Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

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Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Aug 24, 2013 12:48 pm

It's time again for me to use blogging to a barely-existant audience (I know of like one or two people who've said they read these things) as an excuse to play tabletop games against myself as a way of passing my idle hours! Sentinels of the Multiverse (hereafter just Sentinels) is a cooperative non-collectible, non-deckbuilding card game in which 3-to-5 players (or 1-2 players gonzo enough to play multiple positions) each pilot a superhero, represented by a deck of 40 cards and a single Character Card, and work together to battle a fiendish supervillain, also represented by a deck of cards (25 in this case) and two Character Cards (one of which is basically just a picture), with the battle taking place in a dynamic and hazardous Environment represented by yet another deck of cards (15 in this case). I hate to sound like I'm writing advertising copy, but in my honest opinion, Sentinels is the best card-game execution of the superhero genre I've ever seen (outshining deckbuilding games such as Legendary, and several CCGs, of which one of the better attempts was the Vs. System - I am admittedly only barely familiar with that one, so I can't really compare Sentinels to it). The game is very mathy, and you have to shuffle all 5-7 decks at the start of the game, but it's rules are extremely straightforward, the cards offer incredible variety, and it's just ridiculous loads of fun IMO; with an MSRP of $40 for the core edition (getting absolutely ALL the expansions will about quadruple that, but you can safely afford to space the process out over a long time, since the game is crazy amounts of replayable even with just the starter box), for a set of more than 500 cards and some handy dividers and tokens, it makes for quite a bargain if you're seriously into the fluff of superheroes, and the crunch of a simple-but-involved coop battle game. I've played two previous real games plus a solitaire one, so I'm hardly an expert, but I'm still going to puff up my chest, beat my fists against it several times while bellowing fiercely, and display my bombastic badassitude by running all three players in a solo game, for the second time in as many days.

For today's game, I'm running 3 superheroes: Wraith and Tachyon, obvious female ripoffs of homages to Batman and the Flash (the latter also being lesbian, according to the free comic on the game's website), and Ra, Egyptian sun god whose power comes in artifact form to a modern-day archaeologist who uses it to become a superhero, making for a fairly obvious parallel to Marvel's (non-movie) version of Thor. The villain I've selected (and indeed, at least three of the four villains that come in the core set) also comes from very visible Marvel roots, being clearly inspired by Magneto; her name is Citizen Dawn and she has light powers rather than magnetism, but the general concept is the same - she believes her superpowers make her better than other people, and has gathered a small army of fellow "Citizens" with similar abilities, attempting to create her own nation and declare war on humanity (for having taken her lunch money in high school or something). The battle will take place at the Wagner Mars Base, an outpost on the Red Planet with a cache of salvaged alien weapons protected by a self-destruct system (represented by one of the deck's 15 cards). Without further ado, "Let's Play!"
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Aug 24, 2013 1:58 pm

At the start of the game, Citizen Dawn's character card instructs you to obtain "H minus 1" - H meaning the number of Heroes playing, which is 3 in this game, so a total of 2 - Citizens from her Villain Deck. So I'll shuffle the Villain Deck, then reveal the top card - which is a Citizen, and then I'll reveal one more card - which is another Citizen, so I'm done. Citizens come in sets of 2-4 whose abilities key off each other (the back of Citizen Dawn's cards show a distinctly Communistic-looking design, so it makes sense that she'd be teaching her followers a doctrine of banding together against outsiders); the one's I've got today are both women, the somewhat Gothic-looking Citizen Sweat (of Blood, Sweat, and Tears) and the white-haired Citizen Winter (the other three seasons are also in the deck). Shuffling the rest of the decks (leaving out each Hero's character card, which gives us their HP and their innate Power), I'm ready to begin the game.

The Villain always takes the first turn, followed by all the Heroes, then the Environment, and then the Villain again. The Villain and Environment turns both consist of following all instructions on the appropriate set of cards in play, once at the start of the turn and once at the end, and in between those events, you play the top card of the deck (unless an effect on some other card prevents this). Heroes's turns are naturally a little more involved. Each hero starts the game with a hand of 4 cards, and on their turn they usually do three things: play a card, use a Power from one of their cards in play (usually this will be the Power on their Character Card for the first few turns, until they get out a card from their deck which offers them a better Power), and finally they draw a card. (If they are unable or unwilling to play a card, and likewise do not use a Power, their entire turn can consist of drawing two cards instead of one.)

So, for starters, we'll check Citizen Dawn and all of her cards in play (currently Citizens Sweat and Winter) for any abilities that happen at the start of the Villain turn. There is such an ability on Dawn herself, but it has conditions which don't yet apply, so it won't happen. The other two Citizens don't do anything at the start, so Dawn plays her top card, and what an opening salvo it is: Blinding Blast, a One-Shot effect which deals each hero 2 damage and makes them discard 2 cards! Damage is dealt to the HP of heroes, villains, and other "targets" (such as the Citizens). Your Character Card indicates your starting HP: Ra has 30, Tachyon 27, and Wraith 26. So each of them goes down by 2, and then has to dump half their hand! Ra has two copies of his Staff, so he discards one of them along with one other card; Tachyon discards two of her "Burst" cards, which a lot of her abilities like to count for their effectiveness, and Wraith, who has a lot of highly conditional cards and ways to draw more of them, can find two cards she doesn't especially care about to get rid of. Now that the Villain Card for the round has been played, we check for "End of villain turn" triggers, and there's one on each of Dawn and her two Citizens. These go off in the order the cards enter play (always how you resolve timing issues in this game), so Dawn goes first: "Citizen Dawn deals the Hero with the highest HP H-2 damage". That's Ra, so he loses 1 more of those HP, leaving him still the leader at 27. Then Citizen Sweat destroys an Ongoing card, but there aren't any in play, and then Citizen Winter deals each hero 2 damage, putting Ra down to 25/30 and leaving the two ladies with 4 damage each. Ouch, a painful first round for our team!

Next, each Hero takes a turn in sequence; I've set them up in alphabetical order, so Ra goes first. He plays his other copy of The Staff of Ra, which is an Equipment, so it stays out when played. It instructs him to regain 3 HP, so he goes back up to 28 of his full 30. While he has the Staff, he deals 1 extra damage every time he deals damage, and he can throw the staff at someone as a Power (in place of his regular Power), destroying the card, to deal 3 damage (which becomes 4 because the Staff isn't destroyed until after it deals the damage). Having played his card, Ra gets to use his power, and will use his innate ability to deal 2 damage to one target (several characters have this as their power, but Ra is the only one in the current game, so he's both the party "tank" and its sole "beatstick" just at the moment, with the other two characters tending to play support). If this were a real game, Ra would ask the other players for advice, and Tachyon would confirm that she can deal 1 damage to Citizen Winter on her turn, so Ra would go ahead and use his innate Power to deal 2 damage, which becomes 3 because of the Staff, to Winter, leaving her with just 1 of her 4 HP. Ra finishes his turn by drawing a card.

Tachyon's turn; she plays the card Accelerated Assault (also known as "Running around really fast and punching everyone you don't like"), which deals "each non-hero Target" (that is, any Villian or Environment card which has HP, including the Villain herself as well as both Citizens) 1 point of damage. Citizen Dawn has 80 HP (a fair-to-middling amount for villains, just as Wraith and Tachyon have more or less average HP for heroes), so she barely notices the scratch, but Citizen Sweat is bruised and Citizen Winter goes down, her card being placed in the villain "Trash". Now Tachyon uses her innate Power, which lets her peek at the top card of her deck, and either keep it or put it in her Trash. She's got the HUD Goggles coming up, which let her play an extra card every turn; normally that would be huge, but thanks to Dawn's first One-Shot, she doesn't have many cards to play, so the Goggles aren't useful and she gets them out of the way, drawing a different card to end her turn.

Wraith gets to go now; she plays Impromptu Invention, letting her draw one card, search her deck for an Equipment and put it into play (or into her hand if she prefers), and play one more card! Now that's powerful, especially given how good Wraith's equipment tends to be. Wraith decides to go straight for one of the two most potent of her cards (the other one being in her hand, and about to get played thanks to the Impromptu Invention - god what a good card that is!), the damage-dealing Razor Ordinance (which is most definitely not a "Wraitharang," of course; that would be wrong after all *wink wink*). Wraith then uses her bonus card play to put out a Utility Belt (which, according to the flavor text, contains a live fish, just in case); this Equipment lets her use an extra Power each turn, so she gets to throw the Razor Ordinance at Citizen Dawn, dealing 3 damage, as well as activate her own Power, "Stealth", which reduces the next damage she would take by 2. (The game helpfully includes tokens to let you track modifiers like this, so I punch out two of the "-1 Damage Taken" bars and put them on Wraith, who will have to remove them at the start of her next turn.)

Lastly, the Environment Turn happens to close out the round. The top card of the Wagner Mars Base deck is a Meteor Shower, which oddly enough has the effect of preventing any damage from getting dealt. That doesn't bother the heroes too much at this point (aside from Wraith, whose use of the Stealth power is now redundant), since it will stop Dawn from beating on them any more and will let them spend some time redrawing the cards that she made them discard. One hero can skip their entire turn to get rid of the Meteor Shower, which will eventually have to be done so that they can beat up Dawn and win the game; it's inconvenient that I've got Ra going first, since he's by far the most damage-focused of these three heroes, and thus it would be nice if someone else could destroy the Meteor Shower right before Ra's turn, without giving Dawn and the Mars Base a chance to beat on them first. Still, at least Tachyon is free to skip a turn right before Wraith, enabling Wraith to immediately throw her Ordinance; Ra will just have to hope he finds something useful to do with his time in the meanwhile.

Welp, that's one round of the game, so time for a little break before we continue.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Aug 24, 2013 2:54 pm

Back to Citizen Dawn. Her next card to play is Citizen Battery (a guy for a change - only the second male out of seven individuals involved in this battle so far), a 7-HP bruiser who would normally deal 3 damage to the highest-HP Hero at the end of the villain turn, were it not for our Meteor Shower. As it is, nothing else of consequence happens during Dawn's turn, since no damage can be dealt and there isn't an Ongoing for Citizen Sweat to remove, so we move on to Ra.

Ra has nothing useful to do during his turn; he could play an Ongoing, but it would just get destroyed by Sweat, and he can't kill her to prevent it due to the Meteors. So he takes the draw-two-cards option for his entire turn. Tachyon does the same. Wraith has no need to use either of the Powers she has access to, but she does have a card that's perfect for playing during this lull in the fight: Trust Fund, which allows her to draw four cards, then discard two. She has two cards (one previously in her hand, the other drawn as one of the four) which she can quite painlessly ditch, and so it was a highly profitable turn for her, despite the complete redundancy of her Utility Belt to date. She ends her turn by drawing one more card as normal; all the heroes are now back up to 4.

The Environment deck now disgorges the card Villainous Weaponry, which strangely enough is a Target with 5 HP; apparently you can attack the weapons directly, and they all blow up all at once no matter which villains are carrying them. This card is nasty, increasing all damage dealt by the Villains by 1, and coming out right before their turn too. Fortunately, the Meteor Shower prevents it from doing anything unpleasant this turn, but I happen to know the deck contains two other copies. Worrisome!

Dawn brings out Citizen Autumn, another girl, whose ability also destroys Ongoing cards; the heroes are just not meant to have any of those this game, it seems. So we move right on to Ra, who's just about to skip his turn to destroy the Meteor Shower because he's completely screwed as long as it's out, but Tachyon convinces him not to do this. So instead he takes the draw-two-cards option again.

Tachyon plays Lightning Reflexes, a One-Shot which lets her play two more cards. The first of these is Blinding Speed, a Burst which destroys an Ongoing or Environment card, so she takes out the Meteor Storm. She then follows it up with Hypersonic Assault, dealing 1 damage to each non-hero target (meaning all of Dawn's Citizens, Dawn herself, and even the Villainous Weaponry), and more importantly, prohibiting those targets from dealing damage until Tachyon's next turn, thereby preventing the Villainous Weaponry from increasing that damage until the players have had a full round to destroy it and possibly some Citizens. (If Dawn plays a new Citizen, that one won't be affected by Hypersonic Assault since it wasn't in play at the time, so that one might deal damage which is increased by the Weaponry, but this is a tolerable risk.) Dawn, Sweat, Battery, Autumn and the Weaponry are all dinged, and Tachyon uses her power to discard an Ongoing card which wouldn't have been worth trying to use for the one turn before Sweat and Autumn would remove it - then, at the end of the turn, she draws an Ongoing card that will be useful even if it only lasts for the one turn.

The Wraith has lots of options for her turn (as is more or less her shtick), but it's hard to think any of them might be as good as playing another copy of Impromptu Invention. Unfortunately the card she draws is one of the Equipments she might have searched up, but the single best choice remains available: the Micro Targeting Computer, which increases nearly all damage the Wraith deals by 2! Impromptu lets Wraith play another card now, and it's the one she drew because of it, which combos incredibly nicely with the Micro-Computer: Throwing Knives, which like the Razor Ordinance can deal up to 3 damage, but to three different targets instead of the same one. The downside is that if you only have (or only care about) one target to damage, the Throwing Knives can't hit it twice or thrice; they do only one damage. But the upside is that the MTC increases every instance of damage, so now the Knives deal a total of 9 damage across their three targets, while the Razor deals 5 to just one. Since the various Citizens aren't going to deal any damage this round, Wraith has no need for Stealth, so the two powers she uses are in fact Throwing Knives and Razor Ordinance (without the Utility Belt, she'd have to choose); she dishes out 3 damage each to Dawn, Battery, and the Weaponry, and then 5 more straight to Dawn's face. That is a LOT of damage to deal in one round; Wraith is a little hard to get rolling, but once she finds her combos, she's easily one of the strongest characters (come to think of it, Ra is another one I'd put on that list, though he's easier to play right out the gate; Tachyon is not as strong comparatively, though she's a heck of a lot of fun).

This third round ends with the Wagner Base disgorging more Villainous Weaponry; this upcoming round would really hurt if not for the Hypersonic assault! Another brief pause before we continue.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Aug 24, 2013 4:20 pm

Unfortunately, while Dawn and her crew may not be able to deal any damage, they can still do annoying things on their turn; the next card off the top of her deck is Healing Light, which gives Dawn back 10 HP (she's lost 13 so far, 8 of them just in Wraith's last turn), as well as removing all damage from all the other Citizens.

Ra is officially mad about the whole "couldn't deal damage, and still can't keep Ongoing cards in play" situation, which had left him with not much to do and is still cramping his style; he plays a Fire Blast which is improved by the Staff, totaling 6 damage and taking Citizen Autumn out in one shot. He then uses his Power to throw the Staff at Battery, putting 4 damage on him and enabling Wraith to take him out with the Knives on her turn.

Tachyon has two very nice cards in her hand, but they're both somewhat suboptimal here, so she decides to leave them for now, skip her not-terribly-strong Power, and just draw two cards. This means it's all up to Wraith to take some Citizens and Weaponry out before a very painful next turn commences; she plays a Grappling Hook to outright destroy the newer, undamaged Villainous Weaponry, and the Hook allows her to draw a card (which is unfortunately another copy of the Micro-Computer; like most of her Equipment cards, the Computer is Limited, so she's only allowed to have one copy of it in play, the other just being a backup in case it's destroyed, or else something to discard when required to). She tosses her Knives to wound Dawn and take out Battery and the other Weaponry (still damaged from last round), leaving the villain team back down to just Dawn and Sweat and without enhancements, and then sticks another Razor in Dawn, getting her down to almost where she was before the Healing Light. She ends her turn by drawing a card, which is another redundant copy of a Limited card (the Razor Ordinance); she's got 5 cards in her hand now, but only one is extremely useful.

The Environment deck is back down to no cards in play, but it turns up a new one - which is the third Villainous Weaponry. Methinks I didn't shuffle too well. Well, whatever. Dawn plays her next card - another Healing Light! Yeah, my shuffling left something to be desired alright, but oh well; at least this time, Dawn's cronies don't get any healing, though she herself erases all but 1 of the damage she's taken. Finally, the villain turn ends with Dawn able to deal damage; Ra has the highest HP at 28, so he's dealt 2 damage by Dawn's ability (as a reminder, she deals "H-2" damage, with H being the number of heroes, so that's 1 damage, increased to 2 by the Villainous Weaponry).

Ra plays another copy of his Staff, healing himself for 3, then blasts the Villainous Weaponry for 3 damage with his innate power. Tachyon plays her awesome Ongoing card which is worth playing even with Citizen Sweat still out, Pushing The Limits, which lets her play and draw one extra card each turn. She then plays her extra card, Fleet of Foot, which gives every hero (including herself) a card draw and lets her play one more card. (It also has art which shows a hilarious reference to the Flash, which I won't spoil in the hopes that you'll be curious enough to go out and buy the game yourself.) The card she draws is - another copy of Fleet of Foot! Guess sometimes failure to shuffle adequately can be a good thing. Wraith gets an extra copy of a Limited card off the second draw, and Ra gets Ongoing cards both times, so it's not super-useful...but like I said, playing Tachyon is just fun. She still has one play left, and she's just drawn another Hypersonic Assault, but it doesn't seem that it's worth wasting this with only one damage source out there, so she just plays the Burst Quick Insight, letting her draw three cards and discard two. She discards a duplicate of a card she's been saving for a long time and an Ongoing card which won't be worth bothering with, and then she uses her power to cycle past a handy-but-not-very-powerful Burst before drawing two cards to end her turn, making for a total of eight cards that came off the top of her deck in that one turn!

The Wraith only got one useful card out of Tachyon's antics, but it was quite a useful one indeed: Throat Jab, which deals 2 damage to a target (specifically, Citizen Dawn) and prevents them from dealing damage until Wraith's next turn. Now is probably a good time to explain Damage Types, which I have been glossing over so far in this playthrough; damage always has one of a number of types, and usually they don't make much difference, but in this case it's worth noting that Wraith's Micro-Computer increases Projectile damage, which most of her Equipment deals, but the Throat Jab one-shot is dealing Melee damage, which therefore isn't increased. So Dawn just takes 2 damage, but she misses her next attack, which the Villainous Weaponry would have improved. Except that Wraith then throws her Knives, killing the Weaponry anyway, plus putting 3 damage each on Dawn and Sweat, before the Razor dishes out another 5 damage to Dawn (after checking with Tachyon that she doesn't especially mind if Pushing the Limits gets destroyed by Sweat on the villain turn. Wraith draws her card at the end of the turn, and it's Environment time.

The Wagner Mars Base hasn't done an awful lot so far - imposed peace for a couple of turns, added 1 or 2 damage to the villains' attacks after that, and of course soaked up a couple of direct attacks that could have gone after the villains. But it's about to become a LOT more important, because the card that it just put out is the Self-Destruct Sequence. This counts down every turn, starting from 2 (the countdown is measured by taking cards from the environment deck - fewer other things are likely to happen while the base is threatening to blow itself up), and if it reaches 0, the players instantly lose. So, since it starts at 2, the players can afford to ignore it for one round, but the next round, they'll need to make sure it starts counting back up...one player can uptick it by one card if they skip their whole turn, so if one player does that without fail every turn, the countdown will never get any closer to doom. If two players skip their turns, headway is made; when the countdown pile is up to H+2, so 5 in this case (possible if everyone just skips their turn in the round after it appears), the Self-Destruct is aborted. Of course, it might be easier to just destroy the Countdown with any card that destroys an Environment, such as Tachyon's Blinding Speed or Wraith's Grappling Hook, but again this makes it inconvenient that Ra goes before those players; he probably has to be the one to skip his turn to stop the countdown, before the girls draw their card at the end of the turn to see whether they'll be able to destroy the Sequence on their next turn. Had Ra gone last, he could have waited to "hear" (again, if we pretend there were actually multiple players discussing their strategy) where the other two were at before he committed to skipping his turn. (Also of note, there's a slight glitch in the game text here; the Sequence says that if you abort it by getting the countdown pile up to H+2, the Sequence and the countdown pile are destroyed...but it never clarifies that the countdown pile goes anywhere if the Sequence is destroyed directly, nor that it can't be. So by a strict interpretation of the rules...which I think you're not ever supposed to do in this game, according to the creators, but I can't help noticing these things...playing a Grappling Hook not only destroys the Sequence but traps the cards in the countdown pile out of the game forever, potentially whittling the deck down until it's impossible to fill the countdown pile at all! Nor, for that matter, is there any clarification about what happens if a bunch of Meteor Showers and Villainous Weaponries were out, and it proved that the Environment deck ran out and it was impossible to add to the countdown anymore...presumably in that case, it couldn't be aborted, but this is not made explicit. They should have written this card in smaller type IMO.)

Anyway, after all that action on the Environment turn, there's no way I'm not breaking again.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Aug 24, 2013 5:54 pm

Dawn plays Luminous Leadership, her first Ongoing card, which gives each Citizen (including Dawn herself) back 1 HP at the start of the villain turn. Dawn pings Ra for 1 damage, then Citizen Sweat finally gets to destroy an Ongoing, taking out Tachyon's Pushing the Limits.

The "players" agree that it's probably best to wait a turn before doing anything about the Self-Destruct, so Ra takes his turn normally; he opens with a Flame Spike, dealing 1 damage (+1 from the Staff of Ra) to Citizen Sweat, who finally perishes before Leadership can start healing her. Flame Spike also allows Ra to use an extra power that turn, so he uses his innate power to blast Dawn for 3 (she's now down to 9, having been reduced to 11 and 13 before the second and first Healing Lights, so hopefully this trend doesn't continue), and then throwing the Staff of Ra at her for 4 more (now she's down to 13 again; the Healing Lights have pretty much wasted two entire turns of Tachyon and Wraith's efforts, plus three of Ra's turns).

Tachyon could play a new Pushing the Limits, but none of the cards she's holding is of optimum usefulness right now, so she decides to skip her turn and add to the countdown pile. Wraith could do the same, but in view of the lack of extra targets for her Throwing Knives, or much need for her to go Stealth, she decides that it's time to start using a more tactical power, and plays another copy of the very first card she discarded: an Infrared Eyepiece. She then uses its power, which is to look at the top 2 villain cards, sending one to the bottom of the deck, and drawing a card for herself. The revealed cards are Citizen Truth, a very potent bruser who reduces damage to himself by 1 while making all other Citizens immune, and Return with the Dawn, an Ongoing which resurrects random Citizens from the Trash at the end of each villain turn (whereupon, assuming I've been following the rules correctly, they'll immediately do their own end of turn effects, which are impossible to completely predict in view of the random thing). While Return with the Dawn is potentially annoying, it might actually be helpful, since four of Dawn's Citizens have died so far, and she starts getting meaner after a fifth one is killed. Besides which, Truth is just way too big of a pain in the rear, so Wraith sends him to the bottom of the deck, then tosses her Razor at Dawn for 5 damage before ending her turn (and drawing a second redundant copy of the MTC).

The Environment turn begins; the card most recently added to the countdown pile goes to the trash, and then the top card of the deck is played. These are both Oxygen Leaks; the one that's actually play has two effects while in play, but I won't bother saying what they are, because it's one of the easiest Environments to get rid of, and one of its effects is a giant "FU" to Ra in particular, so he happily deals with it. All he has to do is discard one card, and he doesn't even have to wait until the next turn to do it. He discards Flame Barrier, an Ongoing which makes him retribute against the damage he takes with 2 damage of his own, once a turn...handy, but between the Citizens' apparent mad-on for Ongoing cards and the relatively small amount of damage they've been dishing out, it seems spareable. So the Oxygen Leak is quickly sealed, the Countdown stays at 2 for a round, and Citizen Dawn goes.

Recovering 1 HP from her own inspiring leadership, Dawn puts out her Return, then pings Ra for 1. Ra promptly plays Summon Staff, letting him search his deck for the fourth copy of the damn thing and get it into his hand; he then gets to draw a card and play a card, and the card he plays is the Staff, which heals him back to full. He uses his innate power, with a boost from the Staff, to deal 3 damage to Dawn, putting her down by 20 HP (from her starting 80), meaning that a total of 41 damage has been dealt to her so far this game - were it not for her healing, she'd be more than half dead.

Tachyon again opts to skip her turn keeping the countdown busy, and Wraith again refuses join her in making any actual progress on stopping it. Were it simply a matter of discarding cards, of course, she'd be happy to help, but as it is, she rather likes hitting Dawn for 5 each round while messing with Dawn's draws, and so she decides to do that again, first playing Suture Self to heal 3 HP (sadly she doesn't get an awesome Staff out of the deal). Her Eyepiece reveals that one of the upcoming cards is a Blinding Blast; this is nowhere near as damaging now as it was before, and Tachyon in particular requests that it be allowed to occur, so Citizen Anvil goes to the bottom of the deck. Wraith debates going Stealth since she knows she'll be taking 2 damage, but decides that it's not necessary and that there's no sense in giving up 5 damage to Dawn while she's busily healing herself.

The Mars Base suffers from a Fire in the Biosphere; each hero takes 4 damage, since none of them have an Ongoing card to destroy. It'll be relatively easy to destroy this by discarding two cards (even after the Blinding Blast), but it won't be possible until after a round. Citizen Dawn sets off her Blinding Blast, with Ra discarding a couple of Ongoing cards that have Powers he doesn't strictly need, Tachyon happily giving up a Sucker Punch ("Destroy one target with 2 or fewer HP"; yeah, that's totally worth using up your only card play on an average turn) but being somewhat sad to lose a Pushing the Limits, and Wraith happily disposing of a couple of duplicate Equipment. Now Dawn deals her automatic 1 damage; it's been a long time since I had to check whether Ra is in fact still ahead on HP, but he still has 24 to Wraith's 19 and Tachyon's 17, so he gets pinged as usual. Citizen Autumn is chosen to Return with the Dawn, but nobody cares; Ra plans to start playing Ongoings again, and it'll be a long time before he's in any danger of being the lowest HP, which is the only player that Autumn picks on. Autumn destroys all 0 Onging cards that Tachyon has out, and then it's Ra's turn.

Ra plays Scorched Earth, dealing damage equal to the number of Environment cards to every non-Hero target, which currently just means Dawn and Autumn. The damage is 2, +1 from the Staff; he then uses his innate power to deal 3 more. He draws the extremely not-useful (though very cool) Wrathful Gaze, which is like Tachyon's Sucker Punch, only it's an Ongoing card's Power instead of a one-shot, and he clearly doesn't have powers to spare, from one glance at his hand.

Tachyon is finally ready to take a turn, since Dawn finally got around to damaging her; she plays Supersonic Response, dealing 4 damage (of two different types, neither of which currently matters) to Dawn because Dawn damaged her. She then uses her power and confirms that Blinding Speed is her next card, so she draws that and "tells" the other "players" not to worry about the Self-Destruct Sequence.

Wraith has only 2 copies of a single card which she can play; that card is the reason why I haven't been referring to the MTC as just "the Computer" - it's the Mega Computer. It's not very useful, just reducing damage dealt by Environments (and only some of these even theoretically can deal damage, with even fewer getting the chance to), but she has no reason to avoid playing it now that she's out of better options, so she adds it to her collection. She "decides" it's still worth her time to do the Eyepiece, sending Citizen Assault (buddy of Citizen Battery) to the bottom of the deck rather than letting him damage all the heroes on his next turn, and preparing the next card to be a second copy of Return With the Dawn, a card that doesn't get especially more annoying in multiples. Hitting Dawn for 5 with the Razor (since it's not worth bothering to kill Autumn with the Throwing Knives, if it would mean 2 fewer damage to Dawn, even though this means letting Autumn heal next turn), Wraith draws a card, ends her turn, and discards two Limited redundancies to put out the Fire in the Biosphere. (Another copy of this proves to be the next card from the countdown pile, but I'm fairly certain that these two cards did not consecutively come out of the deck, so this one can't be blamed on my shuffling.)

A new Environment card comes into play: the Maintenance Level. This one is strange: it plays an additional Environment card each turn, including right now, and can't be destroyed until the start of the next turn, when destroying it requires all players to reshuffle their trash into their decks - potentially an advantage to most players, though less so to the Wraith with all of her triplicate Limited cards. When the Maint Level is destroyed, this way or any other way, it is added to the countdown pile if there is one, so it can delay the Self Destruct - but of course, that's about to stop being relevant anyway. At the end of the turn, another Maint Level comes out, so it too plays another Environment card, and this one is (I think) the last one we haven't seen from this Enviro deck: Pervasive Red Dust. This one is catastrophic to the Wraith; at the end of the enviro turn, it destroys H Equipment cards. Ra reluctantly gives up his Staff so that Wraith will only need to lose 2 Equipments, meaning the Mega Computer and the Eyepiece (which has been very handy, but is a less direct contributor to winning the game than everything else, so it has to go; I don't want to think about what I'd have to have given up in order to let Ra keep his Staff). What's weird about the Red Dust in the Maint Level(s) is that when the Dust is destroyed, by each player discarding one card, you get to get one of your Equpment into play from the trash (not necessarily the one that you gave up, although clearly that's the intended flavor - your Equipment isn't completely ruined, at least not all of it, but just needs you to take some time cleaning it - but it's also perfectly possible to discard an Equipment card destroying it and then put that Equipment into play), but because cards have to be dealt with in the order they entered play, the Maint Levels would have to be destroyed before the Red Dust, and that would mean players wouldn't have discard piles, except for the one card each they discarded to Red Dust.

Anyway, that's clearly enough talk about this round.
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Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Aug 24, 2013 8:04 pm

Dawn heals herself and Autumn, then plays her second copy of Return with the Dawn; Citizen Sweat and Citizen Winter come out due to the pair of Returns, with Sweat as usual finding no Ongoing to destroy, but Winter dishing out 2 damage to each of the heroes. Ra, however, was very prepared to retaliate. He plays the Ongoing card he's been hanging onto for most of the game, waiting for a chance to use it: Drawn to the Flame, whose power he uses now in place of his own. It deals damage equal to the number of villain Ongoing cards in play, which is 3 right now (Luminous Leadership and two copies of Return with the Dawn), to every non-hero target; if the Staff of Ra were still in play, the resulting conflagration would have killed Citizens Autumn and Winter outright (due to the former's remaining wounds and the latter's low starting HP), but as it stands, nobody outright dies to it, just taking a total of 12 damage across 4 cards. Dawn is now down to 40 HP, the halfway mark of actually beating her, but hopefully she won't do two more Healing Lights and make the game take as much longer as it's already taken.

Ra advises his fellow "players" that it'd be very helpful to him if Citizen Sweat could re-die (he'll then have to hope she isn't Returned with the Dawn, but still, at least this way there's a chance that his awesomely powerful Ongoing will remain). Tachyon has Hypersonic Assault, which would be a great way to demolish Autumn and Winter, but it wouldn't finish off Sweat, and anyway she has no choice but to play Blinding Speed in order to take out the Self-Destruct Sequence, since otherwise Wraith would have to skip her next turn just to keep the game from ending. Tachyon uses her power, confirming that her next card is Fleet of Foot, which she opts to draw rather than discarding.

Aside from duplicates of her equipment, which she plans on discarding, Wraith's only card in hand is Inventory Barrage, a card she'd really prefer not to play except for the purpose of ending the Archenemy. It deals 2 damage to the target for each of your Equipment, but destroys them all (the damage is projectile, but the Targeting Computer gets thrown along with everything else, and this card specifies that the equipment is destroyed first, unlike when you throw the Staff of Ra, so there's no bonus). She could play a Mega Computer, but sees litle point. So she just uses her Throwing Knives to finish off Sweat and Winter along with doing 3 damage to Dawn, then throws her Razor at Dawn for 5 more. She is somewhat happy to then draw a replacement for her Infrared Eyepiece; potentially there may be only 1 turn of Dawn getting to play cards without interference.

The Environment Turn starts. First, the players would lose the game if Self-Destruct were still out, but no worry there. Next, Maint Level #1 may be destroyed. Ra is only too happy to reshuffle his trash; it means his Staffs of Ra go back into his deck, meaning that the next three copies of Summon Staff he draws won't be duds (since, as far as I can tell with the text as written, it cannot take the Staff out of the trash). Tachyon is less happy about it; she's holding a card in her hand which keys off the number of Bursts in her trash, but it doesn't strongly require that number to be maximized, so she is only slightly grudging about shuffling in. And Wraith of course is kind of sad to put back all those duplicate equipment (especially since her trash was one card thicker than her deck!), but it has to be done in order to get rid of the Maint Level and not be deluged with three new Environments this turn. Now that one Maint Level is down, it's ambiguous in the rules whether the players can destroy the second one by shuffling their 0-card trashes into their deck; for the sake of speeding up play in this already-prolonged solitaire session, I'll judge that they can. Finally, there's Red Dust; Ra discards his Wrathful Gaze that he's unlikely to ever need, Tachyon reluctantly dumps Hypersonic Assault, and Wraith throws out a Mega Computer which the Dust puts into play.

Finally, the last card of the Environment deck comes out - an Oxygen Leak. Now I might as well point out what it does, because it's rather impressive - at the start of the environment turn, if Oxygen Leak is still there, all targets on both sides take damage equal to the size of the environment trash - which at the moment is the maximum possible damage of 14. That's a LOT of damage, and with Dawn down to just 32 HP and able to take at least 8 damage just on Wraith's turn (10 if she uses an Inventory Barrage), it's tempting to let it happen. The problem is its other ability - "reduce all fire damage by 3". Ra does virtually nothing but fire damage, and while he can deal enough of it to power through a reduction of 3 thanks to a card in his hand, it's still enough to almost negate his offensive powers. Doing the math, it becomes clear that there's no chance of Ra burning hot enough in a low-O2 environment to deal 6 damage to Dawn, which is the minimum that might weaken her enough that she could succumb to the toxic Martian atmosphere. So, he simply discards his weakest card and disposes of the Leak.

Back to Dawn. She and Autumn heal up by 1, then she plays Citizen Spring, who does the same thing at the villain turn's end which Luminous Leadership does at its start: heal Dawn and Autumn by 1. (Good thing Ra wasn't able to do that 6 damage after all, because it would no longer be enough.) Now that Spring has sprung, five of Dawn's citizens exist, so if one of them doesn't stay in play until the start of her next turn, she'll "flip" into a different (and probably more dangerous, given that she'll be avenging her fallen comrades) form at that time. At end of turn, Dawn deals her damage, forcing me to actually check hero HP totals again - Ra is at 21, so he still leads over Tachyon's 15 and Wraith's 17. He gets pinged, and then unfortunately Citizen Sweat Returns with the Dawn, along with Citizen Winter. Ra was really hoping Sweat would stay dead for a change and Battery would come out instead, even though he would proceed to Batter the sun god for 3; instead, Sweat destroys Drawn to the Flame before it could have shot back a total of 5 damage to each Citizen, due to a combo with a card that Ra has been holding practically all game. Alas, 'twas not to be. After Sweat has done her thing, Winter deals 2 damage to each hero, and then Ra goes.

Ra concludes that there's no point in hitting the Citizens, since they're just going to keep rising from the dead; going for a brute-force approach, he plays Solar Flare, boosting all his fire damage (meaning almost all his damage, excepting only when he throws the Staff of Ra as far as I can tell) by 2 per source, but destroying itself in one turn unless he takes 4 damage at the end of his turn. With Sweat hanging around, the latter option is definitely not happening, so Ra just has the card add 2 damage to his innate blast, hitting Dawn for 4. She is now down by 50 from her starting HP, or about 75 from where she started the game; all the healing she's done is officially most or all of what's keeping her alive at this point. Ra draws his current favorite card, Fire Blast, and ends his turn very much hoping he'll get to use it next round.

Tachyon plays Fleet of Foot, giving herself and each other player an extra card - and more germanely putting a Burst into her trash. She now gets to play another card, which is her Sonic Vortex - hits as many targets as there are Bursts in your trash, for 3 damage each. She only gets one target, which will of course be Dawn. The last card left in her hand is Lightning Reflexes, so when she peeks at her next card (with her innate Power) and finds it to be another Sonic Vortex, she discards it for no other reason than because it doesn't help her draw more cards. Of course, neither does the Blinding Speed she draws instead, but at least that one's a Burst.

Though uncertain whether it's worth giving up 3 damage to Dawn from the Throwing Knives, Wraith decides to play the Eyepiece after all; the heroes have something resembling a plan and are making serious progress toward taking Dawn down, so the last thing they need is to risk that something as insane as Citizen Truth might sneak up on them. Unfortunately, because I "chose not to" (ie forgot to) play a card before using the Eyepiece, I'm not able to, and the Eyepiece finds that two new cards are coming up and both of them are devastating. Devastating Aurora might come in slightly handy by destroying the next Environment, whatever it'll be, and it wouldn't hurt Ra or Tachyon at all - but it also destroys all Equipment (as well as Ongoing cards), and would leave Wraith with absolutely nothing left out except her innate power, which doesn't do any damage. So, even though this ruins Tachyon completely and is rough on Ra as well, she makes the selfish choice and allows Dawn's next card to be Citizen Tears, who we'll hear about in a minute. As a concession to the other players, Wraith considers throwing her Razor at Citizen Sweat rather than at Dawn, since it would kill her in one shot...but she would just Return with the Dawn anyway, there being no way around it at this point. So nothing can be done except to hit Dawn for 5 more and end the turn.

Now it's necessary to shuffle the Environment deck so that a new one can be played (I have yet to find in the rules where it actually says you do this; as far as I can tell it's only stated in the "How to Play Basics" on the company's website, which is dashed annoying, especially since it's still not clarified whether you shuffle upon needing a new card or immediately when the deck runs out - obviously this game I'm assuming the former). To make certain that poor shuffling isn't responsible for suspicious streaks this time, I manually break up all identical sets of cards before the shuffle; after very thoroughly mixing things up, I get a Maint Level followed by an Oxygen Leak. Though Ra could actually deal damage through the Oxygen Leak with his Fire Blast, he sees no reason to give this up, even though the Leak isn't actually dealing more than 1 damage at the most this time, and might do none if the players let the Maint Level stay out. So Ra dumps a relatively weak card to close the Leak, and then it's Dawn's turn.

First Dawn and Autumn heal up, then Citizen Tears - wait, no Citizen Assault comes out. How did that go and happen? I know I just had Citizen Tears and should have put her back on top; where do you suppose she went? Okay, somehow Citizens Assault and Citizen Anvil ended up in uncertain locations, but their proper order was documented, so I managed to get everything straightened out. So Tears goes out as intended, and then the end of turn sequence happens. Dawn damages Ra as usual, since he's still the toughest; Citizen Battery is the last to Return with the Dawn, then Citizen Spring heals Dawn and Autun again (how Autumn still has damage on her, I have no idea; maybe I forgot the healing at some point). Sweat has no Ongoing to take out, of course, but Winter deals 2 damage across the board, and then it's Tears's turn; thanks to Tears's presence, Sweat would have destroyed ALL of one player's Ongoings instead of just one, but of course that doesn't make much difference when Sweat has been in or near play as long as she has. As for Tears herself, she makes each player discard 1 card for herself, and another for Sweat (both of them also deal damage based on the removed cards if Citizen Blood is out, but we haven't seen him yet). Since it's pointless to try and destroy Citizens anymore thanks to the Returns with the Dawn, Ra accepts that his combo potential screwed, and discards every card except the ultra-straightforward Fire Blast. Tachyon loses her whole hand, and thus her whole next turn (and it won't even help for her to draw two cards, because Tears will discard them both). Only Wraith is relatively untouched, discarding two Limited dupes. Finally, still-toughest Ra takes 3 damage from Battery, dropping below Wraith's HP for a change, and it becomes his turn.

Ra plays his Fire Blast and then uses his power, both targeting Dawn for a total of 7 damage; she's now down to 17 HP. That's not enough for the 12 that Wraith can deal with Inventory Barrage to quite finish her off, but the Barrage is going to get discarded otherwise; the question is whether Wraith dares risk what might come out if she lets Dawn start a turn without her top card having been fixed by the Eyepiece. Deciding that it's her own fault that Tears appeared, and that she might as well suffer as a result, Wraith plays her Trust Fund to draw four cards and discard two, leaving her with three cards, so she'll be able to keep one when Tears goes off again. She uses the Eyepiece, getting rid of another Aurora and setting up Dawn to Channel the Eclipse, an Ongoing card which deals her 2 damage at the end of her turn, but lets her play an extra villain card at the start of the turn. Wraith hopes that Dawn won't get to start another turn, so she hits her for 5 and ends her turn, drawing another card, so she'll have two left after Tears goes off.

This time there's no hesitation whatsoever for the players to shuffle their trash into their decks and get rid of the Maintenance Level; in its place, Villainous Weaponry comes out, and this time it's going to hurt. Dawn begins to channel the Eclipse, then deals 2 damage to the Wraith (who's still 1 HP ahead of Ra) with her innate ability. Winter deals 3 damage to every hero, then Tears deprives everyone but Wraith of her entire hand, and Battery hits Ra (who's very briefly back to being the HP leader) 4 more damage. Ouch. Ra is now down to 7 HP, with Tachyon at 10 and Wraith at 12. The healing from Luminous Leadership and Citizen Spring is canceled by the damage from Channel the Eclipse.

Ra can do nothing but blast Dawn for 2, and Tachyon can't even do that; they draw 3 cards between them, but won't keep them past the next turn, so it's all up to Wraith. But y'know, even if Ra hadn't blasted Dawn, she'd still be at 12, which is how much damage Wraith can deal with one of two Inventory Barrages. So finally, Dawn goes down, and it wasn't even the extra 2 damage from Channel the Eclipse which did her in. Had that not been sufficient to keep her from getting another turn, who knows what she might have done. Inventory Barrage is always a last-ditch resort for Wraith, but it can deal a LOT of damage in a hurry, so ending the game is exactly what it's generally meant for.

That's 3 out of 4 games of this I've played where the heroes won (and that time, which was another solo game, it was as much the Environment as the villain which defeated me; the two combined serendipitously to create a hilariously catastrophic scenario, where I didn't even try to count how much damage was getting dealt, because even if someone had survived, it would hardly have mattered as badly messed up as things were at that point), though it's only the second time a game has ended without any heroes falling (Sentinels has a unique approach to the problem of defeated players having nothing to do in the game, which I guess I won't have to discuss until my next Lets Play). Dawn is not one of the tougher villains, but she's definitely tricky; since she never flipped this game, I will avoid peeking at her reverse side, and save myself a surprise for the next time I play against her (though I'll be wanting to at least face two of the remaining three villains first, assuming I don't go out and buy any more). I also still don't know exactly what Citizens Blood, Dare, Hammer and Summer do, and there might be one or two other cards in Dawn's deck I didn't see; with the different abilities of her various Citizens and innate cards, she definitely strikes me as having more variety than most of the other four Villains I've faced (I lied in my OP by the way, saying I had played the game three previous times; that's true only if I exclude the aforementioned disastrous solo game). She's lots of fun to play against, and the flavor they created for her quasi-Hippie, quasi-religious, quasi-Communist faction is right up my alley (I like "white-hat villains" who deconstruct the traditional antagonistic cliches, though I'm less fond of the grittily "realistic" anti-heroes they're often pitted against). I'm less fond of the marsbase Environment, but it was certainly not the craziest or most annoying one I've encountered.

Welp, that's it for this session. But you'll definitely be hearing from me about this game again; it's one of those rare gems that I simply cannot seem to grow tired of.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by ThroughTheWell » Sun Aug 25, 2013 6:35 pm

I read it, sounds interesting, and better than some of the other games you've previewed.

Choices: atk env, atk minion, atk villan, or refresh? And then, in terms of attacking, it sounds like each player hero has a limited choice based on cards out (equipment and ongoing), small hand size, and inate power? I kind of wish there were a few more options. I'm also curious if the card effect make you think of hero stuff instead of just card effects.

Hope your next game ditches Ra. He sounds like the least interesting. Definately show us a different villan and env.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sun Aug 25, 2013 6:56 pm

ThroughTheWell wrote:Choices: atk env, atk minion, atk villan, or refresh? And then, in terms of attacking, it sounds like each player hero has a limited choice based on cards out (equipment and ongoing), small hand size, and inate power?
Yeah, one of the game's weak points is that you often have a relatively short list of choices to make, but there are characters who get a relatively larger number of options, and some Villains and Environments will give you more than others. Mostly, though, variety comes in the form of the many different combinations of Villain, Environment, and set of Heroes. You choose these, randomly or by preference, and then you'll often (thought not always) have some obvious best choices to iterate, and see what effects randomly pop up. It's not the most strategic game, but it's not completely mindless, and of course it depends a lot on what character you're playing. Ra almost always wants to blast things with his biggest available boom, but Tachyon tends to have a lot of choices, and Wraith is somewhere in the middle, with the MTC+Razor combo being extremely obvious, but not always present in play.
I'm also curious if the card effect make you think of hero stuff instead of just card effects.
The cards have art and flavor text to help keep you in the mood, which doesn't come through in my description of a game. Some of the cards are evocative of comic book tropes, but I admit that the game could be better at this; a lot of cards are fairly generic "deal X damage of type Y to Z sorts of targets", keeping the game very focused on the battle aspect, without much sense of other hero tropes such as rescuing civilians or inspiring other heroes to join your cause. Still, the game is fairly flavorful; different Villains have a very distinct "feel". Battling the evil nature spirit really seems like fighting an angry mountain, while the villainess who summons armies of crows to peck everyone's eyes out has an explosive aspect that ramps up the tension fittingly. Could be better perhaps, but I think it works well.
Hope your next game ditches Ra. He sounds like the least interesting. Definately show us a different villan and env.
That was the plan; I've already picked out who I have in mind, though I'm still finalizing the hero lineup. Ra is going to sit out, but he'll be replaced with a character who's nearly that straightforward. I picked Ra largely because I'm into Egyptian stuff, but he's also a highly effective damage dealer, and it's difficult to win the game without such characters, even if they're a little boring. Heroes are ranked in "complexity" by the rulebook, from 1 to 3, and I've mostly stuck with 1s and the occasional 2 so far, wanting to get some experience under my belt. The next game will probably be my first time trying to pilot a 3.
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Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Wed Aug 28, 2013 4:39 pm

Okay, as promised it's time for me to begin another Let's Play, so that you can see more of this awesome game (yes, I'll pretend that all of YOU are the reason why I'm going to spend the next 4+ hours playing a card game with myself). Out of the four villains in the basic game, there is still one left which I've never fought, but in spite of this I'm going to do a repeat of the very first villain I played against, Baron Blade (he's recommended as your first foe, though this might be for flavor reasons as much as anything). I am however using up my last unvisited Environment from the starter set, the Ruins of Atlantis, in order to provide some more variety to the game, besides a different selection of heroes.

Because playing with three heroes was not enough of a tax on my mental resources, I've decided to go with four of them; in the order of play which I've very deliberately picked out for them (contrary to my last game), they are the armored Absolute Zero (henceforth referred to as Zero), time-traveling psychic The Visionary (hereafter Visi), specifically America-themed Superman clone Legacy (whose full name I don't mind typing on occasion, but for laughs I'm likely to refer to him as Legs once in a while), and Maori muscleman Haka. I have played each of these heroes a different percentage of a "real" game before: Zero is completely new to me, while Visionary has seen actual play in a 3-person game, without sufficing to make me tired of her. I played Legacy only in a solo session, while Haka was one of two characters I piloted in a game where another player took the third (this being the only way to play with two players, so these solitaire sessions are sort of a way of practicing for it). Haka is extremely easy to play (though perhaps not quite as easy as Ra), while Zero is listed at Complexity 3 in the rulebook, making him quite a challenge to figure out how to pilot; Visionary is a 2, which I can believe after my last time playing her, and Legs is theoretically a 1, but my experience tells me he's not quite as much of a 1 as Haka is.

Absolute Zero, of course, I'm playing because he's new, while I've included Visionary because she's one of my favorites (for both flavor and mechanical reasons; Tachyon beats her on the latter count, and a promo hero named the Scholar might nudge out Ra as my fave on the former, depending on whether his deck is as interesting as his writeup). Haka I've thrown in just because he can deal damage every turn, without having to draw a card for the purpose, and a game where no hero can manage that is a game with the potential to stall heinously, so I'm reluctant to ever play without at least one of these heroes (Ra is another, along with Fanatic and Tempest, who I'll introduce you to later). As for Legacy, part of my reason for including him is that he plays best in a game with more Heroes; eventually I'll try him in a game with 5, but I've yet to see one of those, so for now, having had him in a previous 3-Hero solo game, I left him out of the last one so that I could see him function as one of 4. The other reason why he's in this game, though, or more pointedly why I'm re-fighting Baron Blade as a villain against him, is due to a game mechanic that never came up last time: the Nemesis Icon.

Each hero has a distinctive icon on their character card, and so do most of the villains; when one hero and one villain have the same such icon, they are "archenemies", and as such, each one deals +1 damage per instance to the other. This applies only when the damage is dealt directly by the hero or villain, not by the villain's henchmen, nor by an autonomous effect the hero created but doesn't control (I'm not sure whether such effects exist for heroes, but they definitely do for villains). Because Legacy is Sentinel's "iconic" hero, and Baron Blade is the bannerman for villainy in the game (he's on the box picture and everything), the two of them have each other's Nemesis Icon. Thusly, if a card says "Baron Blade deals X damage", Legacy would take 1 more damage from that card's effect, but if it said "This card deals X damage", it would affect Legacy the same as any other hero (unless it also had the Nemesis icon for Legacy, which I'm told is possible but rare; usually only the Hero or Villain themself has it).

Well, that about covers the preamble, so...Let's Play.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Wed Aug 28, 2013 5:57 pm

At the beginning of the game, Baron Blade instructs you to search his deck for a copy of the card "Mobile Defense Platform" and put it into play. Blade is one of the weakest Villains, starting the game with just 40 HP (only 6 more than Haka), but the Platform has another 10, and he's immune to damage as long as the Platform exists. Once the Platform is shot down, you can clobber Blade down to 0 HP, but then he changes to another form which has 30 more HP, so he totals 70 HP in and of himself, with the Platform adding at least 10 more - equivalent to Citizen Dawn's 80, and the Baron has two more copies of his Platform in the deck, just as Dawn has two copies of her Healing Light. So the two villains are roughly comparable in how tough they are to take out, but of course they differ in numerous ways, as we're about to see.

Baron Blade is more or less your standard mad scientist, and his family has a long-standing grudge against Legacy's, so after discovering that Legacy's bulletproof skin renders him almost impossible to kill, Blade is planning to destroy the entire Earth in an attempt to ensure that Legacy does not outlive himself. The Baron's character card explains how, if he reaches 15 cards in the Villain Trash (out of the 25 in his deck, not counting the already-played Platform), he succeeds in destroying the world and all the heroes lose. For his first villain turn, he plays - a second Platform. Welp, that's not quite ideal, since there are several ways the heroes can damage both Platforms at once, but at least this makes him a little tougher than in my first game against him, where 50 damage were dealt to first his initial Platform and then himself, getting rid of him before he could get any more Platforms out. (Of course, none of us really knew what we were doing in that game, but between the Wraith's combos and the raw power of Ra, we did quite alright for ourselves; Absolute Zero was also being played at the time, but I forget how much of a role he played, and Tachyon was mostly just there.)

Zero is a rather odd duck compared to most of the Heroes in the game; his innate power is the ability to deal himself damage, which is obviously not a thing you'll usually want to do. Thusly, if he gets a bad draw, he's probably the single likeliest hero to take the "do nothing but draw 2 cards" option on his first turn, and that was what I was planning to do when I decided to play him. But now that I've drawn him a starting hand, I've found a card which is obviously key to making his deck work: Onboard Module Installation. This lets him draw an extra card for the turn anyway, but also search up a "Module" card from his deck, and play either that card or any other one. Thusly, he might choose to just draw the card, search up the Module, and end his turn by drawing one more card, gaining +2 cards in hand just as if he'd skipped his turn - or alternately he could play the searched-out Module, or another copy of Onboard Installation (thus drawing another card), or any number of other card-play options which he happens to have.

Since this is my first time playing Zero and I'd like to preserve some surprise, I'll go into his deck and take the first Module I find, rather than looking for the absolute best one...this doesn't prove to be terribly unwise, because my first Module is the Null-Point Calibration Unit, which says that whenever Zero deals himself Cold Damage (or anything else deals it to him), he instead regains that many HP. Thusly, his innate ability "Thermodynamics", which lets him deal either Cold or Fire damage to himself (I explained the different Damage Types in the last LP) goes from "take 1 damage" to "gain or lose 1 HP" - given how often a Villain or Environment card hits a player based on their having the highest or lowest LP, wanting to damage yourself isn't invariably a bad idea, but certainly it gets a lot better when you can repair yourself afterward. So Zero has searched up his Calibration Unit, and he could play it now, but since he hasn't taken any damage yet, he's not especially interested in a healing device just now. Thusly, he instead uses the extra card play from OMI to put out Cold Snap, an Ongoing effect which lets him deal 1 damage to each non-Hero target (remember, a target is anything with HP, so he'll hit both Platforms at once, and technically he also hits the Baron, but the Platforms prevent him from being affected). Since this works every single turn after being played, it's better to get it started ASAP, and Zero didn't have any use for his Thermodynamics power anyway, so he just doesn't use a power this turn. (At end of turn, he draws a card which would have given him something to do with that power, but might have rather gone without anyway, just to get the Cold Snap out sooner.)

We now move on to Visionary, who plays a card which is identical to Cold Snap except that it deals Psychic damage instead of Cold, called Demoralization. (Don't ask too many questions about the fact that you can Demoralize a Mobile Defense Platform; some amount of abstraction is often necessary to make a game play more smoothly, and I'm content with where the designers of SOTM set the balance point; more complication wouldn't have sucked, but it wasn't necessary and it might have raised the entry barrier when learning to play, which would have been tragic for such an easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master...or, at least, difficult-to-grow-bored-with...game.) She then uses her power, "One player draws 2 cards and discards 1 card", on herself, gaining two new options and discarding the rather weak Suggestion, which could be a lifesaver against Baron Blade in several turns, but doesn't seem worth waiting, for when she can burn through her deck and eventually reshuffle her discards (plus she has other copies). She finishes her turn by drawing one more card than she had before playing, something that she can do every turn until she finds a better use for her Power (whether targeting other players with her innate Power or playing a card which offers her another one).

Legacy's turn now comes; he unfortunately has no cards which will allow him to damage Baron Blade and gain the bonus from his Nemesis icon, so he just plays Fortitude, which reduces damage to him by 1 and thus cancels the increase BB gains, as well as rendering him less vulnerable to the Baron's other cards. He then activates his power, which is the reason he's best in a game with more heroes: "Until the start of your next turn, increase damage dealt by heroes by 1". With two of the heroes already primed to blast both of Blade's Platforms next turn, this ability is obviously huge; technically it affects Legacy himself, but he'd have to be able to use a second power within his turn (or use a power when it isn't his turn; more on this possibility later), otherwise he'd be incapable of dealing damage after using the power but before it expires (since you're always required to play cards first, then activate powers). Thusly, his job in this fight is just to stand there and look pretty while all his compatriots fight harder because of it; some Nemesis he is.

Haka's built-in Power lets him deal 2 damage to one target, and is the reason I included him in the game, but his very first action is to render it moot; he plays the Taiaha (a two-headed Maori weapon, with a spear on one end and a sort of paddle-shaped club on the other; Wikipedia confirms that it's a real thing, and that I'd probably already know that if I lived in New Zealand). This Equipment card grants the Power "Haka deals up to 2 targets 3 melee damage each"; this is obviously an improvement over his own Power even when he's just fighting one target, and is also handy for cutting a wide swath through legions of minions, but it happens to be particularly convenient right now, when there are exactly two things the heroes need to be hitting, and they get a bonus damage to each of them. Haka stabs one Platform and bonks the other (obviously the two heavily armed antigravity fortresses were floating conveniently just one arms-length apart; again, don't ask questions) for 4 damage each, then draws a card, ending both his turn and the hero round.

Environment time! Having briefly glimpse Absolute Zero in play during the previous Baron Blade game, this is my first chance to get a look at a card from a completely new deck (okay I snuck a small peek when I was unboxing my newly purchased SOTM set, but it's mostly going to come as a surprise); very exciting! Well okay, maybe not; Hallway Collapse deals 3 damage to each target and then destroys itself at the end of the turn, so fairly uneventful all in all. Legacy shrugs off 1 of the damage, and Baron Blade of course ignores it all, but everyone else gets hurt equally, and then it's back to the Baron...after I take a little break.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Wed Aug 28, 2013 8:12 pm

Baron Blade plays Slash and Burn, a very self-descriptive card on which he deals H Melee damage to the lowest-HP hero (Visionary) and H+2 Fire damage to the highest-HP one (Haka). You'll recall from my first LP that "H" is always a number equal to the number of players in the game, so that's 4; Visi takes 4 damage, leaving her at 19, and Haka takes a whopping 6, putting him down to 25. That is, however, the Baron's entire turn. (He seems to tend a bit less toward high levels of activity than any of the other Villains I've faced; Dawn had her Citizens and the others I've encountered also had highly active Target cards, but so far Blade has just got his Platforms and they don't do anything, nor does he have an innate ability like Dawn did. This is probably the other reason he's the recommended newbie villain.)

Unfortunately, Zero's Cold Snap fires at the start of his turn, before he can do anything, so each of the Platforms takes their 8th (from Cold Snap) and 9th (due to the effect of Legacy's power) points of damage before he can play Focused Apertures, a card that adds 1 to all of his Cold damage. He debates playing another card that would finish them both off before Visionary's turn, but it would be completely not worth its downside at the moment; the Apertures aren't either, really, though, so he just plays the Null-Point Unit from last turn, then uses his innate power to deal 1 cold damage to himself, which becomes 2 cold damage because of Legacy's power effect, which then becomes 2 healing because of the NPCU. He is now the most nearly intact hero, with only 1 damage left on him (Legacy has more HP because he started higher, while Haka started higher still but is now rather beaten up, and Visionary has been fragile the whole time). He draws a second Cold Snap, but can't play it since it's Limited, so he "tells" Visi that he would appreciate receiving her Power this turn, if she can spare it.

A little annoyed at the Legacy-related overkill as her Demoralization finishes off both Platforms, Visi is tempted to get "first blood" against Baron Blade now that they're down, but this would not be the best use of her One-Shot, so she instead sticks to her time-traveling psychic shtick and plays a Prophetic Vision, letting her prevent 2 of the next 3 Environment cards from happening anytime soon, while allowing the safest of the three to occur. Whle they're all unpleasant to varying degrees, she opts to allow the least annoying one to occur on the next Environment turn: Toxic Seaweed, which will deal H-1 = 3 damage to every hero who uses a Power. One hero can discard their hand to destroy the Seaweed before the end of that turn, which Haka will likely do since he has by far the strongest Power currently, and Visionary can then use her power to give him a hand again. Meanwhile, the Seaweed isn't out yet, so she grants Absolute Zero the draw-2-discard-1 option as per his request, then draws 1 card herself and ends her turn.

Last turn, Legacy had thought seriously about playing Inspiring Presence, an Ongoing card which grants every hero 1 HP of healing when it comes out, even though that part of the card wouldn't do anything; its other effect is that every character deals +1 damage (cumulative with Legacy's power), and that would have meant that Haka's Taiaha and Zero's Cold Snap, plus the Hallway Collapse, would have more than taken down the Platforms before Zero's actual card play, let alone Visionary's turn. But the healing would have been wasted, and Legs himself would have taken 1 more damage from the Collapse, so he figures it was worth the wait. Now, after he again activates his power, every hero is dealing damage in chunks of 3 at minimum, and Baron Blade's defenses are gone; he won't last long if he doesn't do something fast!

Haka's turn is very simple; he plays an Elbow Smash one-shot, which deals 3 damage to Baron Blade, except it's 5 thanks to all the cheerleading Legacy is doing; he then uses his Taiaha's power to deal another 3=5 damage, dropping Blade by 10 in one turn! He's disappointed by the fact that, after drawing his card for the turn, three of the four cards he'll be discarding to Toxic Seaweed would allow him to draw more cards if he were hanging on to them. Oh well, such is life.

Baron Blade plays a Living Force Field (an Ongoing rather than one of his Device targets; perhaps that's the Living part), which reduces damage to him by 1 (so much for the grudge match between him and Legacy; they're both bulletproof). That's his entire turn, and then the Toxic Seaweed appears, only to be instantly ripped out at the roots by Haka's four-card hand.

Absolute Zero started his turn with Cold Snap of course, dealing 3 damage to Blade due to the Legacy bonuses; he then played Glacial Structure, which gives him the power to destroy it and draw three cards. That made a productive use for his entire turn, since he had no damage to heal by cold-damaging himself, and netted a profit of one card over having used his entire turn (except for the start, when Cold Snap happened; it is possible to skip your entire turn including the start, but then you'd also skip your draws for the turn), drawn two cards at end of turn, and kept Glacial Structure in his hand.

After Demoralizing Baron Blade for 3 damage, Visi put out the card Mass Levitation, an Ongoing whose Power can negate a Hallway Collapse or all the damage from a 4-player Toxic Seaweed (a 5-player Toxic Seaweed still ends up dealing 1 damage, and of course all this is assuming no other effects are making the Environment more deadly). Not having any need for that Power yet, of course, she's simply planning ahead, since none of her other cards are worth playing. She then uses her power to let Haka draw a couple cards, one of which he can keep; having set him up for the Seaweed, she figures she owes him all her future usages of her innate Power for a while. (The card he discards, Punish the Weak, is one that I've used in a previous game, which was highly useful very early on but became a liability later; it works poorly in conjunction with the Taiaha, so that plus general boredom make me want to not use it this game, even though the other card is also questionable.)

Since things are currently going the Heroes' way, Legacy decides there's no reason to risk that Blade will get out another Platform, or something else which messes things up; he plays Take Down, a card which lasts until the start of his next turn, prohibiting villain cards from being played but allowing the "villain target with the most HP" (which in most cases will be the villain himself) to deal damage to Legacy...which is reduced by Fortitude, though increased by the Nemesis icon, ending up back at the same 2 where it started. Once he's taken this (after reactivating his innate power), he draws his card for the turn - another Take Down! - and then passes the turn to Haka.

Holding just one card in his hand, Haka plays it - it's called Rampage, and sees Haka dealing an initial damage of 5 to Baron Blade (and any other Villain Targets which might exist), but also 2 to each Hero including himself, with all those numbers being increased by 2. It's a better deal normally than with all the damage bonuses, as he's dealt 16 to the hero team and only 7 to his foe, but Absolute Zero has a nice healing loop among cards in play and didn't have any damage to heal before, Legacy shrugs off 1 point and is still left well over 20, and Haka himself has plenty of healing in his deck (although the Visionary, now down to 16, is probably regretting feeding Haka cards, if this is what he's going to do with them). He then stabs Blade with his Taiaha for 5 more, leaving him with just 12 HP in his first form. Haka then gets to draw a card, ending his turn with that one card in hand (skipping turns to refill is definitely not happening as long as he has that Taiaha).

More Toxic Seaweed enters play on the Environment turn, but this time the heroes agree that it's not worth bothering to discard even Haka's single card to get rid of it; Visi can use her Mass Levitation to escape, which I think gets her out of the damage and definitely does so for both Legacy and Haka, whose powers are much more important than hers, and Absolute Zero has no great need to use his own power. Since Baron Blade has been forced to skip the only thing he could have done on his turn, it's now back to the heroes.

Blasting Blade down to just 9 HP with his Cold Snap, Zero plays Hoarfire, the "not worth its downside" card from before, which its a lot better when the villain has a minion out; as it stands, he has to target himself with the first clause, which deals 2 Cold damage before Legacy's bonuses, but that then heals him of all the damage he took from Haka's little Rampage last turn, leaving him at full HP again. The second clause of Hoarfire deals 2 damage to a second target, fire this time, and he of course targets Blade for that one, knocking him down to 5 HP. Hoarfire then deals another 1 Cold and 1 Fire damage to himself, both of them tripled but the Cold being converted into healing; due to the order in which they're written, I assume the healing becomes redundant when he's at full HP, and then the fire damage is dealt, so he ends up suffering 3 damage. Just for laughs, he then uses his innate Power to deal 3 cold damage to himself, causing the Seaweed to deal 3 Toxic damage to him, which the cold damage then heals (in this case, that seems like appropriate timing, since I'm assuming you first check for effects triggered by power activation, then actually resolve the power; that strikes me as a logical way for it to work, and obviously he wouldn't do this pointless thing if it were rules-interpreted as actually hurting him). He then draws the card Coolant Blast, which is obviously the centerpiece of his deck (it's not a module, unfortunately, so you can't just whistle it up with Onboard Installation), and would have made his Hoarfire more than kill Baron Blade's first form this turn, but c'est la vie. There's always next turn.

Visionary has no particular desire to play any of her four cards, but she needs to use her Power activating Mass Levitate this turn, so that Legacy and Haka can proceed with their powers unpunished. Her Cerebral Hemorrhage stops just short of killing Baron 1.0, meaning that the next attack (hopefully some little poke of Legacy's, so that Haka won't need to waste his Taiaha) will finish him off and then kick off the final phase of the game. She takes three "Schroedinger" damage from the Toxic Seaweed as she activates her Levitation; I don't know for sure whether this happens, just as I didn't know for sure whether Absolute Zero's self-damaging-healing Power worked the way I thought, but in this case it actually matters, so I'll track the damage she might have taken and note the point at which she would die if the damage were applied.

At the start of his turn, Legacy puts a card into his Trash for the first time, since he's only played one card each turn and none of them were One-Shots, and has never been targeted by Visi's innate Power. Having no way to deal damage to the Baron, he simply plays the other Take Down, activates his Power, taking no damage from Seaweed because of Levitation, and ends his turn by drawing a card and taking the 2 Take Down damage. Unfortunately, the card he drew does deal damage, so if Visi had definitely-rather-than-possibly taken damage and targeted him, he could have finished the Baron now, though it would have been overkill just as the Taiaha is.

Having no real reason not to, Haka plays his single card, Savage Mana, which was instrumental in the game I played Haka before, where it stopped all of the Villain's minions from repeatedly returning to play. Unfortunately Baron Blade isn't so big on Minions, so it may not do anything here, but he plays it now just in case. Then, regretfully, he uses his Taiaha to deliver a blow which would have done in Baron Blade even if Visionary hadn't wasted a card on him. (The "players" could have told each other what was in their hands and avoided such redundancy, but oh well.)

Were this a movie, this would be where we'd roll the fake set of credits over the image of the heroes celebrating their victory, while the camera slowly zooms in on the fallen Baron Blade, dramatic music swelling gradually, until there is a single twitch of his hand....
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Wed Aug 28, 2013 10:15 pm

I was kind of hoping, but not realistically expecting, to be done with the game by now; certainly, though, I'm getting there, and will likely not need to make any posts after this one (of course it won't be posted until after I know for sure, but I'm writing as I'm playing here). Now that Baron Blade is a Vengeful Mad Scientist rather than a Terralunar Impulsion Beam Inventor, he's no longer capable of destroying the entire world if we fail to stop him, but unfortunately we're not any more allowed to lose the game than before. This version of him has only 30 HP...and right about now, I realize that I completely forgot that he had a Living Forcefield. So let's go back and check how much damage this prevented...yes, it was 8 damage total that shouldn't have happened, and the Taiaha only "over-killed" him by 4 in the initial analysis (it turns out that Visi's Cerebral Hemorrhage was not a waste at all; the reason why I was concerned it was was simply that skipping her entire turn would have saved that card for later plus profited an extra one, but at the expense of 3 damage to Legacy, 3 damage to Haka, and preventing Zero from effectively healing himself for 3, so it was definitely not worth it, and she might as well have played the card since it was indeed helpful). So it turns out that Blade 1.0 is not quite down yet; he's got 4 HP left...2 of which he promptly loses in a Hallway collapse, and the other 2 to Zero's Cold Snap. So now he flips into Vengeful mode, after a little more damage gets done to everybody else. (I suspect I shuffled the Environment deck somewhat less than well, but then again, with only 15 cards and 2 or 3 copies each of Seaweed and Collapse, the odds aren't unreasonable that there will be some repetition, even with a really random deck.)

In his new form, Blade retains his Living Forcefield (and any other cards he had out at the time), but gets 30 new HP and gains a new direct damage ability. Had he died on Haka's turn as I thought he had, he'd have been able to deal this damage immediately (while still doing nothing else on his turn due to Take Down), but ironically his Forcefield has slowed him down, as he now changes at the very start of Zero's turn, and thus has to put up with a full round of being whaled on before he can fight back. With the amount of bonus damage being tossed around by Legacy, it's not inconceivable he'll go down in this single round, and is very unlikely to survive the round after. But just to be formal, we'll go ahead with his proper sequence: upon flipping, he shuffles his trash back into his deck (relevant in case of the Advanced play, where he hurries up work on the Terralunar Beam by discarding the top couple cards of his deck every turn), then trashes his three copies of the Mobile Defense Platform. (In theory, he could reshuffle his deck again later and get them back, but the party would have to be very lame-duck not to get 30 damage dealt to him in such an interim.) Since his Trash at the time simply consisted of two Platforms and a Slash and Burn, I'll save myself a shuffle and just treat the third Platform, when it turns up, as a Slash and Burn instead (this shortcut wouldn't work if we had Wraith in this game, stacking the Villain deck with her Infrared Eyepiece; Visionary is also capable of such a feat with one of her cards, but hasn't actually done it yet, so the trick is valid).

Zero therefore moves on with his turn, strongly wishing he could play more cards each turn. He performs the long-overdue action of playing his Focused Apertures, since it now actually matters; activating his Power, he in some order heals 4 points with cold damage and takes 3 damage from the Seaweed, profiting by 1 HP.

Visi could play Decoy Projection this turn, a 5-point illusion which takes damage in her place, but in view of the confusion over whether Toxic Seaweed is damaging her, I'll dispense with that; taking 3 more arguable damage when she uses her power, she is left at either 6 or 12 HP, but either way she first plays a Psychic Maelstrom, which is even more wasted than the strictly-worse (in all but the weirdest circumstances) Cerebral Hemorrhage when it has only one target to hit, but at least it means she's contributing, scoring "first blood" against one version of the Baron after all. The new and improved Baron takes 3 damage past his Force Field thanks to Legacy's boosts, and then it's Legacy's turn. (I may have forgotten to draw cards at the end of Visi's turn once or twice, as she has only 4 in hand and I'm certain she was up to 5 at one point, but oh well.)

Like Visi, Legacy has a card which damages up to 3 targets, but does no extra damage when hitting only one; receiving a bonus from his own Inspiring Presence, but not from his yet-to-be-reactivated power, he plays Flying Smash for 4 damage instead of 3, with the Nemesis Icon counteracting the Living Force Field.

Haka plays one of the cards he's named for (a Maori war-dance which, amusingly, I'm told has also been adopted by the New Zealand rugby team), the Haka of Restoration. He draws 2 cards, and that's all he cares about; discarding some of those cards to heal himself would only be likely to get him stabbed by Baron Blade for having more HP than Legacy. So he just whacks the Baron with the Taiha, getting 4 damage past the Force Field to leave him at 23.

The Environment deck produces another copy of one of the cards Visionary fast-forwarded past earlier: the Phosphorescent Chamber. Damage and HP recovery are both increased by 1 herein, but at the end of the environment turn, which is now, each hero must discard a card, then at the start of the next environment turn, they may all discard 1 more card apiece and be rid of the Chamber, or else leave it in play and discard anyway at the end. More damage certainly seems like a good idea with the Baron around, and Zero has no trouble discarding a card from his bafflingly huge hand; Visi can spare a copy of a questionably useful Ongoing which seems less worth devoting her Powers to than her innate ability, and Legacy likewise dumps one of two copies of a questionably useful Ongoing Power card, though that one at least has more of an argument in its favor (ie all of Legacy's allies might die, and unlike Visi he can't use his power to help himself much, if at all). Haka is the only one who feels much pain, discarding a card from his 3-card hand, but he can tolerate the loss since one of the three cards is Enduring Intercession, which would let him take all Environment damage in place of the other characters, therefore swiftly getting himself killed since he's really not that much tougher than other characters (really, Absolute Zero is far more Enduring with the way he constantly cold-heals himself, at rates far better than the Haka of Restoration's "one HP per card discarded").

Now at last it is time for Baron Blade to finally play a new Villain card - and he makes up for lost time with Hasten Doom, a card which certainly would have helped him a lot back when he was trying to destroy the world by burning through most of his deck. It deals 2 Toxic damage (why Toxic I'm not sure; it appears to involve using Legacy's version of Kryptonite, but there's no indication of why this would hurt everyone else but not Blade himself) to each of the heroes, then plays a new Villain card - which might just be another Hasten Doom, as he has five of them in his deck. The damage is increased to 3 per hero by the Phosphorescent Chamber, dropping Visionary to just 3 HP which I'm certain of, and another 6 which might or might not have been lost in Levitating away from Seaweed a little too slow. With Zero at 21 HP, Legacy at 19, and Haka at 16, even the non-damaged version of Visionary is clearly the first target of Blade's second Villain card for the turn, another Slash and Burn. I will now officially rule that she was not so damaged, but she takes 5 damage now (4 for the number of heroes, +1 for the Phosphorescent Chamber), leaving her with just 4 HP. Then Blade hits the toughest surviving target, Absolute Zero, for a whopping 7 damage, leaving him briefly below Haka. At the end of the turn, his new-found Vengeful ability activates for the first time, dealing H damage (which becomes 5 due to the Chamber) to the new HP leader, Legacy (again, his Fortitude cancels the boost from the Nemesis icon).

Zero pings the Baron for 2 through his Force Field with Cold Snap to begin his turn, then plays Impale on the Baron; this card is a miniature Cold Snap which hits only one target each turn, but deals 1 more damage, so it's obviously meant mostly as a "boss-breaker". It does nothing this turn, and is yet another entry on the list of cards Zero would like to have played about four turns before he finally did, but at least now it's out. He then gains 1 HP with his power loop (the Chamber adds 1 to both the damage and the healing, alas, rather than adding 1 point to a cold damage which is then converted into healing that gains 1 point again; the game isn't that munchkin-friendly), and that's his turn.

As badly hurt as she is, Visi doesn't have much choice but to play Decoy Projection now; it'll take damage in her stead until its own HP of 5 are exceeded, hopefully sparing her life for one more round, though it still begins to look as if she will be a casualty (I'm kind of hoping so, as it'll mean I can tell you how hero "death" works in this game). Now down to just two cards in hand, neither of them very useful, she intends to finally destroy the Seaweed after the next Environment turn, but for now she Levitates away from it one last time, which I've decided doesn't damage her. The card she draws for the turn would have been handy, letting her get rid of the Baron's forcefield or recycle her own and her allies' Ongoing cards, but it's yet another Power that she can't use more than one of per turn, so she doesn't really mind the idea of pitching it to destroy Environments.

Legacy wouldn't have minded discarding his hand either, were it not for one card which he now plays - Bolster Allies, which quite simply lets each Hero draw a card. (Readers of my previous LP might remember that Tachyon has a similar card called "Fleet of Foot", which is strictly better since it also lets her play an extra card; such comparisons happen sometimes, with one hero being stronger in some arenas and weaker in others, though I'm not convinced they're entirely balanced, any more than the Green Lantern is balanced with the Green Arrow despite them having long been in the same comic book). After doing that, he activates his power, draws a card, and is left with four cards in his hand of which only 1 is even vaguely useful (it adds 1 damage to any that Legacy deals, but he himself attacks so infrequently that I see little point to it), so he volunteers for Seaweed-removal duty in Visi's place, with her having drawn a playable enough card that she agrees.

Haka profitted a lot from that card draw, given the imminent plan to destroy two Environments; he plays the Ongoing card Dominion, whose ability to draw a card whenever an Environment is destroyed might not always be useful, but happens to come in especially handy against the Atlantean Ruins. As usual he smacks Baron Blade with the Taiaha for 4 damage, putting him down to 17, then Haka draws a card and is done.

As the Environment turn starts, Haka reluctantly discards his Mere (a small club), which deals only 1 less damage to a single target than the Taiaha deals to more targets than are currently available, but draws you a card in exchange for that lost damage point, making it almost certainly better in this situation. At least the redundancy with the Taiaha makes it more dispensible than his other cards, and he has to do his part to get rid of the Phosphorescent Chamber - which, like the Force Field earlier, I've been forgetting to apply, but Baron Blade was damaged only twice, so it made a minimal difference. The heroes are agreed that they need to look to their own survival, so Legacy discards the worst of his four bad cards, Visionary does the same, and Zero with his eight-card hand drops a duplicate of his NPCU. The Chamber dies, Haka draws a card, and then the Environment disgorges the Atlantean Font of Power Oh boy...The Seaweed has been out longer, so destroying it takes priority, costing Legacy all three of his crappy cards and giving Haka one back. Then the Font takes effect, playing one card from everyone's deck, starting with the villain and then each of the heroes (fortunately not the Environment deck, even though there's only one Font; the last thing we'd need is for the Environment turn to get even longer after this).

Baron Blade is the first to drink, and he gets out his first Minion, the Blade Batallion, who has 5 HP and deals damage equal to its remaining HP to the highest-HP hero at the end of the villain turn - which is in about a minute here. Fortunately, the heroes will get a chance to react first. Absolute Zero quasi-serendipitously gets a copy of Frost-Bound Drain, a One-shot which he's holding two copies of in his hand and had been preparing to combo with the "central to his deck" card I mentioned earlier. He pushes 4 damage through the Baron's Force Field (he could instead have killed the entire Blade Batallion, since they lack such shields, but Visi's turn is right after his and she's so good at damaging multiple targets at once), but also takes 5 fire damage himself, leaving him down to just 10 HP - but he'll be able to heal himself with cold damage pretty fast now that he's not dealing with Seaweed anymore. Visi goes next, and gets Precognition, which affects the Villain deck as Prophetic Vision earlier affected the Environment deck. In this way, she keeps the Baron from getting Flesh-Repair Nanites which would give him back 10 HP and thereby prolong this somewhat grueling game, and chooses for his next turn's attack to involve a 5-damage hit from a new Blade Batallion, rather than an even deadlier Slash and Burn. About this time I notice that I've been forgetting Visi's Demoralization for a long time; assuming it was worth 2 HP each time due to the usual set of buffs and shields, it hit Blade once in the previous post without my noticing (not making the difference in when exactly he'd die, thankfully), and Visi has had two turns since then in which I didn't notice it, so Blade is down 6 more HP than I had known, and in fact has only 9 HP left!

We then move on to Legacy's visit to the Font of Power, whereupon he plays Heroic Interception, a weird card which makes Legacy damage himself - unfortunately he adds 1 to that damage by being too Inspiring for his own damn good - leaving him down to 10 HP as well, but in the process makes all other heroes invincible until the start of Legacy's next turn - which won't be as long as if he'd played the card himself, but it's good enough to stop two Blade Batallions and the Baron himself from whacking Haka on his next turn, which will keep Haka as the highest-HP character and thus continue to make attacks focus ineffectively on him, rather than on the battered Legacy who is the only squishy target remaining. Finally, Haka plays a Haka of Shielding off his deck, drawing two cards and ignoring the Shielding part, and the Environment turn finally ends.

Blade begins his turn, plays the Blade Batallion as scheduled, and then gets his buddies to help him in beating up Haka to no effect, exactly as expected. Then it's to Absolute Zero, who triggers both Cold Snap and Impale for a total of 5 damage, leaving the Baron at just 4 HP. He then plays the Coolant Blast Ongoing card that I've alluded to a couple times now - using its Power, he deals the Baron Cold damage equal to the Fire damage Zero has taken in the past round, which was 5 from when he Frost-Drained off the Font of Power. He adds 1 to that damage thanks to his Focused Apertures, which is then counteracted by the Baron's Force Field, but the result is still 1 more damage than needed for Zero to finish the Baron off.

Welp, that's another game where the heroes carry the day without any casualties, though in large part it was due to luck - having the Baron get out two Platforms at once which could be swiftly demolished in tandem, rather than a string of multiple consecutive Hasten Dooms which might have abruptly killed a character who had seemed healthy earlier, definitely made things easier for Our Heroes. If actual players had been involved, I would feel sorry for every one of them except Haka's player, since Zero and Visionary both had numerous cards of low utility and far more things they wanted to do than they could, but above all I would pity Legacy for having spent nearly the entire game doing nothing but buffing his allies. It certainly worked well, but seems like a somewhat dull position to have to play. On the other hand, the next time I'm stuck playing a "real" game with two heroes, due to lack of a third player, taking Legacy along with a more straightforward hero like Ra or Haka, or even the tricky Absolute Zero (who I really like, I might even call him my favorite if he were a trifle less awkward), would result in a highly effective and fairly easy-to-play combination.

In retrospect, I'm sad that I ruled that Visionary didn't take damage from the Seaweed Levitation thing; I'm not up to going back and actually replaying the game, especially given that I'm overdue for bed, but I'll take a minute to talk about what would have happened if Visi had indeed died. In Sentinels, a hero who loses all their HP becomes "Incapacitated", and you flip their character card over; this shows a picture of the character in a "death pose" (the creativity used with these is really impressive to me; Zero is shown with his cold-suit having overheated, Legacy is being cradled by his girlfriend after a heroic sacrifice, Haka appears to have been buried alive under collapsing rubble, and Visi has a highly unusual image which I shouldn't explain, but you can read her backstory on the SOTM website to find out a hint about what it involves; other characters display elaborate tombs, broken artifacts and sadly resumed civilian identities, it's really quite neat). Each hero has a unique set of three abilities listed on their "Incapacitated" side, and the ex-Hero's player gets to continue taking very short turns, in which all they can do is pick one of these abilities to use for the benefit of the surviving heroes. Only when all the heroes are Incapacitated does the game finally end in a loss; as long as one hero survives, the memory of their fallen comrades helps spur them to more vigorous efforts, each in a way specific to the fallen Hero in question! Cool, huh?

Visi may be a largely passive character while she's alive, mostly just rearranging decks and letting allies draw cards while occasionally dealing minor damage with her mind blasts...but once she goes down, what's left of her becomes pure destruction, able to take out Environment or Ongoing cards as well as almost-dead targets (or ones that were as squishy as you can get in the first place; one of the expansion villains has a shtick where she summons flocks of carrion birds to peck at her opponents, and these almost invariably have just 1 HP, so the former Visionary can pick these off one by one if there's nothing more worthy of her attention). Had she in fact died to the Slash and Burn two turns before, Visionary would have had at least one chance to destroy an Environment - taking out the Seaweed without Legacy having to discard his hand - or an Ongoing - ie the Baron's damn Force Field; she might well have been more useful dead than alive! Well, live and learn (and then don't live next time), I guess. That's all for tonight folks; I'm off to bed, and we'll see you next time for an epic 5-hero brawl against the last remaining Villain from the core set (there's one that you haven't met but whom I've played against, and you'll hear about him when I decide to premiere the games advanced version, as it changes him very little and gives me a reason not to be bored about fighting him again). Just like the Heroes and Villains when you think they're down for the count, I will see you on the flip side.
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Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by ThroughTheWell » Thu Aug 29, 2013 3:50 pm

Zero and Haka seem neat. The other 2 are meh. So, I'd like to see a team of wraith, tachyon, zero and haka, unless you have a new substitute for a hero. The Baron also seemed less interesting than Dawn. Maybe if he could recyle and use his mobile platforms in his 2nd version he might have more staying power. Time for a new villan.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Thu Aug 29, 2013 4:52 pm

New heroes are coming. I agree that Legacy is pretty dull, but part of the fun of Visionary is having lots of options, and I didn't describe the cards she chose not to play, so you're probably not getting what I enjoyed about her. I was planning to include Visi in the next game (as well as Tachyon), but I suppose I could do Absolute Zero instead, I certainly don't think I "used him up" this time. Wraith is the one who bores me, even though I have a soft spot for her since she was the first one I ever played; I'll be giving her a rest before I go back to her.

Citizen Dawn is by far my favorite of the first four villains, and possibly of all eighteen that have been published, though it's too soon to say that since I haven't seen most of the others. Baron Blade is definitely a bit lacking; I won't likely play him again until I'm ready to try out the Advanced rules, but even then, he's behind Grand Warlord Voss. But the villain for my next game will be the last of the four, Omnitron, who I've yet to try out. And eventually, I'll be buying expansions which will add 6 more villains, 4 more heroes and 4 more environments, bringing me to a total of about half the game that exists, at a combined cost of $100 (the two expansions I won't be getting would up that by 40 more, but I can't buy them right now because they're sold out, so whenever they come back into stock, getting them will tack on another $10 in shipping costs; anyway I figure I'll let my friend who got me into the game hang on to some exclusivity, even while I get a few things he doesn't have.)

EDIT - Actually scratch that. Absolute Zero is one of the "Freedom Five", as are Bunker and Tachyon; I'll be trying Bunker for the first time and Tachyon is a personal favorite, but I don't want to use too many of them together until I devote a specific "theme game" to running the entire set (also included are Legacy and Wraith). So Zero is required to sit this round outand I'm not up for using Haka twice in a row (both times I've played him, he just gets his Taiaha out and beats everything up with it, it's too good not to do, but too boring for me to enjoy it much), and with two of the other non-Freedom-Five heroes already being in the game, I'm committed to having the last slot be either Ra or Visionary, and Ra would be more redundant with the other heroes I am using. Visi makes an excellent team player, and should specifically combine well with Tachyon, so I'm definitely want to try her out here. But you'll see Absolute Zero in game 4, I promise.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Mon Sep 02, 2013 3:18 pm

Alright, Labor Day is as good a time as I could ask for to perform my third of these LP's; I can't do useful things like look for a job, and I'm tired out from a weekend of going out and having fun, so why NOT sit next to my computer and play a five-player solitaire game. But during the interim, I found myself at a convention which I didn't really care about, and for something to do while bored, I began to play the very game that I had planned to do here, just because it was the setup that was on the top of my mind. While I was still getting set up, I caught the eye of a congoer who agreed to join me for a "real" game (which still involved me playing three heroes to his two, since we didn't have a third person with which to play "normally" with just one hero each), but he thought he recalled having fought Omnitron before, so for his sake I switched to Citizen Dawn, who provided a very steep challenge which he ended up agreeing had made for a satisfying game.

However, while I didn't "use up" the villain, the rest of Saturday's game was virtually unchanged from my intended plan for my third LP, and so I don't want to repeat myself too much now that I'm actually doing it. Thusly, the environment "Megalopolis" is not being used for this game as intended; it will probably feature in my fourth LP, for the sake of you readers getting more variety, but my own desire for constant diversion would be left somewhat unsatisfied in that case since I've played it twice now (once in my second game ever, and once this weekend), so I might repeat the Marsbase or the Atlantean Ruins instead. In the meantime, you guys get to meet the fourth environment in the base game, Insula Primalis, a volcanic island north of the Arctic Circle where dinosaurs have somehow survived. (A rather strange place to find the robotic Omnitron, but the backstory does include an abandoned Soviet military base on the island, whose originators managed to survive the dinosaurs long enough to get it built, but not to keep it operational for long. In the game's "official" backstory, IP is supposed to be where Citizen Dawn builds her "Citizens of the Sun" enclave, an obvious reference to Magneto in the Savage Land, but the game by its nature does not limit you to recreating the stories its designers had in mind.)

For the convention game, I had selected my intended five heroes - Tachyon, Visionary, Tempest, Bunker, and Fanatic - to set out while preparing to battle Omnitron, and I mostly left them as they were after my new friend joined me, except that after he mentioned having played Ra and been bored, I directed his attention to Absolute Zero, by far the most complex of the ten base-set heroes, even as Ra is the simplest. So he controlled Zero along with Bunker, and somehow I decided to remove the Visionary while keeping the other three heroes...so since she wasn't in the last game, I'm definitely including her this time (I hope to convince ThroughTheWell that Visi is not "meh" by the time I'm done here). Since I didn't really play Bunker in that game, he returns here, allowing you guys to meet him for the first time, and I'm also repeating Tempest for the same reason. I'll save Fanatic for game 4, since I don't especially like her...and although I completely agree that Legacy is boring, I do want to see just how strong he is when 4 other heroes can benefit from his "Galvanize" innate power. Finally, while Tachyon is still my favorite of the heroes, I've played her in about half of the games I've done, and don't want to risk getting tired of her, so I benched her for today's game; left with an extremely narrow selection of possibles to take in her place, I opted for Ra over Haka, just to avoid having this game be too nearly a repeat of my last LP.

So, with my five heroes picked, I'm finally ready to begin. I'm placing Legacy first in the turn sequence, to maximize the benefit of his Galvanize ability, which grants each hero +1 damage until the start of Legs's next turn; with the "H" value of the game set to maximum, I'm thinking we'll need this (although Omnitron is stated in the manual to be one of the easiest villains, so it's entirely possible we'll end up mopping the floor with him). Bunker comes next, just because I think it's in flavor for "The Indestructible Bunker" to stand in front of the squishier heroes; I put Tachyon first in the convention game for similar fluff reasons, and it probably doesn't make much difference, but what the heck. "The Inhuman Tempest" has held position 3 in both games, and it seems to suit him somehow; the wimpy and manipulative Visionary comes behind him for the same reason that wizardy types in D&D always stay in the back, and Ra brings up the rear. Since I theorized before that Visionary might be more interesting if you knew how many options she was helping the players sift through, I'll break from my previous LPs' practice and actually describe every card the characters see, even if they discard it (this can also matter for Tempest, who has a card for retrieving cards from players' Trash), starting with their opening hands.

Legacy: "THOKK!" (Legacy punches one target for 3 damage and draws a card; interestingly the draw is not optional, whereas most cards say "You may" draw a card, though I know of no real reason why you wouldn't want to); Fortitude (Legacy's version of "You take 1 less damage per instance"; Bunker and Tempest also possess such a card under different names, with Bunker's being an Equipment rather than Ongoing, and all three being Limited); another Fortitude, and Inspiring Presence (the "heal everyone by 1 when you play this, and grant +1 damage as long as it stays in play" card we saw in the last game).

Bunker: Heavy Plating x2 (the damage-reducer I just mentioned above), Flak Cannon (an Equipment with the Power "Bunker deals 1 target 3 projectile damage"), and Turret Mode (one of three Mode ongoings that Bunker can have one of out at a time, which turn off two of his three turn phases while improving the third, and he can destroy the Mode at the start of his turn if wishing to return to normal play; this one stops him from playing or drawing cards, but lets him use two powers each turn and adds 1 to all damage he deals, so there's an obvious combo with the Flak Cannon).

Tempest: Otherworldly Resilience (Tempest's version of Legacy's Fortitude; with only 26 HP instead of 32, he needs it far more, but he only has a single copy right now); Ball Lightning (one of the game's strongest One-Shots, dealing 4 damage to one target AND destroying up to two Ongoings, whether of the Villain or of fellow players...for instance this can turn off Bunker's Turret Mode right before Visionary targets Bunker, allowing him to draw cards before his next turn rolls around); Electrical Storm (a Lightning-damage version of Absolute Zero's "Cold Snap", dealing 1 to each non-hero Target at the start of Tempest's turn...between this and Tempest's innate "Squall" power, which also hits everything for 1, he's far and away the most eager to receive Legacy's damage boosts); and Aquatic Correspondence (a One-Shot which simply lets Tempest draw three cards).

Visionary: All four are One-Shots at the moment - Psychic Maelstrom (2 psychic damage to every non-hero Target); Mind Spike (3 psychic damage to one Target); Brain Burn (a card designed specifically to thwart Baron Blade, and of very limited utility against most other villains, it puts the villain Trash on the bottom of the villain deck, and deals damage to Visi equal to the number of cards so moved); and finally, a card which the Sentinels forum claims is one of Visi's strongest tricks, Suggestion (which also gets cards out of the villain trash, but only two such cards, and puts one of them on the top of the villain deck; remembering how well the Wraith's "Infrared Eyepiece" performed against Citizen Dawn, I can certain believe that this is sometimes very useful, but I also know from personal experience that it is not always worth anything).

Ra: Blazing Tornado (an Ongoing which strictly upgrades Ra's innate "Pyre" Power, dealing 3 damage to one target instead of 2); Wrathful Gaze (another Ongoing with a Power, this one outright destroys a Target with 2 or fewer HP, which is of limited utility but can be very nice if you're dealing with effects that reduce damage to the villain's "mooks", something that certainly came up in both of my games against Citizen Dawn); another copy thereof; and Living Conflagration (yet another Ongoing with a Power you can't always use, but at least this one does something useful when it's played; it deals 2 damage to a target then, and then allows you to deal 1 damage and draw a card as your Power every turn, which is certainly sometimes more useful than just dealing more damage right now).

Well, that's our entire setup, so hey, I've got a really crazy and radical idea...Let's Play!
Last edited by willpell on Mon Sep 02, 2013 9:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Mon Sep 02, 2013 5:03 pm

In at least one respect, Omnitron is unique compared to the other villains I've played against - he flips his character cards every turn. (By contrast, Baron Blade flips once and never flips back, Citizen Dawn flips once and then must flip back before you can defeat her, but never flips again after that, and Grand Warlord Voss flips back and forth on what I might have called a fairly regular basis, prior to my learning about Omnitron.) Thusly, the first thing that happens in the game is that Omnitron ceases to be a "Self-Aware Robotics Factory" and turns into the "Rampaging Robot". In either form he's a 100-HP beast, but while he's on his second side, he plays an extra Villain card each turn, while his first side pulls previously played cards out of the trash. (So Visionary's Suggestion and Brain Burn will probably not be dead cards in this match; good to know.)

Omnitron then plays two Villain cards, one in the "middle" of the villain turn as normal, and one at the "end" (though always as the first "end of villain turn" action, since he's definitionally the oldest villain card in play, and "simultaneous" actions always occur in card-play order). The first one is a doozy...the Electro-Pulse Explosive (like every one of Omnitron's target-cards unless I state otherwise, including himself, this is a "Device") has 15 starting-and-maximum HP, and at the start of the next villain turn, it will deal each hero damage equal to its current HP. The second card he puts out is not a Target, but rather an Ongoing "Component"; it also fires at the start of the next villain turn, dealing H+1=a whopping 6 damage to the highest-HP hero target (unfortunately, unlike with Villains, hero Targets are nearly always the Heroes themselves, and of course targeting the highest HP in particular usually means hitting a character rather than something played from a deck). The Ray is destroyed if Omnitron takes 7 damage in one round, so it's not too hard to get rid of in a game with this many heroes (especially when one of them is Legacy)...in only a 3-player game, it would deal a more reasonable 4 damage per shot, but would be harder to destroy, unless all three heroes were heavy damage-dealers.

So fortunately, Omnitron hasn't done anything terribly dangerous yet, but the heroes really have to bring the pain if they want to survive the start of his next couple villain turns. Since it's likely the EPE will deal at least some damage to all the heroes, Legacy doesn't want to waste his Inspiring Presence just yet, and plays Fortitude. He activates Galvanize, giving each of the other four players a stylish "+1 damage hat", and then draws Bolster Allies, the Everybody-Draw-a-Card one-shot.

Bunker "discusses" matters with the other players and concludes that there will be little trouble getting rid of Omnitron's current threats, so he fortifies himself with the Heavy Plating, then uses his innate "Initialize" power to draw a card. That card is the Auxiliary Power Source, which can be destroyed either to draw 3 cards as a Power, or at the start of the turn to use two Powers that turn (the latter being far more likely to come up in most games, since Bunker has tons of different Powers among his cards and can draw as a Power anyway, so unless Equipment is getting destroyed or cards are being discarded, he's not likely to need to use the Power Source as his version of Zero's "Glacial Structure", as it's much more likely to be useful when used for the other use). He then draws another card for the end of his turn, and finds it to be something which combines very nicely with the Power Source: Decommissioned Hardware, which puts an Equipment in his Trash straight into play.

Tempest could outright destroy the Disintegration Ray (since it's an Ongoing) with Ball Lightning, but prefers to save that very powerful card for when things grow a bit more desperate. He could mimic the last two players by playing his protective card, but decides instead to take a more proactive stance, though still trusting the last two players to be able to deal the damage for this round. He plays Electrical Storm, which will combine strongly with Galvanize and perhaps Inspiring Presence starting next turn. (This may have been inadvisable, since it's safer to leave the EPE in play with 1 or 2 HP than to destroy it and risk it coming back with 15 again, but dealing damage to everything is Tempest's whole shtick, so finesse isn't really his strong suit and he might as well embrace his raw destructiveness.) He then draws Grevious Hail Storm, which offers him an upgraded version of his innate "Squall" power, dealing 2 damage instead of 1 to all non-hero Targets, and inflicting cold damage rather than projectile. (It appears I forgot to actually have him Squall this turn, as it would have dealt only 2 damage and I seem to have only dealt it in chunks of 3; this would have made the later detonation of the Electro-Pulse Explosive hurt less, though, so even if not strictly necessary, it would have been preferable.)

Alone of the players, Visionary doesn't have an Ongoing or Equipment card to put into play; since nobody else is doing any damage, she plays her Psychic Maelstrom to deal 2 damage each to Omnitron and the Bomb, which is 3 damage because of the Galvanize. She targets herself with her "Enlighten" power, drawing a second Mind Spike and Precognition, which lets her choose 1 of the next 3 villain cards to leave on top, banishing the other two to the bottom of the deck. In view of how many cards she has for messing with the villain deck, "she decides" (ie I do) that Brain Burn is the weakest link and should be discarded, despite the possibility it would actually come in handy. She then draws the very strong Mental Divergence, whose Power lets her either destroy an Ongoing or put one from the Trash onto a player's deck. So good...but it comes at the expense of her Enlighten power, which is also incredible. She is not the Hero for anyone who doesn't like having to make difficult choices, that's for sure....

It's left up to Ra to deal as much damage as possible during this slightly-miscalculated round; with the EPE currently primed to deal a total of 60 damage across all the players, it's easily decided that taking it down a notch must be the priority, and that letting the Disintegration Ray fire at Legacy, the toughest of the Heroes as well as one of those with a damage-reducer, is logical enough. Thusly, Ra plays Living Conflagration (which, among its other merits, also makes me laugh every time I see it, because its "flavor text" is in hieroglyphics); this deals 2-but-actually-3 damage to the Explosive, and instead of using its power and drawing a card, he deals another 2-which-becomes-3 with his own "Pyre" power, leaving it at 6 HP. It's still going to hurt a fair bit; I really miscalculated this round by focusing on the need to deal just 7 damage to Omnitron himself, when he wasn't the most immediate threat. But hey, it's the first round of the game; might as well make it a bloody one. For his turn-ending draw, Ra gets Solar Flare, which lets him deal 2 extra damage with all his fire attacks (not throwing the Staff of Ra at someone, since that's projectile damage), for as many turns as he wants to take 4 (psychic) damage at the end of each one. (Given that villains and environments sometimes destroy your Ongoing cards before it gets back to your turn, this is not an especially good investment.)

Environment time. Insula Primalis produces a Pterodactyl Thief, a 5-HP "Dinosaur" (scientific precision, thy name is not comic books), which if it's still in play at the start of the next Environment turn, will destroy all Equipment the heroes have in play, then deal Sonic damage equal to the number of "stolen" Equipment to each hero target, potentially increasing that amount in subsequent turns if they fail to get rid of the Pterodactyl, at which point all the stolen Equipment comes back to the players' hands. The last time I played on Insula Primalis (against a much more fitting villain, for the record), we also had a Pterodactyl Thief as our first Environment card, and had no trouble killing it before it could steal anything; this time, we'll have even less.

Back to Omnitron. He flips back into Factory form, keeping him from playing two villain cards this turn, and there's no trash for him to pull Devices or Components out of. So all he'll be doing this turn is firing off the ones he's got out already, and then making one more. First, the Bomb sorta-explodes (the flavor is a bit off, given that the thing stays in play and "explodes" again next turn), dealing 5 damage to Legacy and Bunker and 6 damage to each of the other three heroes, leaving Legacy still the highest HP at 27. Therefore, it's Legacy who gets fried by the Disintegrator, losing another 5 HP - and leaving him still ahead of Tempest or Visionary. Finally Omnitron produces his newist fiendish contraption - another Disintegrator Ray. (I shuffled, I swear.)

Having taken their pain for one round of poor planning, the heroes waste no time making up the difference. Legacy's Inspiring Presence heals everyone, he activates Galvanize, then he draws Lead From the Front, an Ongoing which lets Legs take damage in place of other heroes (as long as the damage comes from the Villain deck, not the heroes themselves or their Environment). He may be boring, but on the plus side, he can get himself killed real fast (and while I've told you about how Incapacitated Heroes work, I haven't actually given you a practical example yet). Then it's on to Bunker, who could put down his Flak Cannon and deal 5 damage, but Tempest will be dishing out at least 3 to everything and could make that 6 without difficulty, so Bunker focuses on continuing to build up. He plays the Aux Power Source, then Initializes and ends his turn; the two draws are another Decommissioned Hardware (I shuffled, I swear!) and External Combustion, a One-Shot which deals 3 damage to each non-Hero target and 2 to Bunker himself. It's not looking likely that he'll need that one this game....

Tempest's Electrical Storm deals 3 damage to Omnitron and 3 to the EPE, as well as to the Pterodactyl, and he puts out his Otherworldly Resilience. He then activates Squall, throwing around 3 more damage to take out both the EPE and the Pterodactyl. Tempest is a little on the boring side, but damn is he ever powerful, especially when combined with Legacy. Ending his turn, he draws a Vicious Cyclone, a very strong boss-buster which lets Tempest discard up to 3 cards at the start of his turn, dealing that many damage to the single chosen target of the Cyclone (which will nearly always be the Villain Character, since few other targets would justify such a steep investment, nor the amount of damage which results).

Since the heroes have matters fairly well in hand, Visi plays Precognition to keep things from taking a turn for the worse; the next three cards in Omnitron's deck are Terraforming (destroy all Environment cards and play that many Villain cards), Sedative Flechettes (H+1 damage to all heroes and destroy their Ongoings), and an S-85 Repair Drone (a 4-HP Target which heals Omnitron by 2 or more each turn, depending on how many Drone devices have been put out). Of these, the Flechettes are clearly the most dangerous, and Terraforming might play another Flechettes from the deck, so Visi sets up the Drone to come out on the next Villain turn. She then targets Ra with her Enlighten power, causing him to draw two copies of Summon Staff and discard one of his Wrathful Gazes. For herself, she draws Cerebral Hemorrhage, her more-surgical-but-basically-just-inferior version of Psychic Maelstrom.

Knowing that he's got some healing coming, Ra decides he doesn't mind burning the midnight oil, so he plays Solar Flare to yet further increase his damage, using his Pyre to deal 6 damage to Omnitron and very thoroughly destroy both Disintegration Rays. Unfortunately, neither Legacy's Galvanize nor Inspiring Presence limits its effect to damage heroes deal to non-heroes, so Ra has to deal himself 6 damage instead of 4 by keeping Solar Flare around, hopefully until his next turn, but he'll be able to heal with the Staff of Ra after he Summons it, so he figures it's worth the risk. At end of turn, he draws a third Summon Staff. (I shuffled, I swear!)

The Environment deck now disgorges its most singular effect, Volcanic Eruption. Like the Pterodactyl, it doesn't do anything yet; a hero can skip their entire turn, except for start-of-turn effects from cards older than the Eruption, to destroy it, and when it's destroyed, an "Obsidian Field" card comes into play from the trash, if there is one. If nobody ever skips their turn, the Volcano will deal 7 fire damage to every target on each subsequent Environment turn; both Ra and Legacy have effects which will make them capable of surviving repeated baths in lava, but neither has those effects in play, so it's likely the heroes won't want to leave the Volcano out in the hopes of it helping to finish off Omnitron and his Drones, though I can completely see that being a valid strategy for this party if they had been less proactive with the cards they had available.

Anyway, I suppose I'm probably due for a break here, so Omnitron's teensy-weensy rampage of destruction will continue momentarily.
Last edited by willpell on Mon Sep 02, 2013 10:26 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Mon Sep 02, 2013 6:00 pm

Omnitron flips into Rampaging Robot form, and with no other cards in play, proceeds without further ado to the playing of two Villain cards, the first of which is the prearranged Repair Drone. The second of which is...another repair drone. (I SHUFFLED, I SWEAR!) Thusly, with two of these drones counting each other, Omnitron heals 6 HP as his entire turn.

Legacy plays his first One-Shot of the game, Bolster Allies, and the card he draws is Danger Sense, which is one of two ways he has of avoiding damage from a Volcanic Eruption; though it doesn't help at all against villains (Spider-Man may feel secure that his version of this power remains superior), it entirely negates Environment damage. Bunker draws his Recharge Mode, which reduces his incoming damage by 1 and lets him draw extra cards, but prevents him from playing cards or using powers until he destroys the Mode. (The third Mode available is Upgrade Mode, which lets you play an extra card each turn but stops you from using Powers; unlike the other two, it has no secondary damage-related effect besides doubling one of your usual phase-options, so it also doesn't force you to skip both of the other phases...you can't use Powers, which is rather punishing since Bunker has very few One-Shots to take advantage of the play-extra-cards option, but at least you retain the ability to draw cards, whether at the end of your turn or through card effects at other times. You could even skip playing your two cards for the turn and draw two cards as normal for a skipped turn, while keeping the Mode in play, an option not available in Turret Mode.)

Tempest draws his best damage-dealing one-shot, Lightning Slash, which deals 5 damage in one go, and that is all; in a game that didn't feature Legacy, this would be spectacular, as taking down certain "social" villains such as Citizen Dawn or The Chairman relies almost entirely on the ability to take their mutually-protective minions out of commission in one blow, and many heroes are completely without such heavy weapons. Visionary, as if deliberately sabotaging my effort to prove that she's cool, draws a third Mind Spike, and Ra does exactly what I hoped he wouldn't do - draw one of his four copies of the Staff of Ra, ensuring that whenever he draws his fourth copy of Summon Staff, it'll be a dead card until after he reshuffles. (Virtually everyone has dead cards sometimes, which is part of why Visi's Enlighten power is so strong, but this doesn't stop me from bemoaning my luck when I persistently turn up exactly the wrong cards for the situation, time after time after time.) Once he's finished handing out cards, Legacy hands out +1-damage "hats" again, then ends his turn by drawing Flying Smash, a One-Shot which deals 3 damage to each of up to 3 targets (cf. "THOKK!", I say solely for the sake of saying so).

It is very thoroughly obvious by now that Bunker should have played his Flak Cannon two turns ago; better late than never. Giving up his Initialize power, he fires the Cannon instead, putting a 5-damage hole through Omnitron. He then draws a duplicate Flak Cannon, and passes the turn to Tempest, who shoots off his Lightning Storm for 3 damage to Omnitron and the two Drones, and then skips the rest of his turn to cap the Volcano. (I'm pretty sure this is how it works, though I've created a post on the SOTM forum to get confirmation; I've also asked for a clarification regarding Vicious Cyclone, which might be extremely good rather than just very good at killing bosses, if it does indeed combine with Legacy as well as I think it might.)

The Visionary "asks" Ra whether he's going to be able to deal damage to the Drones without having to go easy on Omnitron, and gets an answer of "no", so to put a stop to this machines-healing nonsense, the psychic hero plays her Cerebral Hemorrhage to make the two robots bleed from their brains (scientific precision, thy name is not comic books), dealing what Legacy turns into 4 damage each, enough to kill the Drones even if they hadn't been hurt by the Electrical Storm. Since Tempest skipping his turn meant Tempest not drawing a card at the end of his turn, Visi targets him with Enlighten, despite him being the only hero with no duplicate cards in hand; he acquires a second Aquatic Correspondence and another one-shot, Flash Flood, whose ability to destroy up to two Environments is potentially quite strong but may not be applicable for several turns. Still, he figures that Grevious Hail Storm is not that necessary, since it only slightly improves on his innate Power and that difference is mostly overshadowed by Legacy's aid, so he discards that one from his existing hand in order to keep both the new cards. Visionary then draws the first card I ever played during my actual game with her, Telekinetic Cocoon, which prevents her from playing cards or using powers (and thus automatically enables her to draw 2 cards instead of 1 at the end of every turn), but makes her immune to damage, a status that she can drop at the start of her turn. (I had forgotten the Coccoon, so Visi is also on the list of Heroes who can completely ignore a Volcanic Eruption if she so chooses.)

Omnitron is down just 16 HP (it would have been 18 if I hadn't spaced on Tempest's first-turn Squall) from his triple-digit starting point, but that's about to change big time, because now Ra's turn is up, and he's retained his Solar Flare for a full round. First he plays Summon Staff, not because he needs a Staff but just because it will let him draw an extra card and play an extra card. The card he draws is Inferno, one of his most potent cards in certain games, though not ideal at the moment; it deals 3 damage to one target, then 1 damage each to up to five others (and of course, Legacy's Galvanize and other such buffs will stack with that). For precisely the reason "Why not", Ra then plays a second Summon Staff, and he draws exactly the card I was hoping for - Flame Spike. Playing this One-Shot rather than any of the Staffs as his final card, he deals Omnitron 1 damage, which becomes 5 damage, and gains the right to activate two Powers that turn - so he deals another 1=5 damage with Living Conflagration, draws a card (which turns out to be another Living Conflagration, but that's a card I don't mind seeing in multiples due to its enter-play effect and non-Limited status), and then deals 2=6 damage with Pyre...meaning that he doubled the damage that Omnitron had taken in that one turn. I stand by my previous statements that both Ra and Legacy are more than a little boring to play as...but they make good starter heroes for newbie players, and boy can they ever do some heavy lifting together. Drawing his ninth card, a Flame Barrier Ongoing which he probably won't bother to play this game, Ra ends his turn, and the Hero round overall.

Insula Primalis produces a Velociraptor Pack; the last time I played in this Environment, it was against a very target-heavy villain, and the presence of low-HP "mooks" (actually pieces of the villain herself from a flavor perspective, but whatever) made the Velociraptors allies to the players, as they behave like predators since the dawn of time generally have in attacking the weakest available targets (other than each other), with the damage going up as more Velociraptor Packs enter play. For the first time this game, an Environment card acts at the end of the turn it came out, rather than at the start of the next turn; the Pack is alone, so it deals just 2 damage, and there aren't any weak Drones for them to gnaw on, so the rather battered Ra (who has given up his Solar Flare, as there aren't enough targets to be worth keeping it around to combine with Inferno later), having already become the first hero to drop below 20 HP so far this game, takes another 2 damage and falls to 17.
Last edited by willpell on Mon Sep 02, 2013 10:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Mon Sep 02, 2013 8:57 pm

Omnitron flips, but garbage is all he's gettin'...oh wait, this isn't a Weird Al song. Playing his single Villain Card for a non-Rampaging turn, he finds it to be the Technological Singularity...he destroys all of Bunker's equipment (and would also hit the Staff of Ra if it were out; unscientific precision, thy name is not comic books either), dealing twice that much lightning damage to the hero in question...and his Heavy Plating is gone, so he takes it all. Bunker joins Ra in the Not-Enough-HP-to-Drink Club, then Omnitron shuffles his Trash and selects a Device or Component from it to put back into play...this turns out to be the Disintegration Ray, so I'm guessing it won't last long.

Not wanting to see his buddy Bunker suffer like that again, Legs puts out Lead From the Front; if he dies and stops handing out +2 damage candies, the rest of the team will have a seriously more uphill battle ahead of them, but they'll do better than he would without them, so it makes sense for him to volunteer to be the first casualty. After using his power, he draws Heroic Interception, a card similar in flavor to Lead from the Front but applicable to Environment and even self-inflicted damage (though recent errata from SOTM's printer has confirmed that Solar Flare and similar cards don't work if the damage is prevented, so it's not as much fun as it could be...it can still help with cards like Bunker's External Combustion), where Legacy takes just 3 damage to prevent damage to everyone else for a round, instead of the amount that was actually dealt, remaining susceptible to damage himself. Normally I would tend to prefer Interception over LFTF since it actually reduces the damage the whole team takes, but when the villain is dishing out large chunks of damage at hard-to-predict intervals as Omnitron is doing, it seems worth investing in a "floating" defense which could save Bunker's bacon in an emergency, so that he needn't be afraid to play more Equipment now.

Bunker plays and uses his second Flak Cannon, knocking Omnitron down to 63 HP, and draws a Maintenance Unit, which lets him restore 2 HP as a Power. That'll go nicely with his AuxPS when he uses DecommWare to get it back out. Tempest's Storm then knocks the "3" off the end of Omni's HP, and he then plays Aquatic Correspondence, drawing Cleansing Downpour and two copies of Chain Lightning. Chain Lightning, like Ball Lightning, can destroy up to 3 cards Tempest doesn't like, but instead of "a 4-HP target and two Ongoings", this one hits "a 4-HP target, a 3-HP target, and a 2-HP target", and of course can damage tougher targets, including the villain himself, with whichever of these blasts can be spared. As for Cleansing Downpour, this is a card which I'll always have a soft spot for in my memories, because of how hilariously I once mis-played it; during my second game of SOTM ever, Tempest was one of two heroes I played, going up against his Nemesis the Grand Warlord (they're both from outer space, you see, so that makes them enemies...okay there's a little more to it than that, but there aren't any other exterrans in the game so far, so it's very much a case of "Guardians of the Galaxy Syndrome"). I played Cleansing Downpour as, I think, the very first card i'd played in that game, and somehow I got the idea it was a one-shot which gave everyone 2 HP...in fact, it's an Ongoing whose power gives everyone 2 HP, something which is both more and less useful depending on the circumstances. In the more grueling games I've played against tough-to-kill villains, the ability to regenerate the whole team round after round would be awesome, but in this particular game, Omnitron has a nice big target on his back, and I'd rather not stay up all night composing my Let's Play this time (the one I did last Wednesday "plum tuckered me out" - I'm speaking Western here for no particular reason, don't worry about it - so much that I missed one of my two weekly social engagements the next morning). So in this game, I'll probably play Vicious Cyclone and discard Cleansing Downpour to it; that might result in hero death or even game loss, but it's better than having the game stall because we couldn't quite finish the villain off. Anyway, having not played the Downpour, Tempest has no Powers out except his Squall, so he deals 3 more damage with that, draws a second (and useless, save to discard to VC, because it's Limited) Electrical Storm, and ends his turn.

Visionary decides it's time to make a Suggestion, putting the two wimpy Repair Drones on the top and bottom of the deck; not being paired up, each one will probably only restore 2 HP to Omnitron when it comes out, assuming the second one ever does. With Omni about to flip into Rampage mode, he'll get at least one new Villain card out, but hopefully this will be better than two of them. Targeting herself with Enlighten, she draws another Brain Burn and her self-protective Decoy Projection, discarding a Mind Spike because she figures the others are so much better at dealing damage that she's unlikely to need all three of these.

Just because, Ra plays his third Summon Staff, then draws one of his three copies of Flesh of the Sun God, an Ongoing which immunizes Ra himself against Volcanic Eruptions and similar hazards, as well as letting him use his Power to protect the entire party against such fire damage. With his bonus card play, he puts down the Staff of Ra finally, healing himself by 3 and condemning Bunker to be velociraptor-chow this turn instead of him, then uses Living Conflagration to deal 1=4 damage (+1 each from Legacy's Galvanize, Legacy's Inspiring Presence, and the Staff of Ra) to Omnitron, more than finishing off his Disintegration Ray. With his bonus card-draw from Living Conflagration as well as his turn-ender, he draws a second Blazing Tornado and the fairly-useless-right-now Drawn to the Flame, which turns the villain's Ongoing cards into damage to all non-Hero targets as a Power, but I don't yet know of a Villain who relies heavily enough on those to really make this a strong card (usually all but a few of the cards in a Villain deck are either Targets or One-Shots). Still, regardless of what they actually are, having 11 cards in hand is certainly cool...if we were fighting on the Marsbase or Atlantis, all those "discard some cards" effects would be easily disposed of thanks to Ra.

Insula Primalis gets mean for the first time this turn; it produces a River of Lava which will deal each hero H fire damage unless they destroy an Equipment (presumably to make a heat-proof boat out of it). It's easily disposed of at the start of the next environment turn, costing each player nothing but the top three cards of their deck (which don't really matter unless you had stacked your deck, since it will reshuffle without effect when depleted), but during its brief reign of terror, it makes the heroes really feel the burn, and since you don't generally see it coming, protecting against it with effects like Telekinetic Cocoon or Flesh of the Sun God is easier said than done. For right now, the velociraptors snack on Bunker first, then Legacy takes his 4 damage due to Fortitude; Bunker dumps his Flak Cannon to avoid further harm, Tempest absorbs his own 4 damage due to Otherworldly Resilience, and Ra happily dumps a Staff so that he can heal himself by playing another one next turn, but Visi "convinces" Legacy to spare her from 5 damage by taking it with Lead from the Front. (I'm assuming this means Legacy can reduce the damage to 4 with his Fortitude, but later on I'll look at the forums and find out whether you're allowed to multiply-reduce damage by bouncing it between characters...it probably shouldn't work more than once, but exactly when it's checked might determine whether it works even the first time.)

Now it's Omnitron's next Rampage; he gets out his Drone, then an Interpolation Beam, which deals 1 damage for each card a hero draws. Being a Component like the Disintegrator Ray, it's likewise destroyed by 7 damage, and it's not hard for Legacy and crew to accomplish that, but in this case they might want to do it faster than is minimally possible. The Drone heals Omni and his turn is done.

Since now is the time for Legacy to deal some damage and not just delegate that responsibility to others, he delivers a "THOKK!" to Omni's nonexistant face, with the damage becoming 4 since Legs applies the bonus from his own Inspiring Presence, but can't (usually) gain the benefit of his Galvanize power. This lets him draw a card, which proves to be Take Down, and he suffers 1 damage as a result, but that's kind of his shtick anyway, and it is only 1 - he's not even halfway dead yet. (I think...let's see, did I remember to have him actually take 4 damage for Visionary? According to my records, he should have been at 28 HP when I began this post, then would have lost 4 to the River hitting himself, and arguably-4 to the River hitting Visi and him taking the damage...which, now that I reread Lead From the Front, isn't actually possible, so he should definitely have 24 HP, minus 1 when he takes the Interpolation hit). Legs then takes another damage as he draws Motivational Charge, an Ongoing card which grants him an actual damage-dealing Power of his own, which hits one target for 2 damage while healing each hero by 1. (Visionary particularly likes this, because her Decoy Projection is a Target, and thus will be healed of 1 damage while she herself is healed of another, assuming the Decoy took damage which didn't suffice to kill it.)

Bunker knows it's a risk with Technological Singularities flying about hither and yon, but decides it's worth it for right now, rather than playing his Maintenance Unit and healing 2 HP but then taking 1 damage when he draws a card, and another if he draws a card with Initialize, to play his duplicate Heavy Plating from the beginning of the game. This allows him to Initialize and then draw his turn-ending card without taking any damage at all...and the cards he draws this way are both External Combustions. (YES DAMMIT I SHUFFLED!!!111!!!)

Though eager to play Vicious Cyclone, Tempest decides he can't resist having such a perfect trio of targets for Chain Lightning, and plays that; with Galvanize and Inspiring Presence as usual, this deals 4 damage to the Repair Drone and 5 damage to the Velociraptors, disposing of both, while putting 6 damage on Omnitron. Combined with THOKK!, that fries the Interpolation Beam quite nicely, it having dealt only 2 damage to Legacy before it died. Actually I forgot the Electrical Storm, which killed the Component and heavily damaged both Drone and Pack, so the Chain Lightning was kind of overkill, but so it goes. After all that, Tempest still feels a Squall coming on, so he deals 3 more damage besides the 3 from the Storm and the 6 from the Lightning; Omnitron is now down to 39 HP. Tempest draws an extra Ball Lightning and his turn is done.

Visi decides to put her Decoy Projection out now, then offers Legacy her Enlighten in the hopes that he can do something proactive next round. He draws another Inspiring Presence, which unfortunately he can't play even just to get the healing effect, because they're Limited and one remains in play, and a Backfist Strike, which just deals 4 damage to one target (cf. Flying Smash and "THOKK!"); he discards his duplicate Fortitude. She draws another Decoy Projection at end of turn (they're also Limited, so she can't have multiple Decoys out...although interestingly, they're cards which sit on the table but are neither Ongoing nor Limited, being the only hero card I can think of which fulfills this description).

Not wanting to remain at half his starting HP forever, Ra plays one of his Staves and promptly throws it, gaining 3 HP while dealing 6 damage to Omnitron. He draws a duplicate copy of Flesh of the Sun God.

At the start of the Environment turn, everyone stops the River of Lava, there being no reason not to; of note, one of the cards Visi discards from her deck is a Mass Levitation, which in future turns she could recover with Mental Divergence as a power, then re-draw, play, and use as her power every turn thereafter, significantly reducing damage dealt by Environments. Not that this is useful at the moment, but it's the kind of play she often has the option of choosing. Other cards discarded this way which could be Divergenced back to their players' decks include another Cleansing Downpour for Tempest (the only one which is publically "visible" to the other "players"), and duplicates of Inspiring Presence and Lead from the Front for Legacy. But the most interesting such discard, if only it were an Ongoing rather than Equipment, is Bunker's Omni-Cannon, which is similar to Tempest's Vicious Cyclone but doesn't require a specific target, deals twice as much damage (though without letting you stack bonuses, which may or may not be possible for Tempest), and lets you "hold the charge" of the discarded cards in future turns, getting a theoretically limitless amount of damage (if you're willing to risk the sudden destruction of your Equipment) by continuing to store cards over time, but then requiring your Power for the turn to finally unleash. Tempest also discards a nice Equipment, the Elemental Subwave Inducer, which allows him to pick a damage type to both deal exclusively and reduce when dealt to him. I won't bother to describe Ra's discards, as they were all one-shots and only one of them would have been terribly nice to have.

Remember when the Volcanic Eruption didn't happen? When it was destroyed, it was supposed to have gotten an Obsidian Field out of the trash, but there wasn't one. Well, now the Environment deck plays one. It increases all damage dealt by 1, and a player can discard 2 cards after their turn to destroy it; Ra will have no problem doing that, assuming the players even want to give up that effect with as well as they're doing. It then moves on to Omnitron's turn; he flips back to factory form, then plays another component, the Electro-Magnetic Railgun. Very damaging, if only it fired at the end of the villain turn, but because it waits until the start and follows the same rules as other components, it won't last long, especially not with the Obsidian Field out. The Factory foolishly churns out yet another Disintegration Ray instead of a Drone that would require separate targeting, and Omnitron is done...for now, and perhaps forever at the rate things are going.

Since things are going so well, and Omnitron is going to flip into his more proactive mode in a turn, Legs plays Take Down (a card which you'll remember Visi gave him), making it impossible for villain cards to be played during the upcoming round - meaning that, with the Environment a minimal threat, the Obsidian Field can safely be left in play, and all damage the heroes deal will be +3. Legacy draws a Bolster Allies, takes 2 damage from Omnitron because of Take Down (leaving him still at 20), and ends his turn.

Bunker plays Decommissioned Hardware to get back his Flak Cannon, then fires it at Omnitron for 6 damage. He draws another Maintenance Unit and ends his turn. Tempest finishes off the Components with his Electrical Storm, then somewhat unnecessarily plays his Vicious Cyclone on Omnitron. He deals another 4 damage with his Squall; assuming I've counted right, that leaves Omnitron at 20 HP. Things being the way they are, Visionary plays a Mind Spike on Omni rather than do anything subtle (maybe she's just quick to anger), knocking Omni down to 14, and Enlightens Ra in case he might get a card with enough sheer damage-power to end this right now. He does indeed get his best card, Fire Blast, so after Visi draws Demoralization (her psychic-damage variant of Tempest's Electrical Storm), he plays Fire Blast for a total of 9 damage with all the boosts, then Pyres for 6 more, and that's the end of Omnitron. (Actually I later realized that 5+3=/=9, and 2+3=/=6, so technically Omnitron should have gotten another turn...but couldn't have played cards during it, so the odds that the Environment alone would have kept the heroes from finishing the game were pretty slim - Insula doesn't have any damage-preventers like the Marsbase or Megalopolis - and ultimately, it wasn't worth prolonging the game.)

Interestingly, if things had been a little different, the end of Omnitron might not have been the end of the game; uniquely among Villain Characters, as far as I know, he can be killed and the game still continues as the players mop up all of his Devices. Curious about how viable this is, I've broken with my usual Conservation of Surprise tradition and looked through Omnitron's entire deck...for such a supposedly-epic threat to humanity, he's not really that tough, and well deserves being tied with Baron Blade as a 1 on the 4-point scale of villain difficulty (the toughest one I've faced so far was The Chairman, who's a 4, but you haven't heard about him here and probably won't anytime soon; I may eventually be able to bring you Iron Legacy or Miss Information, but for now the toughest villains are Citizen Dawn and Grand Warlord Voss, both of them ranked at 3...although Apostate is supposed to be only a 2, and I found him almost as impossible as the Chairman). In theory, Omnitron ought to be able to present a credible threat, but the numbers are all wrong...he doesn't churn out enough Drones for how weak they are, 7 damage is fairly low as a way to destroy all his Components at once, and the odds of any of his Devices being harder to kill than himself are slim, given that he has 100 HP and even the ultimate Bomb had only 15 (to say nothing of how the EPE's damage-dealing method inherently demands that you ignore Omnitron and kill it ASAP). The only thing he's really got going for him is the Adaptive Plating Subroutine, which makes him temporarily immune to any damage type he's dealt; in a game with fewer heroes and/or a poorly-selected set (like my last LP, where the melee-exclusive Haka was the only heavy damage-dealer), this could seriously frustrate the group and buy the time for him to become dangerous, but only that or an improbably effective mid-game Terraforming would be likely to even make him mildly difficult, and only the latter scenario might result in it being easier to kill him than all his Devices. All told, he's a neat idea, but is probably a lot more impressive on your first or second game than this far into my career; even his Advanced options, which reduce damage to him and his Devices on the Robot side while increasing the damage they deal on the Factory side, would be unlikely to make him more than slightly harder to defeat.

Well, it'll probably be a while before I'll have any desire to play against Omnitron again, and I probably won't be LPing that game, unless I become VERY bored with the other three villains while still dithering about whether to buy the game's expansions. Still, Grand Warlord Voss is still scheduled to appear, and after that I might give Blade or Dawn another try, with or without Advanced play. So in the hopes that I haven't entirely bored you to tears just yet, for now I am The Unbelievable Willpell, signing off for tonight.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by ThroughTheWell » Tue Sep 03, 2013 3:19 pm

These games are not seeming too tough for the heroes, as in not challenging. The villans spread their shots instead of concentrating, have less powerfull one shots than individual hero one shots, have much more conditional healing than the heroes, have many less actions (in an action economy sense) than the heroes, and only last as long as they do because they start out with more HP and throw out some disposable minions and equipment along the way. I'd like to see a villan designed to do the kind of things the heroes are doing. Given the weaknesses of villans, it is almost looking like the player heroes would have to play their hands deliberately badly NOT to win.

Villans need: an ongoing non-disposable source of low level damage to force some sense of deadline to their peril, an ongoing non-disposable form of healing, bigger one shots, and preferably a variety of escalating powers (maybe trash based?) Or maybe the ability to play H+1 cards per turn? It seems like the villans hardly get to some of their goodies, and rarely do their goodies get the chance to start stacking and synergizing. If a villan can get a set of cards out, weak as they are, then the heroes would need to target the synergistic center of the set, plus keep using all of the lovely multi-target damagers they have which almost seem underused when the villan can only get out 2-3 cards max.

I'm not getting the sense of peril that to me makes for a heroic story. It seems comicly ho hum. "I use awesomely named power, like I realy need it."

It seems boring in the sense that it does not matter if the players find a good choice, they are going to win anyway.

It might be mean, but a villan aiming at the lowest HP char instead of the highest HP char, might still spread damage around, but at least it makes sense from the villan's perspective. Plus it would add a real sense of peril. Better make sure Miss Low HP is healed, or she could go down. If we keep her up, maybe Mr Big Def will take a hit or 2.

What about a villan power that does dam based on player hand size? That might keep their hand size low enough that the environment might actualy participate in the challenge. Or based on player trash size? To knock back those multi damage dealers. Or to all heroes based on the total ongoing and equipment cards of all of the heroes added together? To counteract all of the boni the players start to get by endgame. Be less mean and make that a heal effect on the villan.

(Not all of these ideas work together; some work based on and assuming the current weak cards and powers.)
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sun Sep 08, 2013 10:06 am

Okay, time to put ThroughTheWell's theory about how easy this game is to the test. The villain I'm playing today is Grand Warlord Voss; on the 4-point difficulty scale of villains suggested by the SOTM rulebook, he's listed as a 3, like Citizen Dawn (who I certainly didn't find easy), and for the first time, I'll be trying out the Advanced rules to make him even harder than he normally is. This will make all four of the Villains in the starter set which I've used now, although I'm not using the fourth different Environment, "Megalopolis", just yet because I've played it twice already. Instead, we'll return to the Wagner Mars Base, site of my battle against Citizen Dawn, so not only will the heroes be struggling to stop a Conquering Alien Warlord, but they may have to deal with a Self-Destruct Sequence besides.

For our heroes, I'll start off with The Wraith, who is probably the single most powerful hero across the board, as long as nothing destroys her Equipment (and relatively few villains seem to have Equipment destruction, compared to the number who hit Ongoing cards). As the rather transparent Batman analogue of Sentinels, she naturally has some of the best stuff up her sleeve, and the only trick sometimes is managing to get it all our in time; let's see if she can manage this time. Second, we have the last character of the starting 10 which you guys haven't seen yet, Fanatic. She's a Peruvian orphan raised by nuns who sprouted wings at puberty, decided she was a soldier for God, and then stumbled upon a cache of Templar magic weapons and armor; she has a serious martyr complex, with a lot of her cards damaging herself in order to damage the villain even more, and while that serves very nicely in games against straightforward baddies like Omnitron or Citizen Dawn, it may prove less powerful here, for reasons that will become clear shortly. Third, I'm bringing back Haka from game 2, who I played in my previous game against Voss (not on Advanced), finding him to be of somewhat mixed effectiveness. He has a card which is a serious game-breaker against minion-based villains such as Voss, and he also has the Taiaha in all its magnificence, but some of his other cards are more conditional, with one in particular having proven inconvenient in the past (partly due to misunderstanding the rules, but still). Lastly, I'm indulging myself in my love of Absolute Zero, although his tendency to slow-roll a bit might prove to be inconvenient in a high-stakes battle like this one. (I'm capping this game at 4 heroes as well as omitting Legacy, to make sure that it's a proper challenge.)

Note that in this game, I'm going back to the standard I used for the first two, describing cards as they're played rather than when they're drawn. I'll think about whether to do the latter again when I next use Visionary, but probably I won't even then, as it made it frustratingly difficult for me to read my own record later. And with her not in this game, there's definitely no reason to bother.

Anyway, the fate of the Earth is at stake, so...Let's Play!
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sun Sep 08, 2013 11:22 am

Warlord Voss has 90 HP, second only to Omnitron out of the set in the core game, but is even more focused on Minions than the Self-Aware Robotics Factory. He always starts the game with H minions in play, so I'll procure those now:
* Gene-Bound Psi-Weaver: 3 HP, immune to psychic damage, AEOVT (At End Of Villain Turn) deals each hero 2 psychic damage.
* Gene-Bound Guard: 3 HP, reduces damage dealt to villain targets by 1.
* Gene-Bound Bionaut: 3 HP, immune to toxic damage, AEOVT deals the hero with the lowest HP 2 toxic damage.
* Gene-Bound Frosthound: 3 HP, immune to cold damage ("argh" says Absolute Zero), AEOVT deals each hero 2 cold damage ("...yay?" says Absolute Zero).
As long as Voss's army is out, it's virtually impossible to hurt him; he reduces damage he takes by 2 for each minion in play. But when there are no minions in play at the start of his turn, he flips into his other form. If he manages to get 10 minions out, Earth has been completely overrun and the heroes lose. Finally, his Advanced text states "Reduce damage dealt by heroes by 1". Between that and the Guard, the heroes have to deal 3 damage just to make a minion lose 1 HP, or 5 damage at once to kill one. This entirely neutralizes the innate damage-dealing powers of Haka and Fanatic, and thanks to the Advanced line, Zero can't even zap himself for cold damage in order to heal with the Null-Point Unit.
Anyway, these four minions came out just at the start of the game, so Voss still gets to play a card. This one is a Gene-Bound Shock Infantry, yet another 3-HP target, who is immune to lightning damage and deals 3 of it to the highest-HP hero AEOVT. And the EOVT happens to be now, so the Psi-Weaver zaps everyone for 2, the Bionaut hits low-HP Wraith for 2 more, the Frosthound hits everyone for 2 more, and the Shocktroop zaps HP leader Haka for 3. The heroes are now down to 20, 26, 27, and 25 HP respectively, the villain is halfway to winning, and they haven't even had a turn! Still sound easy?

Wraith doesn't really like being first in the turn order; if she draws her Razor Ordinance or the Infrared Eyepiece or something, she'll have to choose between using that and getting a potentially-lifesaving damage shield from her innate "Stealth" power, without knowing whether anyone further along in the turn order can deal any damage. (Of course, in a real game you're allowed to ask the other players whether they will be able to do so - with card-draw happening at the end of the turn, you can pretty much plan out the entire hero round collaboratively - but I feel like it's more tense when I pretend the heroes don't have a perfect ability to communicate among each other, and sometimes have to make decisions based on only the information they can "see".) Fortunately, she's able to have most of her cake and still eat some of it; she plays the Stun Bolt, using its power to deal 1 damage to the Psi-Weaver, and "Until the start of your next turn, reduce all damage dealt by that target by 1". Wraith doesn't actually deal any damage because of all the reduction, but the stunning part still happens (unlike with Tachyon's Hypersonic Assault, the ability is not written as being contingent on successfully dealing damage), so the nastiest of the minions will be somewhat less nasty next time around. Wraith draws her card and is done.

Welp, I thought this game was going to be quite a challenge. Then I actually looked at Fanatic's hand. She's holding one of the most spoilery cards imaginable for this particular match - End of Days. It's an Ongoing card which doesn't trigger until the start of the Environment turn, but of course that's before the next villain turn, so it happens effectively-instantly as far as the villain is concerned - and destroys ALL cards in play except for character cards and Relics. (It then somewhat-redundantly specifies that it is destroyed itself.) At least two villains rely heavily upon Relics, but Warlord Voss isn't one of them, so all five of those virtually indestructible minions are going away right off the bat...had Wraith not played her Stun Bolt, it'd be even better (she had a one-shot that she could have used to heal instead, if the "players" had been coordinating perfectly), but as it stands, the heroes have just reclaimed a huge advantage due to this one card. Fanatic's "Exorcism" Power is not useful at the moment, as it deals 1 damage twice and thus is reduced to 0 by Voss's Advanced text; she doesn't receive anything in exchange for having not used a power this turn, since she played a card, but all told this is a pretty small price to pay. She then proceeds to draw her own Relic, which will start making her horrifically powerful next turn...she's definitely the star of this particular match.

Haka has his Taiaha in his opening hand, but of course now isn't the time to play it; his only One-Shot in hand is Elbow Smash, which deals 3 damage to one target, but the only target worth hitting right now would be Voss, and he's currently reducing damage to himself by 12. Haka's "Crush" power is also neutered, so he has absolutely nothing to do this turn, and just draws two cards. Zero also has nothing useful to do, with his only One-Shot in hand being a way to destroy Ongoings and deal damage, with the only one in play being very much not worth destroying in exchange for just 1 damage to everything on the villain side (since there wouldn't be any actual damage thanks to Voss). So he also draws two cards, and then the Environment turn starts and End of Days blows up Voss's army.

The Environment turn now actually starts, and the first card to come out of the Wagner Mars Base deck is the Self-Destruct Sequence. Seems kind of redundant since it was already the End of Days, but oh well. We then move on to Voss's second villain turn, and he flips due to the lack of Minions, becoming the "Super-Thorathian Warrior" (Thorathian being his species's name). In this form, he only reduces the damage to himself by 1 per minion, but flips at the start of his turn if he has more than one of them. AEOVT, this version of Voss blasts the highest-HP hero for H-1 damage, and the lowest-HP hero for H-2, with the first damage being Energy and the second Fire. (If all heroes were tied for most HP, Voss would thus be hitting the same one twice for as much as 7 damage in a five-hero game, or 3 damage if there were just three heroes; here it splits the difference and adds up to 5.) Finally, on Advanced mode, he gets to play an extra card each of his turns, so he goes ahead and plays two cards right now (actually I later discovered this isn't quite right, but the difference didn't really matter so I won't worry about it this time). The first is a Gene-Bound Ion Lancer, identical to the Bionaut except that its damage and immunity are Energy rather than Toxic. The second is another Gene-Bound Guard, so we're right back to Minions taking less damage, although for now it's only reduced by 1, since Voss is no longer on his original side. After playing the Lancer but prior to playing the Guard, Voss dealt his damage - 3 to our current HP leader Fanatic (you have to admit, having wiped out his army singlehandedly, she really deserves his attentions), and then 2 damage to Wraith. The Lancer then stabs Wraith for another 2 damage, and then it's the heroes' turn.

Knowing that her 16-HP self is second in line to take more damage from Voss or the Lancer, Wraith decides she'd like to go Stealth this turn rather than play one of her Equipment and use its Power. First, she plays Suture Self, a one-shot that heals her for 3 (not quite the most healing that anyone can get at one time, but the highest flat number for healing I can recall having seen on any card that isn't highly specific about the conditions), bringing her up to 21 - still the lowest of the group, but not quite so close to death. She then proceeds to draw the single most powerful card in her deck (of which she has at least two copies), and arguably the most powerful single card in any hero deck, so her next turn is going to be exciting.

Liking the idea of getting to use her Power this turn, Fanatic plays Final Dive, a one-shot where she picks one small Target up, flies away, and drops him on another Target. The first one can't have more than 4 HP, but it's destroyed outright, so it's only logical to take out the Gene-Bound Guard; Fanatic then deals projectile damage equal to the destroyed card's current HP to any other target, which means that since the Guard is no longer in play to reduce damage, the Lancer takes the full 3 damage and is also killed. Now that there are no Minions in play and Voss is on his second side, he's finally capable of taking 1 damage from a hero, so Fanatic exorcises him for 1 damage twice, and ends her turn a very happy woman, having single-handedly destroyed seven of Voss's minions and been the only one to actually hurt him.

Since there are no longer two targets for his Taiaha, Haka has no cards he's in a particular hurry to play, so he opts to skip his turn forestalling the Self-Destruct sequence. Zero debates doing the same, but ultimately I decide I'm bored and want to do something. So I have him play Onboard Module Installation, getting a Null Point Calibration Unit out of the deck and playing it, after first drawing a card. He then zaps himself with his Thermodynamics power, dealing 1 cold damage which becomes 1 healing due to the NPCU, and ends his turn by drawing a card - which is unfortunately a duplicate NPCU.

Environment time again; the Self-Destruct counts down to its original 2 (unlike in my first game on Mars, the presence of 4 heroes means that it needs to get up to 6 before it shuts down; you can always shut it down in one turn by having every hero skip their turn in a single round, but the feasibility of having some heroes remain active while others make progress against it varies based on hero-count), then the Maintenance Level comes out, offering a way to make a little progress against the Self-Destruct (though unfortunately it's coming after the Self-Destruct itself in sequence, so it won't help shut it down the same turn), as well as playing another card which is Pervasive Red Dust. This tries to destroy 4 equipment cards, but only one is in play, so Zero loses his Calibration Unit - at the start of the next environment turn, though, everyone will be able to discard a card and put an Equipment into play, so in essence this has worked in the characters' favor. (The fluff is a little bit off on this card; you're supposed to have your equipment temporarily ruined by the Dust, but instead it apparently synthesizes new Equipment out of the former contents of your hand. Weird.)

Anyway, that's two full rounds, so let's take a break before moving on to Voss's next attempt to keep a Minion in play.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sun Sep 08, 2013 2:43 pm

Voss's first card played is not a minion this time, it's First Lieutenant Vyktor, a "Thorathian" Target which increases damage dealt to heroes by 1. ("Yay!" says Absolute Zero, whereupon Wraith and Fanatic take turns slapping him.) It applies immediately as Voss deals his damage (had the top two cards of the villain deck been in the other order, Vyktor would have come out after the damage was dealt, and would not increase it), hitting 27-HP Haka for 4, then dealing 3 damage to Wraith, of which only 1 gets through her Stealth. Voss then brings out a Gene-Bound Psi-Weaver, which blasts everyone for 3 thanks to Vyktor, and the turn is finished.

Wraith now plays her absolutely incredible card, Impromptu Invention; she gets to draw a card, then put any Equipment from her deck into play (or her hand if she'd prefer), and then play a second card! She draws a duplicate Stun Bolt, searches out a Micro Targeting Computer, then plays Throwing Knives, and with the combo she deals 3 damage to each of three targets, taking out the Psi-Weaver first, then hitting Voss for 3 since he no longer has a Minion to protect him, and wounding Vyktor down to 2 HP besides. She draws a duplicate MCT and ends her turn.

Fanatic could bust out her magic sword and deal some serious damage this turn, but since she's done such a good job carrying this game already, I decide to have her be the next hero to skip her turn forestalling the Countdown. It then moves on to Haka, who plays Ta Moko (Maori body art), an Ongoing which reduces damage he takes by 1. Over Zero's objections, he Crushes what remains of Vyktor. No longer having anything terribly exciting to do, Zero skips his turn and gets the Countdown up to 4.

The Countdown goes back down to 3, then up to 4 again as each hero reshuffles their trash to destroy Maintenance Level. (Haka has no cards in his trash, so it's a bit dubious whether he counts as having reshuffled; I'll ask on the forums but I'm presuming it works.) They then each discard an Equipment card and put it into play with Red Dust; Wraith gets a new Stun Bolt, Zero his duplicate NPCU, Haka the Taiaha, and Fanatic gets her sword "Absolution", which heals her for 1 when played and allows her to do 3 damage as a Power, instead of 1 and 1. Significantly when fighting against Voss with his immune-to-something minions, she can choose to deal melee, fire, or "radiant" damage, although the latter is the obvious choice since nothing in the game is immune to it as far as I know, and certainly nothing in Voss's deck. With all the start-of-enviro-turn effects resolve, the deck produces a new card: Villainous Weaponry, a card which is absolutely identical to First Lieutenant Vyktor except for not being a Thorathian. (It even has a picture of Voss on it, showing the same side he's currently on.)

Voss plays the Ongoing Forced Deployment; this will destroy at the start of the next villain turn, and will put all of the Minions in the trash into play at once! Destroying it in any other way will also put all of the Minions out, and with the current trash, that will include two Gene-bound Guards,so there will be eight minions in play, out of the ten which end the game, and they'll all take -2 damage until Voss flips at the start of the following round, when it'll be -3 instead. Yikes. Voss then deals damage; Zero is now the HP leader at 23, so he takes 4 damage, then poor 17-HP Wraith gets slammed for another 3. Voss then plays...well, another Forced Deployment, so that at least is no real concern.

Wraith somewhat fatalistically plays a Razor Ordnance, then zaps Voss for 3 with a Stun Bolt, giving him a "-1 Damage Dealt" marker until Wraith's next turn. She draws her Utility Belt, which she will of course play next turn. Fanatic plays Undaunted, a Limited which prevents damage to her under specific circumstances - 1 damage is ignored, 5 or more at once is reduced by 2, but 2-4 damage at any one time happens normally. It's not a very useful card, but she has nothing she'd rather play; a lot of her cards are really situational, though powerful in the right situation (see for example End of Days and Final Dive, both of which would be quite useless against a villain whose deck is all One-Shots, though I don't know that any such villains exist). She's just playing it for the sake of playing something, before she uses Absolution to chop Voss in the face for 3.

Haka skips his turn to deal with the Countdown, despite being able to do better than 3 damage; Fanatic really should have taken the skip this round, but I didn't plan ahead. Zero doesn't want to give up his turn, but sucks it up for the sake of finally getting rid of the stupid Self-Destruct. The Environment deck then disgorges a Fire in the Biosphere, which deals 2 fire damage, then 2 more fire damage unless they destroy an Ongoing card. Wraith and Zero have no Ongoings, so they have no choice but to lose 4 HP, although in Zero's case this has something of an upside when it gets back to his turn. Haka could either take 2 damage twice, and reduce it by 1 each time with his Ta Moko, or give up his Ta Moko after the first instance to prevent the second; he prudently decides it isn't worth giving up a long-term defense just to save 1 HP now. Fanatic, however, happily throws away her rather worthless Undaunted in order to take only 2 damage.

Voss now forced-deploys (twice), and then plays A THIRD FORCED DEPLOYMENT. He deals his damage, increased by Villainous Weaponry - Wraith is down to 10, Fanatic at 19, Haka has the same damage as Wraith somehow but is left with 18 due to his higher starting point, and Zero has 15, so Voss blasts Fanatic for 3 (+1 due to Villainous Weaponry, -1 due to the Stun Bolt) and then roasts Wraith for 2 more. He then plays his second card - the TCF Conqueror, a "Dreadnaught" spaceship with 15 HP, which is immune to melee damage (presumably it's descended into the atmosphere and is in range of other attacks). At the start of the next villain turn, it will destroy 1 Ongoing card from the heroes' side, but before that comes its AEOVT effect, dealing each hero 3 fire damage. So then the army of Voss performs their salvo - the heroes choose the order that they come into play, so I'll do a little math about what sequence they will deal their damage in. The Frosthound and the Psi-Weavers will be dealing a total of 9 damage to everybody, but Zero will reverse the Frosthound's damage because of his NPCU. So he'll lose only 3 HP, leaving him at 12. Wraith has only 7 HP, so she's definitely going to die; therefore, the Bionaut and the Lancer need to damage her first, enabling her to soak up those hits rather than transferring them to the next-weakest hero. After that, the Frosthound goes between two Psi-Weavers, Wraith dies to the first blast, Zero loses 3 HP and then gains them back and then loses them again, and Fanatic and Haka both soak up 9 damage, leaving them respectively at 7 and 9 HP, with Zero the HP leader at 12 - until the Shocktroop hits him for 4 more. And finally, the dreadnought strafes each surviving hero for 4 fire damage. They are in seriously bad shape at this point; they should definitely have played differently on that last round, and made destroying the Villainous Weaponry a priority instead of just beating on Captain Obvious.

While hunched under a black cloak behind her own tombstone on a dark and stormy night, Wraith can still contribute to the fight in one of three ways: her turn consists solely of either letting one player play a card, one player regain 2 HP, or destroy an Ongoing card. The latter seems obvious, since it'll get rid of Forced Deployment now, before any minions die, and not risk another turn like this happening. But will that make a difference? At this point, I am going to have the "players" discuss their strategy. Of Fanatic's three current cards in hand, none make a significant difference; she could put one of the Minions in a box where it can't take or deal damage, but would have to damage herself to keep it contained, so this hardly seems worthwhile, and she can also deal 1 damage to a target which wouldn't matter, draw a card she couldn't play, and regain 1 HP which wouldn't suffice to keep her intact. The 3 damage from her Absolution will only take 1 HP off a target, so it's hardly worth bothering. Thusly, her next turn won't be able to contribute usefully. Haka has several cards of considerable usefulness, but none of them are sufficient. And Zero is sitting on a rather big boom, but it hardly matters at this point. So destroying Forced Deployment wouldn't really help. At this point, the heroes need a miracle, and as it happens, the ghostly Wraith and the religious Fanatic can work together to produce one: Incapaci-Wraith gives Fanatic the ability to play Prayer of Desperation, a card which lets you draw up to 6 cards and then end your turn, right before her turn. Unfortunately, none of the drawn cards were another End of Days, so the heroes are probably still going to die, but at least it's something.

Fanatic has a couple of options. She could play Divine Sacrifice, letting her deal 1 "irreducible" damage to each of up to three targets (two of which would probably be Gene-Bound Guards), and take all damage that is dealt by those targets (which, if she had more than 3 HP, would let her soak up an entire salvo from a Psi-Weaver, but as it stands she would die to the Bionaut, if not to Voss himself, long before getting that far). So her best bet, such as it is, seems to be a Final Dive to take out one Gene-Bound Guard, dealing 2 damage to the other one since it's reduced, and then finishing him off with Absolution. She draws a card that might have been very nice earlier, and ends what is likely her last turn.

Haka has lots of good cards he could play, but only one of them even begins to get the job done; I called this a "spoiler" for the Voss match earlier, and it still kind of is, but it's clearly the only thing that even might begin to save them. He puts down Savage Mana, an Ongoing which lets him store every card he kills; eventually he can dispose of the stored cards for a bunch of toxic damage, but that doesn't matter much at this point. With the Taiaha, he takes out both Psi-Weavers, and puts them under Savage Mana; they won't come back out during the next Forced Deployment, and so the only things which will damage everybody will be the Frost-Hound and the TCF Conqueror, and the first one will heal Zero enough that he'll only lose 1 HP overall to the second - assuming of course that nothing else hits him.

Before moving on to Zero's turn, I suddenly realize that I haven't been accounting for Ta Moko's damage reduction, so I have to rewind to when all the damage was dealt, and see if it would have turned out differently. Okay, so the three damage-everybody minions would have reduced Haka to 12 rather than 9, which would have made it possible for the Shocktroop to hit Haka instead of Zero, but we'll assume Zero volunteered to take the hit, since this was still legal (even though it would have been 1 less total damage against Haka). Haka would finally have taken 1 less damage from the Dreadnought, so he saved a total of 4 HP, leaving him with a whopping 9.

Now it's Zero's turn, and he's got one great big boom he can do, if it's even worth bothering. The card in question is Coolant Blast, an Ongoing whose Power deals cold damage to a single target, equal to the fire damage Zero has taken since the end of his last turn. Since Zero roasted in the Biosphere Fire for 4 last turn, then got shot at for another 4 by a spaceship which inexplicably shoots fire at things (perhaps the fire damage is rocket exhaust, but the picture makes the ship look more high-tech than that), he can dish 8 cold damage out, but that won't suffice to kill the Conqueror, nor can it power through Voss's four minions worth of damage reduction to deal an amount of damage to him which is anywhere near significant to his remaining 79 HP. Still, nothing else he can do is useful, so he puts the thing down, takes out Villainous Weaponry with it, and ends his turn.

At the start of the enviro turn, Haka discards a duplicate Ta Moko and the card Enduring Intercession, which automatically makes him take all the damage from Environment stuff, unless he uses his Power to destroy it. Might have been nice to get out much, much earlier, so that all the Biosphere Fire damage would have partially bounced off his Ta Moko, but right now it's more useful discarding to just get rid of the Fire. Had the new environment card been a Meteor Storm, the heroes would not have died this round, whereas if it had been more Villainous Weaponry, they almost certainly would have; one copy of each of those cards remains in the deck. But for this turn, what comes out is Oxygen Leak. This reduces all fire damage by 3, which would block half of Voss's attack and completely neutralize the Conqueror now that Villainous Weaponry is out; if any of the players had a way to destroy an Environment card during their turn, this would be a very good trade. But they lack such methods, and so at the beginning of the next Enviro turn, the Martian atmosphere would deal 12 toxic damage (the number of cards in the Enviro trash; a late-game Oxygen Leak hurts more than one which happens right after you step through the airlock into the Base) to everything. This would kill off Voss's minions, and even down the Dreadnought if it had taken 3 damage first, but it would very definitely do in our not-so-intrepid-anymore Heroes. So, with no environment destruction in hand, they can risk letting it stay out, and must discard 1 card immediately in order to seal the Leak. Fanatic being the most certain-to-die, she opts to take this hit, dumping one of her weakest cards.

Now it's back to Voss. He's got multiple minions in play, so he flips back to his more indestructible side; he no longer deals damage or plays 2 villain cards a turn, so if the heroes survive this turn, they'll have a fighting chance again. Forced Deployment puts the Gene-Bound Guards back into play, then the Conqueror destroys an Ongoing; due to a slight snafu in my accounting, I'm forced to select Haka's Ta Moko as the target instead of Zero's Coolant Blast, though I'd probably have chosen so anyway. Haka has 9 HP, Fanatic has 3, and Zero has 4; the Bionaut hits Fanatic for 2, then the Lancer kills her. The Frosthound subtracts 3 HP from Haka but adds 3 to Zero, leaving Zero with 7 to Haka's 6; after that, the Shocktroop deals 3 to Zero, then the Conqueror does 3 to both, leaving Zero at 1 HP to Haka's 4.

Wraith and Fanatic are both ghosts now (presumably only the latter is a holy ghost), and their Incapacitated sides are identical except for the last power; Wraith no longer has any need whatsoever to destroy an Ongoing, but Fanatic's ability to add 2 to the next instance of damage for a particular hero is obviously significant, given that Voss's minions are taking 3 less damage. Since healing just 2 HP is of no conceivable significance, Wraith's only relevant ability is to let one of the boys play a card. Zero has nothing of significance, but Haka greatly enjoys the chance to play Punish the Weak, letting him deal 1 extra damage whenever his target has the lowest HP (so in this case, he deals 1 extra to minions, but 1 less to the Conqueror or to Voss, as well as to Villainous Weaponry when it comes out).

Fanatic's choice is less obvious; Haka would love to play either Elbow Smash or Haka of Battle this turn, as Elbow Smash would currently deal 3 damage, increased by 1 for Punish the Weak, but then reduced by 3 to be left at 1 damage...so that's probably not such a good option. Either Haka of Battle or Fanatic's ability would increase the damage of Haka's next attack, but Fanatic's ability only gets it up to 5, not quite killing the first Gene-Bound Guard, so she instead lets him play Haka of Battle, drawing two cards first, and then discarding 3 cards to increase his next damage by 3. This costs him his entire hand except for the Elbow Smash, which he then plays on his turn, dealing 3 damage both increased and reduced by 3, killing a Guard. Actually, wait, I forgot Punish the Weak; he gets to keep one card, which will be a different Haka that he'll eventually play just to draw two cards, if he lives long enough. But anyway, he kills a guard, stuffs it into Savage Mana, and then uses his Taiaha to deal 3 damage, reduced by 2, to two targets...no point in hitting the Guard this time, so he targets the Lancer and the Bionaut, hoping that Zero can finish these off and thereby avoid dying, absorbing damage from the Frosthound and maaaaybe even getting hit by the Shock Troop instead of Haka himself...not that all of this matters much.

Zero, unfortunately, has only one way of even damaging the two minions, and not for enough to kill them thanks to the Guard; he could play Fueled Freeze to destroy up to 3 Ongoing cards, which is all there are in play, and deal that many damage to all non-hero targets. With a few more cards in play, this might be worth doing, but as it stands he'd have to destroy the essential Savage Mana to even deal damage past the Guard and Advanced Voss. So the most useful card he can play is actually his Cryo-Chamber, which increases cold damage dealt to him by 1, while reducing fire damage so dealt. Speaking of fire damage, Zero took 3 of it on his last turn, so he could use the Coolant Blast to deal 3 back to a minion, but only 1 would get through so it wouldn't kill anything, doing just 1 more damage. Instead, he uses his innate power to deal 1 cold damage to himself, increased by 1 by the Chamber but reduced by Voss, to double his remaining hit points.

This message has gone on long enough, so regardless of which of the next Environments actually comes out, it'll be time to take a break. There's a 50% chance of either Villainous Weaponry or Meteor Storm; the former would increase damage dealt, which hardly even matters at this point; regardless of what Voss played, the Bionaut would certainly kill Zero, then the Lancer and Frosthound together would polish off Haka, all of this being true even without the bonus damage from Weaponry. Therefore, I will end this message now on the assumption that Weaponry was the card drawn, but will then proceed to the next message with the assumption that Meteor Swarm turned up and the game was put on pause; I'm curious whether the heroes are capable of recovering. What the official next card actually is will only matter for the sake of the statistical record I'm contributing to, as I don't want to pollute the data; for the purpose of amusing myself and having an excuse to blog, it's just more interesting if the game continues a little longer.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Davecom3
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by Davecom3 » Sun Sep 08, 2013 2:57 pm

Um, Pell, how did healing 3 damage get a 16 HP character to 21 HP rather than 19 HP?

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willpell
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sun Sep 08, 2013 5:23 pm

For the sake of the statistical record, the heroes definitely lose; Villainous Weaponry was indeed the next card. And, in fact, I was wrong about another Meteor Storm coming up; the last card was Fire in the Biosphere, which I should have remembered had a second copy in the deck, leaving room for only two Meteor Storms (both of which had been in the Countdown Pile for the Self-Destruct Sequence). Still, as a thought experiment, I'm going to pretend Villainous Weaponry and Meteor Swarm had exchanged places in the deck, and leave Fire in the Biosphere where it was, and see whether the game might have turned around for the two male heroes if they'd gotten an extended pause. Since this part of the game didn't really happen (and is extremely long, and very silly and degenerate), I'll tuck it away in a spoiler box so it's easily ignored.
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Davecom3 wrote:Um, Pell, how did healing 3 damage get a 16 HP character to 21 HP rather than 19 HP?
Not sure when that happened, but as you can no doubt tell, there are lots of little adjustments to be made in this game, and it's far from surprising if I occasionally mis-counted my HP counters or simply did the math wrong in my head. It might have made a difference, if it had changed who was the highest or lowest HP hero at some critical juncture, but clearly it didn't keep me from losing the game eventually, so if I did accidentally cheat in my favor, little real difference was made.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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willpell
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 2:29 pm

This is a placeholder post.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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