About 95% of my Sentinels gaming consists of my wife and I taking two heroes apiece and setting out to defeat one of the classic-style villains. Although we got Vengeance as soon as it was regularly available, we rarely ever play a Vengeance-style game. (In fact, from our win/loss tally sheet, it’s clear that we’ve only played Vengeance style about three times.) I think that’s because we typically have two players, and the heroes’ “planning horizon” goes down from one round in classic style to one hero turn in Vengeance style. Neither of us really likes that format. We did play Vengeance with four human players one time, and that was more enjoyable - though still not as fun as just taking on Citizen Dawn, in my opinion.
Anyway, I preordered Villains mostly for the environments, mini-expansions, and oversized villain cards. But it really would be a shame to let all those villain decks go unplayed! I’m thinking about trying out some games with the Vengeance-style villains, but putting (H) - 1 or (H) - 2 of them in the classic villain’s position, one after another following the environment. I think that would address my general preference against the Vengeance format, at least in the two-player style I usually play.
Have any of you thought about how the difficulty and playability might work in such a format? I don’t see any fundamental reason why it wouldn’t work. What would be the optimal number of villains to pick?
We play 2-player Vengeance/Villains format (I'm going to start calling it "V-format") by having one of us control the first two villains, the first hero, and the environment and the other person control the last villain and two heroes. V-format -- for us -- really shines with H of 3, and this makes it a very fun way to play (as long as one person is willing to only have one hero they are controlling).
To directly answer the question, though, no I haven't considered that. We'd definitely have to try it out, as it seems like it could be hard to recover from some of the hits that would come from that. But it's worth trying!
A group that I've joined recently plays with (H)-1 Villains, but otherwise sticking to the Vengeance rules. Seems like more fun, less like slogging through mud.
Making the Villains go one after the other sounds like a good way to streamline the gameplay with fewer players, it will feel more like the Ennead. H-1 Villains also sounds good, but I feel you do need at least 3 Villains (which is what you said).
The modification I did to play Vengeance was that when a Nemesis target enters play, it needs it's Hero Nemesis to be in play, otherwise it is discarded.
Thematically, the goon is fighting his Nemesis somewhere else. Mechanically, you take away some of the Villains plays (they still have their End of turn effect) and reduce the number of overall HP Vengeance has. Both things make the game go faster and makes Vengeance not as hard.
You could also play hybrid game wich is loads of fun you each take 2 characters then choose a standard villain and a vengeance villain. You play the main villain first and then the second villain is played by the second player before their two heroes. This allows some nice mix and match like ambuscade an easy villain at h=3 with Ermine as a companion for the lacking h for a total h of 4. Thus mix brings the extra hp and destruction to make Ambuscade a credible threat.
That’s an interesting idea, Medic-Tank. Heh…you could battle two versions of La Capitan from different times! You would definitely need to lower your value of (H), though.
Rabit, I wouldn’t think the hits would necessarily be terrible, since you’ve got the same number of villain turns per round. But, still, that’s exactly why I was thinking of choosing < (H) villains.
The variant Medic-Tank suggests is a popular one to pump up weaker villains. You just add a Vengeance style Villain to a regular game. It does really ramp up the difficulty, so it is better for 5 player groups.
More to your speed though, have you tried 2 heroes vs. 2 Villains? it is less balanced, but it does work. The balance issues are largely based on team design, making sure you can take out ongoings and deal with damage immunities is the biggest part. It should work better with the new expansion than it does with just Vengeance.
As for the difficulty and bookkeeping, We put a lot of work into this expansion to make it less work to run, and added quite a few lower difficulty heroes. It is at its best at 3 players, but I played several 2 player matches during playtesting and they went fine.
Well using that the H value is easy to adjust every vengeance villain usually already count as 1 h hence are balanced with the number of heroes. In my example Ambuscade would usually get H = 4, but since Ermine counts as 1 H of difficulty playing with Ambuscade at H = 3 with Ermine (counts as H = 1) means playingat H = 4 meaning balanced for four heroes. The only thing is adding vengeance style villains never really supports well a 3 heroes game. It would probably work with more than five heroes with a main side effect of lowering environment impact but game length would quickly suffer bringing classic disengagement symptoms in the players.
One of the V-style games we tried was 2v2, and I’ll grant you that it seemed to be a more fun experience. It’s encouraging to see you suggest that this format is something that the Villains expansion was tested for (if even a little). We’ll have to give it a shot.
I can certainly see some “breaks” happen, though. Our very first game after buying the base set (and our second game overall) was Legacy and Haka vs Omnitron…one adaptive subroutine and we were completely screwed. That’s when we moved to our current (2+2)v1 format. We’ve tried other variations occasionally, mostly to get (H) down from 4 when fighting the Matriarch. We can certainly do some more experimenting!
My wife and I also play almost exclusively 2 player SotM and have really only played Vengeance 2v2 since it is so muhc bookkeeping at more, as you've said. I am interested in the V format as mentioned above but I will also try teh variant of having the villains take their turns in a row
See, I've always got the opposite problem -- my game night regularly has at least 6-7 people in it. So has anyone tried going the other direction, doing six or seven heroes against six or seven villains from the Vengeance and VOTM sets?
So far, we've done 6 or 7 against the regular villains -- it's an interesting challenge. On the one hand, we have a lot of time to do damage between villain turns and there's much more chance of having good utility/deck control when you need it. On the other hand, when the villain turn comes around, we get clobbered. This week we did six heroes against Iron Legacy, and if it wasn't for throat jabbing and hypersonic assaulting, he'd have trashed us in two rounds, easy -- as it is, his first turn took several of us down to half health.
Then we did La Capitan with seven heroes and it makes most of her crew members terrifying -- if we hadn't avoided the card that takes them out of the trash, it would've been it for us.
(Yes, I did just get Shattered Timelines for Christmas, how'd you guess?)