I was wondering if anyone has found a new interesting way to play SotM. I was thinking maybe playing with two different villains or mixing all of the environment decks together. You could also do a huge game with every character and start with a villain then 3 heroes then a villain and so on. Does anyone else have any ideas?
Me and my wife tried a PvP a few weeks back. We each had two heroes each and then doubled the HP value of each hero so that way it wouldn’t end so quickly.
That sounds really cool you could probably do something with like the Freedom Five against the other heroes or have a hero turn to the dark side and team up with the villain. I was also thinking of a one on one encounter with the villain where the hero takes like two turns and the villain takes one but I don’t know how that would work out it is an interesting thought though.
During playtesting, we tested 6 and 7 heroes against 2 villains, but found that it was totally unbalanced and not that much fun 
If two villians were made to compliment one another, then it could be fun. The four villians currently released are made for the soloing. Lets say two new villians are made, one can focus on damage while the other focuses on the defenses. And if both are out together they can have bonus to eachother, and maybe the flip mechanic for them is if one gets defeated the other flips and increases damage dealt by her/his minions or something.
I had come up with an idea of “Triple Double” to allow all 10 players against a villain at once. Basically, any damage dealt to the villain character would be reduced by 1/3 rounded up, and all damage done to all other villain cards would be reduced by 1/2 rounded up. It played interesting for the first couple rounds, but then it got really late and I just ended it and went to bed.
One thing I did think of would be an endurance mode, where up to 10 players go up against the “easiest” villain character, and if/when defeated, immediately swap in the next easiest villain character, maybe switch out to a new environment, immediately start the villain turn, but no modifications to the current heroes’ HP, max HP, cards in hand, cards in play, etc, until all villains are defeated or a villain succeeds. It’d likely be a very easy game, but an interesting one to try out anyway.
I’d be curious how this goes if you play it on advanced mode. It would likely still be fairly easy, but it could potentially at least be something of a challenge in that case…
I like the endurance mode idea.
Okay, so, I just played (for five hours…) the so called “endurance mode” (in advanced mode at that) with all ten heroes. It was way to easy. The heroes get built up to the max while the villain can’t get anything set up. However, I do have a couple other thoughts. First is a front and rear assult, where two hero teams are created, such that the villain takes his turn first, followed then by the front team. Then the villain gets another turn, the back team, then finally an environment turn and loop, with advance mode to deal with the fact the villain is still attacking twice the heroes.
Another idea for a large (greater than five) hero team against a single villain would be to give the villain one turn per round for each hero in the team. E.g.:
Voss
Legacy
Voss
Tempest
Voss
Fanatic
Voss
Absolute Zero
Voss
Ra
Voss
Visionary
Voss
Wraith
Voss
Bunker
Insula Primalis
That would likely be a very tough challenge though.
Not to mention if it were Baron Blade, he would get his 15 cards pretty easily considering he discards a card after each turn in Advanced mode, if all the cards he draws end up being one-shots he could win in the first round, second if most are somehing else.
If a viable alternative play method were to be found/created (I’m particularly interested in a multi-villain setup), perhaps it could be “released” as part of a future expansion pack. In other words, you would receive x new villains, y new heroes, z new environments, and an “alternative rules” set.
Also, a pony.
I would say a better way of an endurance mode is to just use a standard team of 4 heroes, then try and defeat all villains in a row: Blade > Omnitron > Voss > Dawn. Maybe give them 10HP healing in between battles, but that should be pretty challenging.
Also, we don’t have any ponies to give you. Yet.
I vote for whip-a-corns!
I think I will have to try an endurance game trying to defeat all of the villains soon - that sounds fun.
It does, but I’m going to have trouble finding people in LA willing to commit the time.
Has anyone tried having a player control the villain yet? It’s been something I’ve been mulling over, to include more players. So far I think 3 without advanced mode has been my favorite size. My wife and I played 2 player with 2 heroes each over the weekend, and it felt too easy.
My thoughts for player controlled villains:
- Have them play with a hand of villain cards, but follow the current play 1 V-card each turn, just they would get to have some choice in it.
- They get to re-align their minions during the heroes turn, so they fire off in whatever sequence the villain wants.
I’d be very interested if that works out! The biggest problem that I see is that, even with giving a player a choice of which villain card, the villain’s possible choices are not going to be terribly interesting or dynamic for a player character.
In terms of play difficulty, have you tried Advanced Mode yet?
Endurance mode sounds fun as long as you’ve got a fair number of players. Just with two of my friends and me, Baron Blade nearly wiped us all out on normal mode. But seeing as I know most of my friends will–or already do–like SotM, a larger game of endurance would be nice. Though I don’t know if I’d want to heal between rounds. Less health = more exciting.
The idea of an endurance mode was to help balance playing with a larger number of people. I’ve found out that’s not enough when playing with 10 heroes, even when playing advanced. The idea (untested yet) is either to give the villain an extra turn per round (run villain, first half, villian, second half, environment) to give the villain a chance to build up while running an endurance, or give the villain a single turn (choice of advanced mode or not) going up against a single villain (no endurance).
If you have 10 people, you can always play two, 5-hero games out of the same box. You can play 3 games out of the same box, really!
That is a perfectly acceptable alternative. However, the players are segmented from each other, and can’t play off of players playing in another group. The idea was a way to allow more players without segmenting them. Although, in my case, such wouldn’t matter much, as I’ll never likely have that many people playing with me at one time.