Origin Story Review – A Fun but Unfair Power Fantasy

Disclaimer: Origin Story was provided for free by Stonemaier Games, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

As a publisher, Stonemaier Games has carved out a very clear identity. Medium-weight board games, standard boxes, inoffensive gameplay and gorgeous artwork are kind of their whole thing. Which is why Origin Story, from Jamey Stegmaier and Pete Wissinger, feels like a bit of an oddity.

It’s a smaller, more focused game than most of what you’ll find in the Stonemaier catalogue, with artwork that feels noticeably more mature. Enough so that, at first glance, you might genuinely wonder whether this is even a Stonemaier game at all.

Then you actually start playing, and that concern quickly fades away, because despite the smaller box and sharper edges, Origin Story absolutely still feels like a Stonemaier game.

How to play

Origin Story’s title gives it all away. You are a superhero, and this is where your journey into heroic deeds and skin-tight outfits begins. Over the course of the game, your character grows, picks up new powers, and slowly becomes something greater, all building toward a final round where you become the hero you were always meant to be.

None of that sounds particularly new on its own. Superheroes are well-worn territory, and so are trick-taking card games. What’s surprising is how Origin Story brings those two familiar ideas together. This is a trick-taking game powered by super abilities.

Before each round of tricks, players draft new powers to use, each with a stamina cost, a specific effect, and a timing window for when it can be activated. These powers can radically change how you approach the round and give you plenty of interesting decisions to think about.

For example, one power lets you spend stamina to play a non-trump card off suit. Another allows you to discard a card to draw a replacement. Others let you exchange cards with another player or even play with your hand face up. And that’s just scratching the surface. There’s a whole deck of strange and powerful abilities to be explored.

Before any of that kicks off, you’re dealt a hand of eight cards. These come in four suits, with Love, the yellow suit, acting as the trump suit. If that sentence made your eyes glaze over a little, don’t worry. It did for me too when I first got into trick-taking games. If you’re new to the genre, I’d definitely recommend checking out my guide on how trick-taking games work.

Once powers have been drafted, you then allocate stamina from your personal supply to those powers. Only the powers you fund will be active for the round. When activating anything that affects other players, you’re required to announce it clearly, so there are no surprises later on.

The final step before play begins is choosing your alignment. You can play as a proud and righteous hero, aiming to win tricks and score one victory point for each trick you take. Or you can embrace your inner villain, where the goal is to lose. If you manage to avoid winning a single trick in the round, you score four victory points instead.

With alignments set, powers online, and goals locked in, the trick-taking begins. It’s standard trick-taking gameplay, but with player powers triggering constantly and a mix of heroes and villains at the table, things quickly descend into mayhem.

And if they somehow don’t, they definitely will during round three. That’s when a special event triggers. These events tend to pull the rug out from under everyone. One might force players to play yellow cards whenever possible if they go off suit. Another might have everyone pass their entire hand to the player on their left.

Finally, you have the round five finale. This is where your origin story truly pays off as you choose one of the two superhero cards you were given at the start of the game. These offer much stronger abilities and are designed to swing the outcome in one last dramatic moment. Once the round ends, victory points are tallied and you find out who truly deserves to be called the most powerful hero at the table.

Fun first, balance later

Origin Story is to trick-taking what Tapestry is to city-building. If you’ve played Tapestry, you probably already know what I mean. And if you haven’t, the short version is this. Origin Story prioritises fun over fairness.

Over the course of the game, you’re drafting new powers, chaining together different abilities, and gradually powering up your character. Being offered three new powers every round gives you plenty of freedom to experiment, hunt for synergies, and shape how you want to play.

And that’s a lot of fun.

But is it fair? Absolutely not.

Across my plays, I’ve seen players completely run away with the game thanks to a mix of lucky draws and perfectly aligned power combinations. At the same time, I’ve also drafted powers that looked fantastic, only to never activate because the required conditions simply never came up. That’s what you’re signing up for with Origin Story. It’s very comfortable letting those moments happen, for better or worse.

The hero versus villain choice is another clear example of this design philosophy. Deciding whether you want to win tricks as a hero or deliberately lose them as a villain is a great decision point at the start of each round. In practice though, I’ve never seen a successful villain as choosing that role paints a target on your back, and once the everyone start coordinating, it becomes incredibly difficult to lose every trick.

Still, I love that the option exists. Even if villainy rarely pays off, it’s always tempting to trade your cape for a secret volcano hideout. And it highlights one of the things I enjoy most about Origin Story. That is how it constantly asks you to think differently about trick-taking. Sometimes that comes through player powers, other times through the hero or villain choice itself. The result is a game that’s always interesting to play, even when the imbalance hits you like a super-human punch.

When your powers click (and sometimes don’t)

Chaining powers together and watching your character slowly come online is something I’ll never get tired of in a board game, and Origin Story does this wonderfully. That sense of growth from round to round is genuinely satisfying.

That said, I did find it easy to forget which powers I had and when I could activate them. With so many interactions happening at once, it’s surprisingly easy to lose track of what your character is actually capable of, especially once the table state starts shifting.

This is most noticeable during the third round, the event round, where everything can suddenly change and carefully laid plans get thrown out the window. In one game, we drew an event where you swapped hands with the player next to you, then scored points based on how well their hand performed. Suddenly we were trying to help another player succeed while actively sabotaging our own decisions.

It was a lot of fun and changed how you thought about the game, but once again, not especially fair. Who you pass your cards to, and how skilled they are, can shape the entire round. In my case, that meant handing my fate over to an eight-year-old who hadn’t quite wrapped their head around trick-taking games yet.

Putting gameplay aside, Origin Story also feels a little torn in how it presents comic books and superheroes. The character artwork leans toward a more modern comic style, with sharper edges and a darker tone. Which honestly feels like a departure from Stonemaier’s previous titles. Each of them (yes, even Scythe) felt approachable in their own way, whereas Origin Story comes across as more grown up and a little too serious for the kind of game it is.

That moody artwork then sits alongside graphic design choices, font selection, and victory point dials that feel like they’ve been lifted straight from the Silver Age of comic books. So you’re getting comic book vibes from both directions, old and new, but they’re very tonally very different, which can feel slightly jarring when everything is laid out on the table.

Now when I look at any trick-taking game, I always come back to the same question. Does it elevate the core mechanic, or does it rely on it without really adding anything new? Origin Story definitely elevates it. The powers, stamina management, shifting goals, and round-to-round surprises all introduce decisions that meaningfully change how trick-taking feels.

Because of that, if you’re already a fan of trick-taking card games and you’re happy to embrace something that values expression and challenges how you approach the genre over tight balance, Origin Story is well worth checking out.