Doctor Doom wanted to unleash the power of the Cosmic Cube, and only Shabadu and I could stop him.  Well, with the help of Iron Man, Wolverine, Spiderman, Thor, Nick Fury, and S.H.I.E.L.D.  Doom wasn't on his own either!  We had to also face down Juggernaut, Ultron, Doombots, Whirlwind, and The Melter (?  Never heard of that guy before).  

How did this epic battle arise?  We cracked open Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game and this is what randomly got generated.

The game is designed for 1 to 5 players, and each player starts with a small deck of 12 cards, consisting of 4 S.H.I.E.L.D. troopers and 8 S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.  From this deck a player draws 6 cards for their hand, and then plays those cards to attack villains or henchmen, or recruit more powerful heroes to add to their deck.

At the start of the game, the players will mostly focus on recruiting from the available heroes, meanwhile minor villains and henchmen begin to pile up as they scamper through the city.  At random intervals the main villain launches the next twist in his master plan, which if completed, ends the game and the heroes lose.  The only way they can win is if the mastermind is defeated 4 times.  That can be hard to do because of the distraction of the minor villains, and because the main baddie is so tough.

Once the game is over, the most Legendary player is the one with the most Victory Points.  These points are mostly received by defeating villains.  So while you're cooperating to achieve the goal of defeating the big bad, you're competing to earn more points.  This can lead to some douchy moves by players, but then, even in the comics all the heroes don't always get along.

The game itself is quite fun.  The only pain comes from sorting the cards initially into the different piles, and randomly picking between sets.  To that end, someone on BoardGameGeek suggests the following piles when storing (for quick setup):

Quoted Text

divide heroes by picture: 15 piles of 15 cards each
divide henchmen by pic: 4 piles of 10 cards each
divide villains by affiliation (ie:Villain:brotherhood/Villain:Spider-Foes): 7 piles of 8 cards
divide the schemes & scheme twists (8 and 11 cards respectively), if you want you can seperate these into 2 sections, I actually add the master strikes (5 cards) to these as well
divide out the masterminds by pic: 4 sets of 5 cards each
divide out the bystanders/wounds/shield officers by pic into seperate piles of 30 cards each
set up the 5 starting decks of 12 cards each (8 shield agents and 4 shield fight guys (can't remember name, the +1 attack guys))

The Good: Nice artwork.  All the cards you need are included.  Co-operative play.  Randomly generated for different game each time.
The Bad: Time flies by once you're playing
The Ugly: Sorting the cards between games

Hey Diddles.. your next project is to create a random generator app for this game... at the click of a button, it will spit out the correct number of random heroes, henchmen and arch villain.  It shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes to build (heck I could build a rudimentary version in excel, but it would be more manual than "the click of a button"   Then you can post the app up online and sell it for $0.99... if 40 people buy it, the game will have been FREE

That seems like a useless app since it gives you those numbers on the upper left corner of the board.

Not that people don't buy useless apps...  but I don't really want to contribute to the plethora of crap available.

Now, what WOULD be neat is an app that lets you design and share custom Masterminds and Schemes.  Since those cards, once chosen, just sit on the board for the entire game.

Hmmmm.....

Yah I don't think I made my point clearly.. rather than having to make a pile of one card from each hero set, another pile from each henchmen and another pile of the villains (and any other sets that require you to randomly select one or more from the pool of many cards), I was proposing an app that randomly selected those for you.  For the heroes for instance, we have to take one card from each of the 15 sets of heroes and randomly draw out 5.. I was suggesting an app that would auto-randomize 5 heroes, 2 henchmen and 1 master villain (and any other randomizations required to start the game) all at the click of a single button (and save us having to pull a single card, shuffle and draw them out).
But as the owner of the game and the person who has to make it, it boils down to would it take too long to create this app versus the time it saves randomly shuffling and pulling out and resorting the cards back into their original piles.

Ah yes, that would make more sense.  Another option, which I just saw on DiceTower reviews, is to make a "deck" out of 1 card from each of the 15 options.  Then whatever you pick gets added to the deck it represents and away you go.

Here's nice website that randomizes Legendary for different numbers of players: http://legendary.comuv.com/

And this one is more plain, but includes the ability to tweak the difficulty: http://legendary.seven2.net/