GregHowley.com

This past weekend, my family went “camping”, which is to say that we stayed in a beautiful boathouse with a big deck overlooking a lake. There were bunks, a full kitchen, and a common room with a fireplace and tables. There was a lot of swimming and boating on the lake, and it was a very relaxing weekend.

We'd met the other family staying in the boathouse exactly one year prior, and hadn't seen them since, but since I knew they also liked board and card games, I brought a few, one of which was Sentinels of the Multiverse. I own the base game, and the Rook City, Infernal Relics, Shattered Timelines, Vengeance, expansions, as well as the Oblivaeon expansion. I don't have the Wrath of the Cosmos expansion, but I'll likely pick that one up at some point. The Villains of the Multiverse expansion I probably won't, simply because that one has zero new heroes and all the villains are of the Vengeance format, which I don't love.

I still have the custom case I built for the game, as well as the oversized hero cards and card boxes I printed from Spiffworld, a great online resource. My case I starting to get full though, so if I do order that other expansion, I'll need to figure out how to make more room.

Saturday afternoon, my daughter Lia exclaimed that she was bored, because the lakefront hadn't yet opened for swimming. So I pulle dout Sentinels, and decided to try out one of the new heroes I hadn't yet played: The Luminary. So we roped in my nephew and one of the other 7th graders he'd befriended. The kid picked up on the game mechanics surprisingly fast, and we smashed the self-aware robotics factory to bits pretty quickly.

On Sunday evening, after the nighttime campfire, the kids had a couple new friends, so we invited them to play. I sat this one out to run the environment and villain, and the four kids played Tachyon, Unity, Tempest, and the Wrath against the invading alien Grand Warlord Voss. Halfway through the game, at around 11pm, two of the kids had to leave. But by then the high school kids from the other family had come back, and jumped into the game. They play Magic the Gathering, and so picked up the game's rules pretty much instantly. This game ended quickly with Voss crushed.

It was now around 11:30pm, but everyone around the table wanted to start a new game. We were on vacation, so I caved and pulled out The Chairman. Both Omnitron and Grand Warlord Voss are difficulty 1 villains, on the game's scale of 1-4. The Chairman is difficulty 4.

Lia decided to play Mister Fixer, her cousin picked up The Fanatic, and our cabin-neighbor decided to track down the most complex character he could find, since that's what he was into. So he picked Nightmist. I decided the one thing missing from the group was multi-target damage, so I decided to play The Southwest Sentinels, an interesting hero which is actually comprised of a team of four mini-characters.

We started off strong, but the game was certainly a long slog. By the time the game ended at 1:30am, only Nightmist (one of the game's toughest tanks) and Writhe (one of the four Sentinels) were left standing, and we'd just barely taken out the Chairman after two consecutive jailbreaks. If we hadn't done it that round, I'm fairly sure we'd have all been killed by the horde of underbosses in play.

The next morning, everybody was extremely tired. But that didn't stop everyone from demanding another game the following afternoon. I pulled out Citizen Dawn, a difficulty 3 villain, and I decided to play Legacy rather than sit this one out, which meant that this was a five-player game rather than four players like the other times we'd played. The fact that we had five heroes, plus the addition of Legacy (easy-to-play but extremely powerful) meant that this game was far easier than our late-night slog. We managed to take out Citizen Dawn and her legion of superpowered citizens before she merged with the power of the sun and became invulnerable. This game also gave me the chance to dive a bit into the game's lore. I've been listening to The Letters Page podcast over the past year and a half, and the amount of story that's been created to support the universe of the game is astounding. One of my players was running Expatriette, and I got to explain about how Citizen Dawn, a powers-supremacist a la Magneto, was infuriated at raising a daughter who turned out to not have any superpowers herself, and disowned the child. Expatriette gre up to become a Punisher-like vigilante. The heroes again saved the day and defeated Citizen Dawn.

It was fun to introduce the game to new players who love the game so much that they'll almost certainly be buying their own copy soon. I'm nearly finished printing and folding the new card boxes and character cards for Akash-Thriya, La Comodora, and the new Void Guard team. That should conclude my set. All these new heroes have crazy and complex new mechanics, so I'm looking forward to learning how they all work.