Design-wise, the deluxe edition is a (you should only excuse the expression) marvel, with a die-cut metal box and a game board that is, essentially, a gorgeous mural of heroes and villains charging each other in the instant before both teams clash. The game tokens represent not heroes, but their symbols: i.e., Spider-Man's web, Captain America's shield, Thor's winged helmet, the X-shield worn on the belts of Professor Xavier's students, the Fantastic Four seal and (oddly, given this bunch, but understandable once you remember that the movie's coming up), Ghost Rider's flaming skull.

As in previous Scene-It games, players circle the board, answering trivia questions from either a card set or the DVD. Correct answers are rewarded with additional turns. Based on comic-book trivia alone, it's not hard to imagine a sufficiently dedicated geek circling the board without ever allowing any other player a roll of the dice.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the questions do include obscure points from the movies, including the names of supporting actors—an element that may not provide much complication for the Spider-Man films, where just about everybody's recognizable to some extent, but that is downright difficult for, let's say, the Fantastic Four movie, where Michael Chiklis and Jessica Alba led a cast that was otherwise populated by obscurities.

Questions like this help steer the gameplay away from those players who know, even before seeing the movies, that Elektra's weapons are called sais.

Ambiguity leads to frustrating gameplay

Still, there are problems. When playing prior Scene-It games based on TV sitcoms, or Hollywood classics, or the Star Wars universe, even clueless players had the benefit of knowing exactly what question was being asked. Unfortunately, this game is based on characters whose backstories vary tremendously, depending on whether you know them from movies, cartoons, the original comic books or (in some cases) the comics set in Marvel's "Ultimate" universe.

The game never specifies which version's being asked about, a failure that will no doubt lead to some serious arguments. One card asks players to come up with the ring name used by Daredevil's murdered father, a professional boxer. Anybody who's read the multiple versions of this story in the comics over the past 40 years will come up with the historical answer, "Battlin' Jack Murdock." The game expects the completely different answer given by the Ben Affleck movie, "The Devil."

Similarly, the game asks players to name the Black Panther's powers. Fans who know the character from the comics are likely to say athleticism and fighting skill. The game expects the answer known to players who met the character via the direct-to-video movie Ultimate Avengers 2: retractable claws and vibranium armor. Given all the available differing versions of these characters, some ambiguity is unavoidable, but it certainly would have been lessened by the simple expedient of clarifying such continuity questions with modifying phrases like "In the comics," "In the movies" or even "In the cartoons."

There are other elements of ambiguity, too. One recurring question type, off the DVD, challenges players to identify characters from a scrambled screen image as it gradually comes into focus. One such image is Michael Chiklis in his Thing makeup. The screen answer is "Ben Grimm." People who know that Ben Grimm is the Thing will no doubt be accommodating enough to find both answers acceptable. But we can imagine a stressful situation where the one non-fan in your family or group of friends, playing because that's what everybody else is doing, considers this explanation double-talk and believes it cheating to accept any answer other than the one specifically shown on the screen. The result: pointless discord. And both sides would be right. The game should provide full information. Again, putting the full answer, "Ben Grimm (The Thing)", on the screen would have gone a long way toward avoiding such pointless wrangling.

Not incidentally, all of these moments of serious ambiguity came from a single game session. Repeat: a single game session. The higher math necessary to calculate how many such moments must exist throughout the card set and DVD features is probably beyond Reed Richards. Who is, incidentally, the same person as Mr. Fantastic.