Sentinels of the Multiverse Review Link to heading
(This review was originally posted on Boardgaming.com and subsequently posted on the old version of this blog, hence the 2015 post date!)
Sentinels, ASSEMBLE Link to heading
Baron Blade and his minions are attempting to destroy Megalopolis using their mobile attack platform! It’s time to join forces with Legacy and the other heroes of the Multiverse to take him down!
Sentinels of the Multiverse is a co-operative card game for 2-5 players, which can be played in 30-45 minutes (although you might just find you want to start another game straight after…)
Gameplay
Each player begins by selecting the character they will play, the villain they’ll be facing and the environment where the battle will take place.
Each hero, villain and environment has their own pre-built deck of cards, all of which are unique to that character/environment, and each hero begins the game with a hand of 4 cards, drawn after they have shuffled their decks.
Game turns work in three stages: the Villain Turn, the Heroes Turn and the Environment Turn.
On the villain turn, any ‘start of turn’ effects shown on all active villain cards are resolved, then a card is played from the top of the deck (this can usually be either a one-off action, a piece of weaponry/equipment or a minion coming into play), then finally any ‘end of turn’ effects are resolved.
The inclusion of effects which take place at either the start or the end of a turn is nice, meaning that some cards start to impact you straight away, and others give you a full turn before you feel their effects – this really keeps you on your toes, as for example a devastating weapon may come into play that you know will decimate you if not destroyed before the start of the villains next turn.
Next, the heroes each take turns to play (in clockwise order). Each hero turn breaks down to: Play a card, use a power, draw a card (although card effects may increase these actions).
Played hero cards usually take one of two forms: a one time action or a card which gives some kind of continuing effect.
When it comes to using a power, each character has their own innate power to use, or they may be able to gain more options through the cards that they can play.
Finally, it’s the turn of the Environment, and again like the villain turn there are usually start and/or end of turn effects to resolve, with a new card drawn and played in between. The environment can help or hinder both the heroes and villains, and adds a great element to the gameplay, often forcing players to choose whether to deal with issues in the environment (Help! A train’s about to crash into a crowd of people!) or to keep focusing on the villain and leave the environment to wreak it’s own havoc.
The game continues until either the villain or all of the heroes been reduced to zero hit-points and are therefore defeated. Interestingly, as this is a co-op game even if a hero ‘dies’ they can continue to play along, just taking one of a selection of simple actions (often giving extra moves or support to another hero), on the rationale that the other hero’s are fighting harder to avenge their fallen companion.
Another nice touch is that there’s no ‘decking’ in the game – if you run out of cards you simply re-shuffle your discard pile into a fresh deck.
A selection of heroes!
Components
The cards are a nice quality, and feel like you’ll get a bit of use out of them, and you certainly get a lot of them for your hard earned cash! The core game comes with almost 600 cards, which includes decks for 4 different villains to face, 4 different environments to face-off in and a whopping 10 different heroes to play as!
The ‘Enhanced Edition’ (which is really the only version of the base game that you should consider purchasing*) goes one step further though, including around 160 tokens for keeping track of character health and status modifiers (and trust me, you’ll really appreciate having all of these as you play the game – there can be a lot to keep track of!)
*(Since first publishing this GtG have released a definitive edition that might now be the one to go for!)
One of my favourite inclusions with the enhanced edition though is the good sized box and divider cards – there’s plenty of space to keep all of the base set cards, along with the expansions (and the amazing guys at Greater Than Games also include divider cards for all the cards from both the Rook City and Infernal Relics expansions!) – if you like to keep your cards well organised you’ll be in heaven with this package.
At this point I should also mention the card art, which to be honest I wasn’t too keen on to begin with, however I’ve found has really grown on me. The art style is very comic-book-ish, and goes with the theme well, but – in my mind at least- it looks a little ‘amateurish’. Having said that, it is great that the GtG guys have created all of these characters themselves and put together such a great package in-house.
Play time
A game of SotM usually takes a little over half an hour to play, although this will vary depending on how well your team works together, the villain that you’re facing and the environment where you’re doing battle. It’s not uncommon to want to play again straight away though!
Summary
Sentinels of the Multiverse is a fantastic co-operative game, with great replay value. It is steeped in theme, and half of the fun of playing is getting really submerged in the world of the Multiverse (right down to the in-character smack-talk that is surely mandatory when playing this type of game!). Unfortunately a few small grumbles prevent me from giving the game a higher score, mainly because of the sheer amount of stat-tracking involved (I honestly don’t know how anyone who bought the original base-set managed to cope without the tracking tokens!)
These frustrations mainly present when playing the more complex characters, and may slowly dissolve as our gaming group gets more used to the game. The game creators do at least provide a handy difficulty rating for each character (moving from easy to difficult although annoyingly in the base set there is no medium rated difficulty villain included.)
Despite these small annoyances though, it’s hard to not have fun with the game, and it’s certainly possible to play several games using the easier characters. As is often the case with theme-heavy games the life you’ll get out of the game is directly proportional to how well you can submerge yourself in the theme, and to be honest, if you’re a comic book fan you’d be crazy not to pop Sentinels on your shopping list.
Verdict: 8/10