just nudging one space into (or out of) range is also massive.
Aside from the fact that many of the special moves (like Ghost Spider’s life-saver for example) are specifically designed for cooperative play and assisting other heroes, the Heroic assist is the “glue” that binds a lot of what you’ll be doing from one turn to the next together. Without those incremental nudges in the right direction, I just don’t think Marvel Crisis Protocol – Alliances would work. As it happens, with just one action per hero per turn and then a villain turn every four hero turns, the pace is rapid and the flow of the game is absolutely spot-on.
Special attacks feel powerful and characterful, with (based on my gut feel only) about 75% of attacks that target an enemy directly defeating that enemy. Heroes have distinct roles and personalities, and the Goblin himself is a wonderfully disruptive boss with lots of mobility, unpredictable moves and the ability to turn a comfortable board state into chaos with a single action. The final showdown feels like a proper comic‑book climax, with the team scrambling to control the board while the Goblin swoops, strikes, and sabotages whilst weaker minions take up space and chip away at both your actions and health.
Production quality is strong. The boards are clean, simple and attractive, whilst the iconography is intuitive, and the components support the game’s accessibility goals. The miniatures follow the Alliances philosophy, being relatively simple push‑fit and glue builds that go together quickly, but once painted they look fantastic — dynamic poses, crisp detail, and the same quality sculpting that we’ve come to expect from Atomic Mass Games. For me, these strike a smart balance between hobby appeal and ease of entry, and I was able to build the models in about an hour, and paint them over the course of about 4-5 hours a few days apart. For those interested, I actually used Speedpaint markers for these, without a single paintbrush in sight.
Where Night of the Goblin excels is in the social aspect that the gameplay pushes us towards. The cooperative format encourages discussion, shared planning, and dramatic reactions when the Goblin does something outrageous, whilst features such as some of the specific moves and the Heroic Assist force the right behaviours. It’s ideal for mixed groups: MCP veterans will appreciate the familiar mechanics, while newcomers can jump in without learning a full skirmish system. The multi-stage structure and boss finale give the game a satisfying arc, making it feel like a complete adventure rather than a one‑off mission.
If there’s a caveat, it’s that in making the leap from miniatures game to true board game, the rulebook has suffered somewhat and so too has the scale of the game. On the rulebook side of things, there are definite issues here, with simple concepts such as “Push,” “Throw,” “Away,” and “Toward” being explained in slightly verbose ways, and other rules such as what happens when an enemy is thrown into another enemy being tucked away in odd places. On the scale side; you’re going to get exactly four heroes and one set of villains here and whilst the mission stages have some variation, its a very similar experience each time you play. Thankfully, the Alliances range already has plans for an X-Men and an Avengers release, and cross-compatibility is sure to be a thing.
In short: Marvel Crisis Protocol – Alliances: Night of the Goblin is a standout cooperative board game that captures the spirit of MCP while making it accessible to everyone. It’s fast, cinematic, and packed with personality, with streamlined rules that still deliver big Marvel moments. For groups who want a fully cooperative superhero adventure with real tactical bite — but without the complexity of a miniatures skirmish game — this is an easy recommendation.
Marvel Crisis Protocol – Alliances: Night of the Goblin is available now from Amazon.
