Review: Origin Story

Introduction & Overview

Your inner superhero is ready to emerge, chapter by chapter. Reveal your Origin Story, gather artifacts and allies, swear vengeance against your arch-nemesis, and unleash your ultimate ability as you transform. Strategically use your wit, love, speed, and strength to build your narrative.

This is how Origin Story is presented to us, a design by Jamey Stegmaier (Scythe, Viticulture) and Pete Wissinger (Crits & Tricks). First published in 2025 by Stonemaier Games in an English version. The illustrations are handled by Clémentine Campardou (Floriferous, Wyrmspan).

It is published in Spain by Maldito Games (the game has quite a bit of language dependency on many of its cards, in addition to the rulebook). It allows for games of 1 to 5 players, with a suggested minimum age of 14 years and an approximate duration of 45 minutes. The RRP is €24. For this review, a copy of the Spanish version by Maldito Games has been used.

Important: if you already know the game and/or are only interested in my opinion about it, you can go directly to the Opinion section. The Content and Mechanics sections are especially intended for those who do not know the game and prefer to get a general idea of how it works.

Go to Personal Opinion

Components

Inside a two-piece cardboard box (lid and bottom), measuring 20×15×6 cm.—a medium rectangular box similar to Tenby—we find the following components:

• 5 Player Boards (cardboard)
• 56 Standard Size Cards (63×88 mm.):
  • 52 Trait Cards
  • 4 Trait Cards for Automa Mode
• 100 American Size Cards (57×87 mm.):
  • 64 Story Cards
  • 18 Event Cards
  • 16 Event Cards for Automa Mode
  • 2 Reference Cards for Automa Mode
• 10 Superhero/Reference Cards (70×100 mm.)
• 5 Faction / VP Dials
• 36 Stamina Tokens
• First Player Token
• Rulebook

How to Play

Origin Story is a trick-taking game set during a superhero’s origin, where each player develops their own background over five rounds. At the beginning of each round, which represents a chapter of the story, players receive a hand of eight cards, add a new story card to their personal board, and use stamina tokens to charge their cards’ abilities. After this, they secretly choose their alignment for the round: heroes will try to win as many tricks as possible, while villains will look to win none. In each of the round’s eight tricks, players play a card attempting to follow suit (out of four possible suits), keeping in mind that the love suit always functions as trump. Additionally, the game includes special twists, such as a random event in the third round or the revelation of the superheroic identity in the fifth. At the end of the fifth round, the player with the most points will be proclaimed the winner.

Key Concepts

Let’s start with the Player Boards, which serve as a personal space to organize and structure their character’s background throughout the game. The board features several areas delimited with numbers and specific slots where the cards obtained in each round will be placed.

Let’s continue with the Trait Cards. These cards form a traditional deck structured into four different suits (brains, love, speed, and strength), with printed numerical values ranging from 1 to 13. They are the main element used to resolve the tricks in each round of the game. Normal trick-taking rules apply, so the leader will set the suit to follow for the rest of the players, who can play a card from another suit only if they do not have any cards of the led suit. Among these, the love suit is considered trump, meaning cards of that suit are always considered higher in value than any card of the suit set by the leader (other than love).

Let’s move on to the Story Cards. These represent the different chapters, allies, or gadgets that shape the character’s background. They display a cost printed in energy icons in their upper left corner, as well as explanatory text at the bottom. They are placed on the numbered spaces of the player board at the start of each round; once positioned there and activated with the corresponding markers, they enable special rules and unique effects that modify the standard rules of the game or alter the resolution of conflicts.

On the other hand, we have the Event Cards. These cards form an independent deck, from which one card will be revealed during the third chapter of the game. They display text with specific instructions that affect all participants equally, introducing a global rule or an alteration to the turn conditions during that specific round, adding a constraint or an extra scoring method that is resolved at the conclusion of that period before being discarded.

As for the Superhero Cards, each player receives a pair of them randomly at the start of the game, initially keeping them face down in a dedicated space on their board. For most of the game, their back serves as a quick reference guide for players. They are activated at the beginning of the fifth and final round (instead of adding story cards), at which point the player must choose and reveal one of them to manifest their character’s ultimate identity, unlocking an immediate benefit or advantage and a final ability for endgame scoring.

The Faction Dials feature two cardboard masks and two inner rotating wheels with printed numbers. One side of the dial shows a red design associated with the hero faction, and the back features a purple design linked to the villain faction. Their function is twofold: on one hand, they are used at the start of each round so that each player can secretly choose and reveal their alignment (seeking to win the maximum number of tricks or trying to win none); on the other hand, their numerical wheels serve to immediately record and update accumulated victory points.

Finally, the Stamina Tokens represent the available energy and endurance and are obtained at the beginning of turns or through specific effects to be placed in the personal board’s supply. They serve as activation markers; players must place these tokens on the costs indicated on their board cards to charge and execute the special abilities of their stories and characters during the round. Some abilities remain active for the rest of the game, while others will spend their stamina tokens, meaning they would need to be recharged.

That is enough to get started.

Preparación de la Partida

1. Place the stamina tokens within reach of all players to form a general supply.
2. Shuffle the story cards and place them face down in a deck.
3. Shuffle the event cards and place them face down in a deck near the previous one.
4. Set aside the trait cards deck.
5. Each player receives a player board at random.
6. Each player receives an alignment dial, setting the dials to a value of 0.
7. Each player takes one stamina token and places it in the stamina supply space on their player board.
8. Shuffle the superhero cards and deal two to each player. Players secretely check them and place them face down in the superhero space of their player board.
9. Randomly choose the starting player, who receives the first player token.

We are ready to begin!

Game Flow

A game of Origin Story takes place over five Rounds, where each round represents a chapter in the evolution of the players’ characters. Each round unfolds across three phases.

Phase I: Preparation

Proceed as follows:

1. Deal Cards. The dealer gathers all the trait cards and shuffles them, dealing a face-down hand of 8 cards to each player. In two-player games, a hand of 8 cards is also dealt to the sidekicks located to the right of each player, flipping 2 of their cards face up to form a row.
2. Event (Round 3 Only). An event card is revealed, which will apply special rules or additional scoring conditions for that round.
3. Story or Superhero Cards. From rounds 1 to 4, each player receives 1 stamina token from the general supply, draws 3 story cards, and plays one of them face up on their personal board over the current round number, discarding the other two. In the fifth round, this is replaced by the revelation of the secret identity: each player chooses and reveals one of their two superhero cards kept since the beginning of the game to activate its benefit.
4. Charge Abilities. Simultaneously, players place their stamina tokens on the cost indicated in the upper left corner of their story cards or player board to charge their abilities. Abilities that depend on other players are charged in clockwise order starting from the left of the dealer. Charged abilities are public information, and any leftover stamina tokens are kept for future rounds.
5. Reveal Alignment. Each player secretly configures their alignment dial and reveals it simultaneously. A faction must be chosen for the round:
   • Hero. Their goal is to win as many tricks as possible to score 1 victory point per trick won at the end of the round.
   • Villain. Their goal is to lose every single trick of the round. If they manage to finish the round with zero tricks won, they will score 4 victory points.

Phase II: Tricks

This phase takes place over eight tricks. Each trick is resolved as follows:

1. Lead. The leader (the player seated to the left of the dealer in the first trick) plays any card from their hand face up, establishing the suit to follow for the trick (brains, love, speed, or strength).
2. Follow Suit. Continuing clockwise, the rest of the players must follow suit if they have a card of that suit. If they have no cards of that suit, they may play a card from any other suit. In two-player games, the active player chooses which of the 2 visible cards of their sidekick to play on their respective turn, then flips a new card from the sidekick’s deck.
3. Determine the Winner. The trick is won by the player who played the highest value card of the led suit. However, the love suit always acts as the trump suit. If there is any love card in the trick, the player who played the highest value love card wins the trick, regardless of the initial led suit. In the event that an ability modifies values and causes a tie, the first card played among those tied wins the trick.
4. Cleanup. The winner of the trick collects the played cards, places them face down in their personal area to keep count, and becomes the new leader to start the next trick. Tricks won by sidekicks are discarded and do not belong to any player.

Throughout the turns, players can activate their charged Special Abilities (discarding the stamina tokens if necessary). Each ability indicates how it can be activated.

The phase ends once all eight tricks have been resolved.

Phase III: End of Round

Proceed as follows:

1. Players can activate abilities with the “End of Round” label present on story or superhero cards.
2. At the end of the third round, the end-of-round effects of the event card are resolved, and it is then discarded.
3. Each player immediately records on their dial the victory points obtained based on their alignment (hero or villain) and the net number of tricks they currently possess.
4. If it is not the fifth round, energy tokens on abilities are recovered and returned to each player’s personal supply (except for tokens that had to be returned to the general supply to activate the effects).
5. If it is not the fifth round, the dealer marker is passed to the player on the left.

After this, a new round would begin.

Game End

The game ends at the conclusion of the fifth round. The player with the most points will be the winner. In case of a tie, the tied players share the victory.

Variants

Solo Mode. The player faces two bots, Automaton and Factoryon, who always play as heroes and whose eight-card hands are placed face up. During setup, standard events are replaced by an Automa deck adjusted to the chosen difficulty, revealing effects at the start of each round that modify the rivals’ hands. During gameplay, the real player plays normally and can choose to be a hero or a villain, while the bots are managed automatically: if they lead the trick, they play their highest card (unless you are a villain with no tricks, in which case they play their lowest); if they follow suit, they first draw two cards to try and update their hand, and then play the lowest card of the led suit that beats what is on the table, or failing that, their lowest legal card. In case of a tie in values, they always choose the leftmost card. Finally, scoring is done according to standard rules: the real player scores based on their chosen alignment and the bots under the criteria of the hero faction.

Personal Opinion

I’ve already mentioned this in many recent tocho-reviews, but here we go again… We are living in a golden age for the trick-taking format, a genre that has managed to break the boundaries of the traditional deck. Nowadays, it has transformed into a hotbed of originality where publishers compete to stretch its limits. By introducing plot twists, team collaboration dynamics, and elements of deductive logic, the sector demonstrates that this veteran game system is not only still relevant, but is enjoying ironclad health.

Given such effervescence in the genre, it was only a matter of time before a figure like Jamey Stegmaier made a move. The charismatic designer and publisher, known for his relentless instinct for capturing market trends and turning them into mass successes, couldn’t sit idly by watching the genre reinvent itself. Thus, he has read the community’s current appetite to shape his own proposal.

So here we are with this Origin Story, with which, alongside Pete Wissinger, the author responsible for publishing hits like Scythe (here is its tocho-review) or Viticulture (here is its tocho-review), will try to hook lovers of the genre. But first, we must thank Maldito Games for providing the review copy that makes this long spiel we just started possible.

Each player will take on the role of a superhero from the moment they discover their powers until they establish their character in the public eye. Thus, over the course of five rounds, these characters will receive characteristic elements, such as iconic objects, special powers, tight lycra suits, enemies, allies, etc. All leading up to a final revelation where their character arc is completed.

The goal of the players is to try to get the most victory points throughout these five rounds. And those victory points will be obtained mainly by playing a trick-taking game. Thus, at the beginning of each of those rounds, in addition to resolving various steps where an event can be revealed (only in one round), choosing a new story card that enables an effect, and receiving stamina tokens with which to activate those effects, each player receives a hand of eight cards from a deck made up of four suits with cards numbered from 1 to 13, with one of those suits acting as trump.

Before proceeding to resolve the eight tricks, each player must reveal their alignment simultaneously after choosing it in secret. Thus, you can act as a hero, which will provide one victory point for each trick won, or as a villain, which will provide four victory points if you don’t win any of the eight tricks.

The trick-taking phase is resolved in a traditional way. Thus, the player who leads the trick will play a card setting the suit that the other players must follow. If they don’t have cards of that suit, then they can play any card. The trick will be won by the player who played the highest card of the suit set by the leader or, if at least one player played a trump, the player who played the highest trump.

Even so, various effects from the players’ story cards can come into play here to modify card values. The player who wins the trick collects the cards to keep count and becomes the new leader of the next one. And so on until all eight tricks have been resolved, scoring points based on the alignment each player chose and the number of tricks won.

And that’s all there is to the game. The quick summary would be that we are looking at a trick-taking game of the type categorized as bidding on the number of tricks you’re going to win (although here the bid is simply whether you will or won’t win tricks) which has the peculiarity of accumulating rule modifiers as the game progresses.

The main idea seems very interesting to me, as it endows the design with something these kinds of games usually lack, that is, variability. The story card deck is huge, and in each round players draw three cards to choose one, looking to generate synergies that turn their superhero into an unstoppable force. The same applies to the characters themselves (each has a base ability) and the superhero cards (there are ten, and you receive two). Even the event deck is huge just to reveal one card per game (here my gut tells me that a card should be revealed each round due to the sheer amount of them).

But then the problems arrive. The first, and to me not the most important, is the issue of randomness and balance. The story cards provide very diverse types of effects, potentially generating strange snowballs where a player manages to create a combination of effects that sends their score through the roof, making it very hard to stop them. It’s a bit like what happened with Tapestry, although here perhaps it’s more relevant because the impact of those imbalances is felt much faster. But oh well, it’s a trick-taking game whose duration is not excessive for this type of design, so it’s better for it to have variability than to always be the same.

Where I do think the game fails is in the most important part, that is, the trick resolution and, above all, the scoring system. We start from the baseline that the maximum score you can get in a round is eight points if a player manages to win all eight tricks and had defined their alignment as a hero. The rest of the players in a situation like that would most likely have detected that they weren’t going to have many options to win tricks, declaring their alignment as a villain and scoring four points as a lesser evil (the difference in the end is four points in favor of the “hero”).

The problem is that players have no room for maneuver when managing an “average” hand, and only in extreme cases will they tend to act as a villain. But it is enough for a player to have received a single high card of a suit (a twelve or a thirteen) for them to be unable to avoid winning at least one trick.

And for me, the problem lies in the trump suit. As a general rule, if you have a game where there is a trump suit and it is a trick-taking game about trying to fine-tune the number of tricks you want to win, you need to generate uncertainty through some element, or else allow a certain rebalancing between players’ hands via card drafting or passing. If not, you open the door for a player to know in a round that they are going to win all eight tricks if they happen to be dealt the eight highest cards of the trump suit.

It strikes me as surprising that at this stage, with so many trick-taking games published, there are designs that keep tripping over this stone. It’s true that not all cards are dealt and that generates some uncertainty, but for me it’s insufficient for a player to feel like they have any control over what is going to happen in the resolution of the tricks. It’s a shame, because on a thematic level I think the design implements a great idea.

In the end, the only way to minimize this problem is to play at the maximum player count, so that the probabilities of a player having a tremendously bad or tremendously good hand are as low as possible. In this configuration, the game is entertaining, though the risk of imbalance from effect combinations always exists.

Where I did get a surprise is with its two-player mode. It seemed to me a very elegant way to add this uncertainty through two mini-hands of two cards that each player manages in parallel to their own, giving rise to quite interesting strategic resolutions. Very much in line with the two-player mode of dnup (here is its tocho-review).

All in all, I think it falls short of being a recommended game. As an alternative within the world of trick-taking games, and also looking for a distinctive touch through effects and paradigm shifts in each round, I recommend for the umpteenth time Chronicles (here is its tocho-review) by Seiji Kanai. A true masterpiece of the genre.

Let’s move on to production. There is nothing to object to here, as we find cardboard elements of acceptable thickness and density (the double-sided dial design is very clever, keeping the score visible no matter how you look at it), nicely dense speech-bubble-shaped wooden pieces for the stamina tokens, and cards with an excellent weight, linen texture, and great snap that wouldn’t need sleeving except for the trait cards, which are going to suffer significant wear if the game fits your group. The rulebook is well-structured and leaves no room for doubt.

On a visual level, the product stands out for a markedly painterly and comic-book approach, with a primary technique that emulates watercolor and ink, using fluid washes, transparencies, and splatters that bring dynamism and poetic textures to the compositions. The black outlines, done with a loose and expressive stroke, structure the figures while evoking the visual language of independent graphic novels, which is reinforced by the numbered panel layout of the personal board. It’s true that it can look a bit blurry, but I think it suits the design well.

And let’s wrap this up. Origin Story is a suggestive design that tries to combine the classic structure of trick-taking with an asymmetric progression based on the accumulation of effects representing the growth of a powered character. The search for synergies to power up our characters generates an initially stimulating dynamic, where building powers promises epic moments. However, the game trips up on the most important part: the resolution of the tricks. The lack of tools to manage uncertainty or mitigate the impact of luck in the deal ruins the tactical tension. Although the thematic premise is very interesting and the accumulation of effects brings attractive twists, the imbalance in scoring and the lack of control weigh down an experience that, while appealing, quickly deflates. Because of all this, I give it a…