Capes & Cowls: The Superhero Board Game (2006)

From demo packet:

Capes & Cowls: Adventures in Wyrd City. It's super fun in 3 easy steps:

1. Recruit a team of heroes.

2. Send them into battle.

3. Clobber till content.

Wyrd City—where conflict lies in wait around every corner and the shadows are acrawl with mystery and adventure, where liberty wanes, government waxes, and a chosen few don capes and cowls to take their stand in a world gone Wyrd....

Capes & Cowls: The Superhero Board Game features 32 original Heroes (and/or villains, depending on your perspective) and several Crews of secondary characters, including Freedom Patrols, Liberty Bots, Diabloids, Arachnidrones, Darklings, thugs, and zombies. Each Hero is defined by personalized stats (Attack, Defense, Speed, and Vigor) and 3 unique Powers, while each Crew is defined by personalized stats and 1 unique Power. Altogether, Capes & Cowls provides over 75 characters with over 100 Powers.

Capes & Cowls is played on a unique Battleboard whose color- and number-coded spaces influence character abilities, modify power levels, and place strong emphasis on strategic and tactical play. Though certain game situations do require a roll of the Battle Die, skillful players will find themselves seldom relying on luck to determine the outcome of an action. In short, the player who recruits and manages his team of Heroes most wisely will nearly always prove the victor.

Capes & Cowls offers the following 3 modes of play:

1. Basic: In the Basic Game, each player recruits a team of 2 or 3 Heroes, deploys the team to the Battleboard, and dukes it out with his opponent’s team for a predetermined number of rounds. The victory goes to the player with the most Heroes left on the Battleboard at the end of the game.

2. Standard: The Standard Game allows each player to recruit a team of 4 or 5 Heroes, and introduces Scene Features such as Rooftops, Walls, and Trees, as well as Objects such as Boulders, Cars, and Mailboxes. These elements enrich the Battleboard environment and call for keener strategies and sharper tactics. The victory, as in the Basic Game, goes to the player with the most Heroes left on the Battleboard at the end of the game.

3. Adventure: The Adventure Game requires the players to select an Adventure from the Adventure Book. Each Adventure includes a full-color map for Battleboard setup, instructions for team recruitment, and special rules for playing the chosen Adventure, including team-specific goals and victory conditions. This mode of play incorporates Crew characters, special items, and plot devices that further define the Wyrd City universe and its colorful assortment of costumed denizens. The victory in an Adventure Game goes to the player whose team succeeds in fulfilling the predetermined goal of the Adventure.

In addition to the above modes of play, Capes & Cowls also allows for solitaire and multiplayer variations.

Wyrd City—where the “good guys” are bad, the “bad guys” are you, and the dress code is decidedly unusual.

Capes & Cowls: The Superhero Board Game! Let the battle begin!