Technologies

Marvel Snap: Beginner’s Guide and Top Tips to Get Cards and Win Games

Just starting out with Marvel’s new mobile card game? Here’s what you need to begin.

On the surface, Marvel Snap is a mobile card game with simple mechanics. But with hundreds of different heroes to play with, the game can get complex. Our Marvel Snap beginner’s guide will get you started and take you through higher competitive tiers.

Developed by Second Dinner, a studio filled with veterans from Blizzard’s successful digital card game Hearthstone, Marvel Snap is a refreshingly streamlined game that’s built to play well on smartphones. It plays in a vertical orientation and its quick match times typically last as long as a pop song. The mechanics are easy to learn, but there’s enough variability to keep things fresh.

Marvel Snap is downloadable from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, or on PC via Steam if you prefer. (To make it easier to port your collection between phone and desktop, sign up with your Google login when making an account.) It’s free to play, with microtransactions, but you can’t buy your way to the top in this game — everyone has to play a lot to grow their collection of cards.

Snapping superheroes down to card size

Each card represents one hero, and most of them have a special ability. In addition to snazzy comic book art, cards have an energy cost in the top-left corner and a power level in the top-right corner. Each deck you bring into a match must have 12 cards, and outside of rare cases, matches last six rounds. You start matches with one energy point per round and gain another each turn, with more powerful cards costing more energy. The goal is simple: Play your cards into three locations (each with four card slots), and the winner is whoever controls at least two locations at the end of the match.

Plenty of factors can complicate a match. Locations are randomly assigned and each has special rules, while unique hero abilities change how the match plays. Players start with three cards and draw another every turn, so you won’t get to play your whole deck by the end of the match. This randomness keeps the game fresh and can occasionally hand you victories, though it can also ruin your chances to win.

Bluffing with cubes

This uncertainty raises the stakes for the final mechanic, a pokerlike betting system around cubes (of the Cosmic variety). Marvel Snap pits players against each other as they climb the competitive ranks and earn rewards; to climb, you need cubes, which are awarded to the winner of each match and subtracted from the loser. If a match isn’t going well, you can retreat early and lose only one cube to avoid the two-cube toll when you’re defeated. But you can manually raise the stakes by tapping the cube icon at the top — now the game is worth four cubes, and your opponent can tap it again to raise it up to an eight-cube game. Yikes!

Much like in poker, you can aggressively tap the cubes (called Snapping in a reference to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s big baddie Thanos’ famous act, hence Marvel Snap). This can intimidate opposing players into retreating, though some will call your bluff. You may be confident in your hand of cards, but you have to wait to see which cards opponents play (and where) to understand their strategy and estimate whether you’ve got a winning chance. That’s the risk and the thrill — but don’t worry if you take a hard loss, as matches last only three to five minutes, making it easy to shake off losing and breeze right into the next potential win.

First steps for Snap

Don’t worry about knowing all these rules up front, as Marvel Snap has a generous tutorial. The first matches are against computer opponents who aren’t too tough to beat, offering space to learn the ins and outs of the match flow before going up against human players.

You’ll start with some basic cards, and playing matches (win, lose or tie) earns boosters, which are a currency to enhance the appearance of cards, making them look even more like they’ve sprung out of a comic book. While boosting a hero grants purely cosmetic upgrades like moving backgrounds and shiny hero names, it also ratchets up your overall collection level — which is the way you get more cards.

For the first several collection levels, you’ll get a preset series of cards that are key to simple yet powerful strategies; like silver-age hero Ka-Zar, who powers up your smallest one-energy cards, or Wolfsbane, who gains power based on how many cards are already at her location. These early cards fit into a handful of different deck strategies, from empowering minions to repeating the «on reveal» abilities with the late-game Odin card for a dramatic finish.

On reaching collection level 18, you’ll move on from the beginner slate of preset cards to a wider set. At higher collection levels, you’ll be rewarded with a random card from the first pool and face opponents with access to the same card group. You’ll enter the second card pool at collection level 222, and the third pool at 486. As time goes on, even more cards will be added to this last pool, with newer cards showing up more rarely.

Upgrading cards requires spending the in-game currency credits (which are different than boosters), gained through daily missions that typically involve playing cards of a certain cost, earning wins, or drawing cards. You can either wait to earn enough boosters for cards or head to the in-game shop and pay extra credits to upgrade cards early. Later on, you’ll also be able to gain ‘collector tokens’ to buy single cards showcased one at a time in the in-game shop.

What’s the fastest way to get more cards?

Marvel Snap is geared toward granting players new cards as rewards for playing, though the rate of new cards slows in higher collection levels. There are only a couple of ways to buy new cards with real money: buying very pricey seasonal bundles that include specific cards, or paying for in-game currency to indirectly boost your collection level.

The latter is a slightly complicated sequence. You can pay real money for gold, a secondary in-game currency mostly used for buying variant versions of cards you already own, but that can also be used to buy credits. As previously mentioned, credits can be spent in the in-game store to rapidly upgrade cards to bypass boosters and climb the collection level, which earns you new cards. It’s a hassle, and you don’t get much currency for your hard-earned real money — best to save it for bundles that offer more value.

It may be disappointing to hear, but simply playing more matches is the best way to get cards.

Tips for winning matches

Winning in Marvel Snap seems simple — just secure two out of the three locations — but wild swings can happen in any of the six turns (or seven, on rare occasions). As you play, you’ll get a feel for what kind of decks you’ll face and the best strategies to counter them.

But there are several basic things about the game that aren’t immediately obvious. In a match, see whether your player handle or an opponent’s is ringed with light — that’s who’ll flip cards first next turn, which can matter if an «on reveal» effect relies on opponents having certain cards in play. Also, tapping your or your opponent’s player portraits opens up a dropdown status menu showing how many cards each has in hand and in the deck, along with how many have been destroyed or discarded during the game — key info for certain card abilities.

To win matches, you want to control locations. You probably won’t have enough power to win all three, so you’ll want to focus on the two you’re most likely to win. This might change as location abilities are revealed and your opponent plays cards, so remain flexible for the first few turns to see how the board plays out. You can even deceive your opponent by looking like you’re going to invest in one location and abandon it for the two others in later turns.

Keep refining your decks. If you’re losing, go back to the collection and see whether different cards might fit your strategy better, especially new ones that haven’t been tested yet. Remember, the worst that can happen is losing cubes and rank progress — but you can gain that back later with strategic Snapping.

Speaking of, the last tip is to know when to Snap and when to retreat. There’s no shame in ducking out if it looks like you’re not going to win. A good rule of thumb is that if you aren’t winning at least two of the locations going into the sixth and/or final turn, you might want to back out — it’s going to take too much power to flip multiple locations.

On the other hand, if you have more power in two or three locations and have a strong final play, you might want to Snap to increase your winnings, which could scare the opponent off to retreat. Like in poker, a win is a win, whether you’re bluffing with weaker cards or the opponent is too intimidated to play cards that actually would’ve beaten yours.

That’s it for now, so get out there and start building your collection. If you’re struggling, look online for guides on popular decks made of cards in your collection. And don’t be afraid to experiment, as there are many, many interactions that aren’t clear until you slam down your cards — just look at this recent combo that skyrockets a single card from four to over 600,000 power. Excelsior!

Technologies

Sunderfolk Hands-On: A Cozy Co-Op RPG Streaming Tabletop Magic Into Everyone’s Home

Four friends, four phones, one video game. This is how you bring board game night into the digital age.

My party of adventurers walks into a spider-infested cave, and my friends and I start chatting strategy about the plan of attack for each of our heroes — then we leap into the fray by controlling the action through our phones.

This is Sunderfolk, a new roleplaying game and the debut title from studio Secret Door. Made by veterans from Blizzard, Riot Games and fantasy tabletop hits like Descent: Legends of the Dark, Sunderfolk brings board game nights to modern video games. It’s available for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch for $50.

The game looks conventional enough, with up to four players choosing between six animal adventurers packing varying skills to protect their town. The game’s combat and action play out on a shared screen, but the novelty lies in each person pulling up their phone to move their character and look up battle info.

«[Sunderfolk] is built for folks who are already genre-lovers in this space who want to bring in folks who are not genre lovers,» said game director Erin Marek. The game was designed to be intriguing to fantasy tabletop veterans, yet approachable to those put off by complex board games requiring deep dives in manuals.

To do that, the Secret Door team started with a concept of «TV DnD,» as the studio chief Chris Sigaty explained: «It’s like [Dungeons and Dragons] meets JackBox.» That’s the party game where everyone jumps in to play on their phones, and it aptly describes the mediums Sunderfolk attempts to blend. The team wanted to bring the camaraderie of the couch to digital games, all set in an evocative fantasy world.

While Secret Door was kind enough to invite me into a Discord to connect with other players, I knew I had to experience this game with my own tabletop group. My dice-rolling battle-hardened cadre of thirtysomethings has tackled campaigns in RPG systems like Dungeon World, The Sprawl, Blades in the Dark, A Quiet Year, and Stonetop — all of which eschew the staid elements of Dungeons and Dragons in favor of more streamlined approaches to role-playing. That made them great sample players for Sunderfolk.

I attempted to get a game going in-person, but like every classic RPG campaign, we faced the greatest tabletop villain of all: scheduling. Nobody could find the same night to meet. Yet Sunderfolk’s setup allows everyone to play remotely: We just logged into the game on our phones sitting in our respective homes while all watching the same screen.

This is also the genius of Sunderfolk: All players share one big screen. At any time, players can treat their phone screen as a thumb pad to move their cursor around to look up enemy details or battlefield features (like healing shrines or exploding rocks). But it also lets players point and gesture around the map to plan and coordinate moves. We may have been sitting in our respective homes dozens of miles apart, but it felt like my friends and I were gathered around a table in person.

Streaming Sunderfolk to the whole party

But since my party wasn’t in the same place, I used a clever workaround, running the game on PS5 and streaming it through our friend group’s Discord, which everyone tuned into.

Admittedly, this was a bit challenging on the PS5, which doesn’t let you stream to Discord natively from the console — instead, I had to use a workaround I found online to use the Remote Play app to run my PS5 on my PC, and then stream that window through Discord. Complicated! There are alternatives, like streaming to YouTube or Twitch, but those require extra steps before you start broadcasting to the masses. Note that Xbox Series X lets you stream directly to Discord, and PC players will be just fine.

This shows a bit of the double-edged nature of Sunderfolk’s unique setup, but at least the trouble was on my end, and my friends didn’t need to download extra copies of the game — one copy will work for a whole party. All they had to do was download the free Sunderfolk app, watch my stream, scan the QR code on screen with their phone to log into the campaign, and we were off to the races.

How Sunderfolk’s phone-controlled RPG plays out

Once logged in to our campaign, three friends and I chose our quartet of characters from the six animal hero choices — and gave them silly names, as is tabletop tradition. One friend picked the barbarian polar bear (named Bearzerker), another the lamb ranger (Big Lamb), a third the raven spellcaster (RavnAbtMagic), and I picked the bat bard (Bat Stevens).

Like any good tabletop RPG, the campaign opens up in a tavern. Here we learned basic mechanics and ran through our early move selections, which differed for each character, before spilling out into a proper brawl outside. The local ogres had descended on the town to raid and pillage, but our brave heroes fended them off.

Though fights feel familiar for fantasy RPGs, like using different attacks to whittle down enemies, Sunderfolk has a heavy emphasis on moving around the battlefield. Our spellcaster teleported around (and likewise ‘ported enemies hither and thither), while I used my bat bard to swap places and drop power-ups around the area, encouraging different playstyles while never staying put.

That all led to The Moment. If you’ve ever played a tabletop RPG, you’ll probably remember the first time it became suddenly clear that you could do anything. When you tried something so spectacular that, succeed or fail, it was vividly memorable. In Sunderfolk, our next encounter had us chasing the ogres onto a bridge — and one by one, each party member found an attack or movement ability that let us shove our foes off the edges.

«What we’re stealing a little bit from tabletop games is those moments where something that should never have happened, happened,» Marek said. «You have that moment, that storytelling with your friends that you carry through with you and try to explain it to other people, and they don’t get it because they weren’t there.»

There are things we couldn’t do that a regular tabletop game would’ve allowed, like trying to talk to the ogres or bribing them to leave. Sunderfolk trades that in for fewer but still potent possibilities — just ask my party of thirtysomething men, gleefully cheering each other to boot enemies into the wild blue yonder — and the streamlined system with codified rules that a video game enables. From personal experience, it is a joy to have the game handle all the monsters, quest progression and more, meaning our regular dungeon master could join in, too.

As we wrapped up our first adventure, we chatted with townsfolk and grew relationships, did a little shopping and unlocked new abilities — standard RPG stuff, all wrapped up in a 2-hour session, which I later learned was the target time the Secret Door team set for a night of adventuring (quests take about an hour, and every two quests should result in a level-up awarding new skills). While I had a good time with the game, I was impressed that everything worked smoothly — even though I’d never used my phone to play a game this way.

Designing a new way to play old games

Sunderfolk’s team is full of people who have taken games from other platforms and mediums to adapt to play on the humble smartphone. Before joining Secret Door, Marek worked on Wild Rift (League of Legends on phones) while Sigaty worked on Hearthstone (a digital card game on PC and phones). Kara Centell-Dunk, Sunderfolk’s campaign designer, has over a decade of experience making tabletop games — including working on Descent: Legends in the Dark and Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth, which have smartphone app assistants to help with play.

On an interview call with the three Secret Door creators above, only the fourth hadn’t worked in the intersection between phones and tabletop — Daren Bader, art director at Secret Door, who didn’t play Dungeons and Dragons or tabletop at all despite submitting fantasy art for Monster Manuals and Magic: The Gathering cards. «I was kind of the perfect guinea pig for the team,» Bader explained, as someone who would need to be dragged into the game. His conversion into a tabletop gamer during Sunderfolk’s development is a proof of concept.

«My favorite thing is that we created a game that I want to play, to tell you the honest truth,» Bader said.

Designing a game that would be «TV DnD» as Sigaty described was a process. Gamers don’t look down at their controller or mouse and keyboard while playing, but Sunderfolk would have lots of essential information on the phone app — what the team found was that players were staring at their phones instead of the action on the screen. The solution lay in another TV implement.

«One of our UX/UI designers, Hasiba Arshad, was actually looking at Apple TV remotes and how they use their paradigm … and she came up with this idea of what if you’re actually controlling a cursor?» Marek said — almost like drawing with a drawing pad.

It took years of evolution and lots of playtests with friends and family to get the controls just right (even in release form, the app on the phone tells players to look up when important gameplay is happening on the main screen). Other parts of the design took time to refine, like having each move arrayed in a row for players to tap and swipe between, like they’re holding a hand of cards — and then swiping the one they want upward to start their turn, like a sort of skeuomorphic motion.

All of this work would amount to a novel proof of concept if the game weren’t fun to play, but it is. It’s not the most complex RPG to start, but it’s designed to ramp up — as Centell-Dunk explained, the game’s philosophy is simple parts that, when combined, become complex. So those spiders I found lurched over merchant loot that scatter when I hit them? That can be combined with other movement abilities to get the tactical advantage.

As my friends and I wrapped up our second session, having delved in the vibrant underground worlds Bader designed — full of light and mushrooms, friendly animals and vicious ogres — we called it a night. But not before my tabletop-tested friends gave it their seal of approval by asking when we’d play the game next.

Ahead of us was the thing Centell-Dunk was most proud of: boss fights, and the systems she made for them.

«I hope players also enjoy being crushed by our bosses,» Centell-Dunk said.

Technologies

Xfinity Mobile Adds Premium Unlimited Plan With Twice-Yearly Device Upgrades

If you’re already an Xfinity internet customer, Xfinity Mobile is sweetening its top-level wireless plan.

How do you add more to «unlimited»? As carriers offer unlimited talk, text and data on their wireless plans, Xfinity Mobile’s answer is to launch a new Premium Unlimited plan that includes high-resolution streaming, 30GB of fast hotspot data per month and, for customers chasing the latest phones, the ability to upgrade devices twice per year.

The Premium Unlimited plan is available now. Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll get.

More perks for Premium

The Premium Unlimited Plan, which costs $30 per line on top of required Xfinity Internet service, includes unlimited full-speed data. That’s a boost over the regular Unlimited plan, which throttles data speeds after 30GB.

For mobile hotspot usage, the Premium Unlimited plan includes 30GB of data before speeds are reduced. By comparison, the Unlimited plan offers only slower speeds, although both plans give you unlimited hotspot data so you won’t be cut off.

Also unique to the Premium Unlimited plan is 4K resolution video streaming (the Unlimited plan serves up only 480p standard resolution) and Xfinity Call Guard service for intercepting spam calls.

Xfinity Mobile uses Verizon’s network for 5G and 4G LTE cellular access, but also leans heavily on its installed base of home and business internet service with modems that double as public Wi-Fi hotspots. Both the Premium Unlimited and Unlimited plans feature WiFi PowerBoost, which can automatically hop onto a Wi-Fi connection and deliver faster speeds, up to 1GB, according to Xfinity.

The company states that more than 90% of mobile data traffic happens over Wi-Fi. If you’re connected at home (and your Xfinity service uses an XB7 or XB8 Gateway to route the data), your phone can get the faster speeds, even if you’re not paying for that level of bandwidth.

Stay on top of the newest phones

If you know someone who replaces their phone every year for the newest model, you can literally one-up them by being on the Premium Unlimited plan. The new Elite Upgrade option allows for twice-yearly phone upgrades with a «guaranteed new-device discount of up to $830 with an eligible trade-in,» according to the company.

For those switching from another carrier, Xfinity Mobile will pay up to $500 per line for as many as five lines to buy out existing contracts.

See more: Discover the Best Phones for 2025.

Your iPhone Wants These 11 Essential Accessories in the New Year

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Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Wednesday, April 23

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 23.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword isn’t terribly tough — for once, the two-part clue was simple. Usually, I beat my head against the desk trying to solve those. Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

The Mini Crossword is just one of many games in the Times’ games collection. If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get at those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: With 7-Across, flight option that saves money at the expense of sleep
Answer: RED

4A clue: Like pastel shades
Answer: PALE

5A clue: Appliance on a patio
Answer: GRILL

6A clue: Simplicity
Answer: EASE

7A clue: See 1-Across
Answer: EYE

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Underpaid employee’s request
Answer: RAISE

2D clue: Fashion magazine with a palindromic name
Answer: ELLE

3D clue: Director Guillermo ___ Toro
Answer: DEL

4D clue: Thank God, say
Answer: PRAY

5D clue: «Will you look at that!»
Answer: GEE

How to play more Mini Crosswords

The New York Times Games section offers many online games, but only some are free for all to play. You can play the current day’s Mini Crossword for free, but you’ll need a subscription to the Times Games section to play older puzzles from the archives.