First Guy's Game Night with SotM

General GTG General Discussion
1

So I did my first Guy's night game night with Sentinels of the Multiverse last night and it was a roaring sucess.  We played three games and I wanted to tell you how they all went.  There were four of us total.

First Game:  I played Chrono-Ranger, one of my buddies played Legacy, another played Ra, and the last guy REALLY wanted to play Absolute Zero.  I told him (tongue-in-cheek) under no circumstances would he be allowed to play AZ (first time for all of them).  He settled and played Tempest.  We fought Voss in Metopolis and destroyed him.  Fun and challenging, but not hard.

Second Game:  After that victory they all felt cocky and wanted to take on the hardest guy in the box.  I told them they were nuts and that we'd probably all die, but we took on Iron Legacy.  We fought him in the Final Wasteland.  It was Legacy, Chrono-Ranger, Haka, and Fanatic (the one guy was still really wanting to play AZ, but I refused to allow it).  It seemed IMPOSSIBLE to actually win, like we had no chance.  We were not inflicting any damage at all and getting kicked around like ragdolls.  We held on, and things started to turn around when we were able to start knocking out his ongoing cards.  He killed Chrono-Ranger and Fanatic, even after Fanatic resurrected once.  It was a bloodbath!  Haka had 6HP and Legacy only had 1, and on the final turn the good Legacy punched the Iron Legacy and defeated him.  We won!

Third Game:  At this point we were all reveling in the sucess of doing what literally seemed impossible (we actually googled something and were like, "No way, Iron Legacy is really THAT powerful???").  We had done it.  I said, "How about Cowboys and Robots in the wild, wild west?"  We all liked the idea and decided to take on Omnitron in Sivler Gulch.  My one friend was begging to play AZ, I told he was nuts and but decided to let him do it.  Then, for thematic purposes, I took Omnitron-X.  The other guys were Legacy (same guy played him every game) and Chrono-Ranger.  WE GOT DESTROYED.  AZ self-destructed and could never get anything running, Omnitron-X could never get anything going, and the other two were unable to stand alone.  It was bad, real bad.  But it was good to lose, because it was good to see that we were not invincible!

It was a ton of fun, and there were plentious LOLZ to go around.  The AZ player kept making the following jokes:

"You know how much I liked playing this character?  ABSOLUTE ZERO."

"You know what the chance of me ever playing him again?  ABSOLUTE ZERO."

"You know what good he is? ABSOLUTE ZERO."  

2

AZ takes some getting used to.  A real bad game as AZ is also really frustrating and terrible.

Tempest/Legacy might be able to 2-man Voss.  

Overall though, really cool to see they liked the game and you guys had fun.  Sentinels is a great light-hearted game night game.  It has strategy without intensity, and is as enjoyable for theme as it is for Mechanics.

 

3

Sentinels has been a hit with everyone I've played it with (I think I've taught almost 20 people now). Glad your friends didn't demand to exclusively play Dominion instead! ;)

4

Ha!  They hinted at it, but I insisted that we play Sentinels because a guy's night demands a game that is a little more nerdy than Dominion.  It would like getting together to play UNO.  The wives in my social group tend to like more mainstream games and it seems like Dominion is closer to that than Sentinels.  Sentinels is by far my favorite game.

5

hey, SuperRick, what does the Scouter say about his power level?

It's ABSOLUTE ZERO!!!!!!!!

 

Some heroes just don't mesh well with certain players.    Personally, I'm not a huge fan of AZ either, although I much prefer the Elemental Wrath variant.   Some people just love him. 

6

I HATED playing Omnitron-X but didn't mind Bunker or Legacy. 

7

Sometimes I have noticed that the character you want to like just doesn't nesessarily work out that way.  I truly wanted to like Unity more then anyone, but every time I've played her I get frustrated that I'm simply not doing much or helping out if the luck of the draw simply isn't with me that day where a character like Ra or Expatriette were ones I did not expect to like and yet I simply love them when playing and feeling some real power.  It's just funny how things were out sometimes, lol.

8

Just imagine if you had had all the characters to choose from. :wink:

9

All the girls in my RPG club (including me) prefer Sentinels to Dominion, even though Dominion is very popular with everyone (except the guy who decided halfway through a game that he doesn't like Dominion - he says it's too random, but he likes Quarriors which is essentially Dominion but with more randomness).

I guess that's the difference between partners who aren't necessarily "hardcore" gamers and women who have deliberately joined a gaming group…

10

Personally, I think you shoulda let the guy play Absolute Zero, if not in the first game then at least in the second (you let him do Fanatic instead, and they're a lot alike).  Beating Iron Legacy and then losing to Omnitron is...impressive.

Oh, and for the record, I love Omnitron-X, and have found Unity to be extremely powerful on more occasions than I've seen her falter.  Everyone's experiences are different of course, but both of them are quite good heroes which I quite enjoy (learning a little more toward Unity in power and O-X in me-likeiness, but both in the same ballpark).  I almost played Unity today, but went with Visionary instead...and then ended up needing to not draw cards for the first half of the game.  Grrr.

11

I adore Zero and Omni-X, and can barely stand Zero's promo card :P

12

Sounds like it went well!  I had a game night last night and really wanted Sentinels to hit the table, however, out game of Arkham Horror took 6 hours...so we didn't have the time.

Also, AZ players need to be extremely aware of card text, especially that which pertains to damage "targets" vs "non-hero targets".  A lot of AZ's One-Shots allow him to damage a "target" which can very well be directed at himself for further survivability.  They also need to pay attention to the changing damage type; if you take fire damage, which can be then dealt as cold damage, you can choose to target yourself a second time. With Focused Apertures in play, this can result in a +1 net heal.

So AZ is not just complex in terms of setting up, keeping track of damage, and letting your health go up and down; the player also needs to be incredibly astute when it comes to reading all the cards carefully, which is why newcomers aren't likely to grasp his full potential within their first 3-5 games.

13

Also, cold damage he uses to heal himself is not considered dealt; it is prevented, and he regains the HP instead. It matters for Thermal shockwave. If he hits himself and 2 other targets for 1 each, the resulting fire damage coming at him would be 2, not 3. Since he didn't actually DEAL himself 1 cold damage. Not really DIRECTLY relevant, but tangentially.

14

you sure about that, McBehrer?   reference please?

15

It's come up before - with his NPCU, when Ab'Zero would be dealt cold damage, he heals instead. So if he's nuking, say, three targets for two points of cold damage each and chooses himself as one of those targets (and has his NPCU out at the time), he will only have dealt four points of cold damage, not six, because the two that hit him were changed into healing. Damage is only dealt if you lose hp - if they stay where they are or go up, you're not taking damage (which is why, under Rule 15, cards like Solar Flare and Pushing the Limits go away if you try to hit yourself whilst immune to that damage type).

16

Yeah, they tend to do that.  Maybe 4 if you're lucky (or extremely unlucky).  I find it's usually better to schedule a day JUST for a game like that, rather than let it eclipse the entirety of a general-purpose Game Night.

17

My first game of AH took about 5 hours all told. Though whenever we feel brave enough to break it out, 4 of us can rip through games in about 1.5 now.

18

We actually did go into that Game Night fully expecting the majority (if not all) of it to be Arkham Horror.  We had been wanting to break it out for a while, but hadn't been able to get our schedules to fit until last weekend.  The idea was to play a few appetizer games (Smash Up!, King of Tokyo) and then jump into Arkham Horror.  If we finished with enough time to spare, we'd do a round or two of Sentinels.

Well, since we didn't finish until early the next morning, Sentinels wasn't going to happen.

19

Ooh, Smash Up....another favorite of mine.