My family and I are at our cabin this weekend, which usually means lots of time for SotM, and this weekend was no exception. We came up with an Ambuscade alt option which transformed Amby from a faceroll to a really fun challenge. When I get back home, I'm going to make an alt oversized villain card with these rules, but I thought I'd post them here first. The changes are:
During setup, search the deck for H-1 trap cards. Shuffle them and put them into play face down.
Next, a change to how traps work. Whenever a trap is revealed you don't bury it back in the deck. Instead, its damaging effect trigger immediately and then the card goes to the trash like normal.
Whenever a Device is destroyed, reveal one of the face down traps (triggering it).
Lastly, whenever Ambuscade flips to his cloaked side, search the trash for a trap and put it into play face down.
With these rules, traps are a much bigger part of the game. In a regular-version game, we'd typically only encounter a trap or two in a normal game, and even then, they'd get buried back in the deck which meant you had to encounter a trap twice before it would have an effect in the game. These rules keep traps as something you know is coming and want to avoid (which you can do by not destroying Devices, if that's what you want to do), which is an important part of their game feel.
It also ramps up the overall damage Ambuscade lays down on your super team. Typically, as long as you could burn down his initial set of Devices, Amby was a pussycat for the rest of the game. With these rules, you get punished each time you take away one of his toys. And each time he cloaks, he pulls another trap from the trash back into play, so you're never truly safe. In addition to the face down traps, you can still stumble across traps as part of a normal villain deck card draw, which will explode immediately with these rules.
As an aside, we also played Akash'bhuta where she starts with H-2 Primordial Limbs in play at the start of the game, which ups her challenge level too. Rather than a slow ramp up as she gets out Limbs, this puts a bit of danger in the player's faces at the outset, which we enjoyed. I'm going to put that on an oversized villain card too.
I can't wait to try Ambuscade this way! Thanks for posting the alternative option. Sefirit, Belteshazzar, and I have talked about ways we could make the traps more effective, dangerous, or active in the game. I really like Ambuscade, but the traps seem kind of useless (especially if he doesn't have any devices in play). We're usually glad to see a trap get shuffled into the deck becuase it means it's something of a free turn for us. This should raise the danger level quite a bit...
I like it, I like it a lot. Generally I have started advocating in our group that you just start the games with all the traps face up in his deck, but maybe this is even better. Our next plan is to fix Gloomweaver. There have been plenty of ideas out there on how to do this alread, but we are talking about just changing his character card and leaving the rest alone.
I've got an upgraded Gloomweaver on my site too. He's much tougher than the normal version, and my group finds him a much more fun challenge. Give it a look.
I've been working on a fix for Ambuscade myself and well as much as I find him a total pushover I was aiming for a fix that would raise his threat level while keeping a thrill of the hunt where you are not so sure how things will turn out. Here are my thoughts:
First: I was thinking on simply adding "Play a villain card" at the end of trap texts, that way it doesn't become a free turn. We still need a mechanic to set off those traps thus I came up with my second point.
Second: If I remember well it was mentioned that primed traps when they are revealed blow up before counting in the revealed cards. Thus, I would see a mechanic in Ambuscades deck like say: "When a device is destroyed reveal H cards play any trap cards revealed this way." (Yes I know that means he might get to play cards by the number of traps revealed and if you don't like it change the text to prime (put face up and shuffle his deck) traps revealed.)
I haven't had the occasion to actually try thios fix but I feel it would keep in tune with the mechanics of how he's supposed to work while actually giving him a decent threat level.