Marvel Snap made me think I was great at games – then I made a horrible discovery

I am very bad at video games. Which is a shame, because getting good at them sounds like it would be a lot of fun. There’s only one big thing holding me back. I’m an idiot. A jester. A soft-brained idiot who is fundamentally unable and unwilling to intellectually engage with the game’s mechanics at their deepest level.

I have never pressed a lock button in my entire life. I have never countered a move because I am not a member of MENSA. I can hardly bring myself to consider grenades in multiplayer shooters. So thanks, marvel addonfor making me feel like a genius.

Marvel’s new digital card game has been expertly calibrated to appeal to people like me: chumps with minuscule attention spans who are easily distracted by pretty shapes and colors. Very, very pretty colors. Marvel Snap may be a fundamentally simple game, but it’s been packed with an absurd amount of clever animations and effects and satisfying sounds, all meticulously crafted to illuminate the baby joy receptors of a player’s brain. It’s like playing a Bop It. The cards themselves really pop off the screen if played on high-resolution mobile screens capable of reproducing deep, rich colors that render these little rectangles of Marvel art so sharply you could cut your thumb with them.

A big hook beyond just playing the game itself is the drive to enhance the appearance of all these cards and see them organized as if they were in one big ring binder. The resources required to do so aren’t locked behind victory, so getting started wasn’t as daunting a prospect as it usually is with these things. Headbutting something and having nothing to show for it unless you win is always frustrating, but being a free-to-play mobile game, it’s designed to make you feel special.

While I was initially only entertained by the aesthetics of the thing, remembering how shiny Pokémon cards were the most exciting item for me when I was nine years old, something strange began to happen. I realized that I had not lost a match. In 50 games. I passed it off as beginner’s luck, or as a sign that I was being matched with AI or bots for an extended period of time. That 50 win streak turned into 100. When I finally lost a match it was because I got distracted hugging my sexy girlfriend that exists and timed out. I set out to find out exactly what was going on here.

The first possibility, though less believable, was that he was simply good at Marvel Snap. That somehow, through repeatedly playing a game, I internalized information about the rules. That he had developed some sort of intuitive understanding of card synergy and galactic brain tactics. Perhaps he had somehow assembled some kind of mathematically unbeatable deck simply by choosing cards based on their appearance. As I played into the night and began to pay more attention to what I was doing, I finally started to lose. I couldn’t pinpoint what was going on, so I went to bed.

The next morning I launched another undisputed streak of decisive wins and finally realized what was going on. Kids. I was hitting the children. I just described the game as a ‘flashy toy’ and yet it still surprised me. This is a game for babies. I’m a freelance gaming journalist, which basically means I’m unemployed. I can watch TV during the day and play mobile games to my heart’s content. In the middle of the day, he had been playing against children at school, looking at a phone under their desks. I went with this theory and made a note to try again after 6:00 pm

I was erased. Forensically disassembled by adults with fully formed brains on their way home from their real jobs. These are people who watch University Challenge and talk about books with their friends. People who crash games know what dropped frames mean. I could picture them, sitting in their exquisite homes with their feet up on luxurious ottomans, laughing and drinking port as they easily beat me and my pathetic, absurd card game.

The dream of being really good at video games is over, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped playing. I can still pretend I know what I’m doing between 8am and 4pm. a space where you only have 3 lit – do your homework).

I finally got a glimpse of what it must feel like to be able to think straight, to feel the thrill of victory over an opponent. I was never able to do that in Splatoon 3 – I bought it on launch day and the skill cap was already out of reach forever. The boys are worryingly good at aiming guns, but apparently not very good at counting.

Marvel Snap, then, is the perfect game if you’re bad at games and would like to feel what it’s like to be good at them. You can spend 10 minutes reading card descriptions and setting up a deck that mostly just makes all the numbers go up every time you do something and make easy wins against people a third of your age during Chase week hours of bargains.

Will you feel good about it? That’s up to you really. The way I see it, I’ve long needed a break after trying to get into Apex Legends and finding myself unable to see what was killing me. Kids can get over these things easily, but I’m a depressed adult going through a second puberty and I’ll take as much as I can.