Second Dinner, the independent studio founded by former Hearthstone director Ben Brode, is finally unveiling the mysterious Marvel project it’s been working on for the last few years. It’s called Marvel Snap, and it’s a free-to-play collectible card game and battler published by ByteDance gaming arm Nuverse.
Marvel Snap clearly wears its Hearthstone DNA on its sleeve, right down to the booming voice of Brode showing off mechanics in the official reveal. Its main draw is the brevity of the matches, with the average Marvel Snap game ideally only lasting around three minutes. It accomplishes this by eliminating back-and-forth turns and allowing players to play simultaneously, layering turns on top of one another. It also limits both players to a 12-card deck in a given game.
Games take place across three randomized locations — out of a possible 50 — that can impact strategy. It’s tough to tell from the reveal exactly how gameplay flows or works, but one element described in the reveal is the battle over “cosmic cubes,” where players fight to be the one with the most cubes at the end of the match. Connected to that is the ability to “snap” an opponent to double the cubes at stake.
At launch, Marvel Snap will include over 150 base cards made up of Marvel heroes and villains, including different variants of characters with different art and artists. More cards will be released each month as new seasons roll out, and all cards can be acquired in-game with time without spending any money, though it sounds like microtransactions of some sort will be present given that it’s a free-to-play game. For now, Second Dinner hasn’t said exactly which characters will be available at launch, but so far we’ve seen cards of Cosmo, Captain America, Multiple Man, Shang-chi, Scarlet Witch, The Infinaut, Iceman, Ghost Rider, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, Professor X, White Tiger, Gamora, Hulk, Mysterio, Venom, and a ton more in various screenshots and footage. So we can expect a pretty robust lineup.
Marvel Snap is “mobile first,” but not mobile only, and Second Dinner has plans for an early access on PC to drop simultaneously with its upcoming mobile launch. There’s no official release date just yet, but a beta is said to be coming “soon.”
Second Dinner was announced back in 2019 from Brode and fellow Blizzard veteran Hamilton Chu, who have since been joined by Jomaro Kindred, Yong Woo, and Michael Schweitzer – all also from Blizzard’s Hearthstone team, among other projects. Marvel Snap is being published through a partnership with Marvel and publisher Nuverse, which is the gaming arm of TikTok parent company ByteDance.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.