A coworker brought in his copy in late 2014 soon after he was hired. We have mandatory 1 hour lunches, so we figured it was no problem to get through. What I didn't realize was that while he was familiar with the game, he hadn't actually used his copy yet, so I was given Absolute Zero with an unshuffled deck. By the time the game ended, I'd done next to nothing and I couldn't figure out why my power was to hit myself. After we won against Blade, I looked through my deck and things started to click. My next game a couple weeks later was as Legacy with a shuffled deck and I had a lot more fun.
(I told Christopher the AZ-unshuffled-deck story at Gen Con 2016 and he seemed horrified; he thanked me for giving the game another shot.)
I picked up an iPad Air 2 in November of 2014, as soon as they released, and I noted the existence of the app soon after. Picked it up the first time it went on sale for $8 on iOS in April of 2015 and I've been playing it regularly ever since. Since my primary mode of play has almost always been the app and I live in Indianapolis, I've also been a Gen Con volunteer for Handelabra the last two years.
My wife (favorite characters: Unity and Tempest) and I also have a smallish collection of the physical version, basically as much as we could stuff in one of the big expansion boxes.
And now I feel sad that it took me so long to discover Sentinels. Unfortunately I just didn't have any friends or family of the type to already know about such a game, and my attempts to get my friends interested so far haven't gone that well. (Not surprising I guess; my friends are almost never interested in anything I like.)
Jeremy and I and the whole Handelabra Studio team were at PAX 2011 to show off our upcoming game: Uncle Slam! Our booth was up on the 6th floor hall and it was very fancy, with scaffolding and lights and TVs and fancy chairs. No Skyrim dragon or anything, but still pretty fancy.
Right next to us was a little booth that would be way more important to our future than anything we were doing at the time..
I don't have any pictures of Christopher, Adam, or Paul, but we played the game, chatted with them a lot, and I picked up a copy (original printing with Young Legacy promo). The start of a great journey =)
I first played the game when someone brought it along to the gaming club I used to go to - he had the base (pre-EE) version of the game, plus what was at the time its only expansion, Rook City. I think we did the usual Baron-Blade-in-Insula-Primalis setup as the first game, from what I remember. I had a look at the various hero character cards and decided to play the Wraith because she had a cool name and because she looked like a sneaky Rogue-type, which is something I tend to go for in RPGs and stuff. I think we won the first game and then played against (and possibly beat, though I can't remember now) the Chairman. And Spite. And the guy who owned the game told us something like "They're re-releasing this some time later in the year, around October, so if you want it, wait till then to get it". So I did. There was another expansion out by then, called Infernal Relics. I managed to get that and the base game on Games Lore but they were out of stock of Rook City, so I kept checking back until a few weeks later when I was able to get that too.
At some point not too long after that I joined the forum and was therefore around for every subsequent Kickstarter and expansion release and all of the other things that have happened since then :D. And now the person I used to regularly play with at atbletop I don't really see face-to-face any more, so we use Tabletop Sim instead...although our games in recent months have been dominated by Spirit Island rather than Sentinels. So much co-op fun!
This thread has reminded me just how much I can't trust my own memories, so I went back and checked photos from the early days. Adam wasn't at Origins 2012 – it was just Christopher, Andy, and I. I'd forgotten, but we had folks sign a birthday card for Christopher to take back to Adam!
My discovery experience was back in college I went to a local game store that had "Open Gaming" nights. People would bring their games and play with whoever showed up. The store also had a library rack of opened games that anyone could play. One of the games on the shelf had some weird, chisled-featured superhero looking guy on it so I thought I'd give it a whirl.
Now I am up to something like 150 hours played on just the PC VG, not including mobile and physical copy....
My wife and I got invited to a game night at one of my old college friends' house. I dind't know most of his friends, though. I forget what we played first, but people kept talking about a game they just called "superheroes." Whoever brought the game over had the core game enhanced edition. He didn't quite have the story behind Sentinels right - part of his introduction was "they couldn't get the rights to Marvel heroes, so they invented their own!" - but we got the rules down and stomped Baron Blade in the Ruins of Atlantis. After thinking about it for a week, I decided that the game was fun enough to buy for ourselves to try...and that accelerated quickly.
As Russ mentioned, it wouldn't have been Adam – almost certainly either Russ or me. Evidence and memory suggests I mostly (possibly entirely) ran Baron Blade.
We played at the booth itself, if that helps solve the puzzle. It would have been Saturday afternoon, as well-- we were only at Origins for the weekend that year due to my teaching schedule.
We played with them, and I made my friend Henry buy it (along with the recently-released Rook City expansion.
The guys who showed me got some things wrong (damage increases counting for multiple instances of damage, for instance, and saying that “The only way to improve Absolute Zero is to burn his deck.”) But I still made sure to get in on the Kickstarter for Internal Relics!
A friend of mine brought it home from Origins in colombus in 2013, i had a BLAST! I still play it at ever opportunity with who ever can put up with me long enough to get a game in
I found the >G booth at PAX, I believe it was 2014. The digital game had just come out for iPad and they were pushing it hard, but I don't have an iPad, so it was the card game that drew me. I'd actually heard of it in passing before, compared favorably to the Marvel Legendary deck-building game, so I was very interested in playing. Our host set us up with Legacy, Fanatic, and K.N.Y.F.E. (the third player was a SotM veteran but didn't have Vengeance) against Ambuscade. He got eaten by the Velociraptor Pack and we loved every bit of it. Took us a while to invest in all the expansions (we definitely never did get our money's worth out of Villains) but we at least have them all now. We've beaten almost all of the solo villains on every difficulty level--we're just missing Ultimate Akash'Bhuta and Ultimate Agent of Gloom Spite/Skinwalker Gloomweaver because the games are long, boring slogs, and Ultimate Dreamer, Kaargra Warfang, Ennead, and Cosmic Omnitron because they're stupid hard and just not fun. We've barely played anything else in the last 3 years, although now that we've wrapped up all the villains we plan to fight, I'm not sure what we're doing next. Maybe rematches, maybe some other games finally.
I also played Tactics at the same event, and I loved it too, but I never finished a game at home. It just takes too long, to set up and to play.
I picked up the Revised Edition cold - a few years ago my wife and i bought each other board games for our birthdays, which are within two weeks of each other, and the theme caught my eye (i’m a Champions player from way back).
Our first game was abortive, as we sat down to play at an hour when we should have been hitting the sack; nevertheless i noticed we had stumbled across a Ra/Visionary combo that effectively neutered the villain, and had we not been so tired, victory would have been within our grasp. For me, the game was perfect: superhero team combat with lively mechanics and way less setup than the RPGs that are my other love. I’m not able to play tabletop as often as I’d like, but the app lets me indulge at any time, and has clarified a number of rules questions for me, and I’m rambling now, so o/
I was aware of the game for a while, but hadn’t really looked into it too deeply, but stumbled on the app earlier this year while looking for a new game to play in my spare time. While I would like to own the complete collection of the real game, I suspect I would end up playing it solo more than with my board game group anyway (although I suspect they’d enjoy it), but the app is a fantastic and deep experience that I’m very glad I dropped the money on - very much looking forward to the remaining content to be added once the Kickstarter delivers.
Always loved super hero comics and card games, so this game is great for me.
I was looking at the game before my wife and I moved to Houston, so that was sometime in the 2010-2011 area. Once we got to Houston I ran into the game again at Fat Ogre comics and games shop and eventually bought a copy of the core, Infrenal Relics, Rook City, and what we now understand as Mini-Pack1 somewhere in between. While in Houston I never really made new friends, but I could always find people to play SOTM. We moved back to Abilene in 2012. So I bought mine somewhen before then. I never really backed the KS's, until Obliveon, video game Season 2, and the Green Ronin crossprodution. I'm kinda greatful, I can only imagine how it would have gone over before the wife really figured out how much I love this game.
My copy of the video game says I've racked up 7111 hours... I might have a problem.
In Fall of 2012 one of my wife's high School friends came ove to play games. He brought his copy of the game with Rook City and Infernal Relics. I played Argent Adept because he was a Bard and also because said guy stated you shouldn't play him your first game. My wife played Expatriette and with Adept's help shot all the things many, many times.
After he left I googled the game, saw the Shattered Timelines Kickstarter and got all of the game to that point through the Kicksarter. I then hated myself because I had to wait to get any of the game.
I think I found out about it on BoardGameGeek, I certainly played it via the "official" vassal version (an electronic tabletop) a while before I trundled on down to Orc's Nest in London and picked up the original set and Rook City at the same time*. Since then I've picked up the expansions as and when they've come out.
All in all a pretty boring story.
*Pretty sure that I put up a picture of the receipt from that purchase somewhere on this forums when I found it while cleaning a few years ago.
It must have been 2012, and I was a Grad Student at RPI and working at a movie theater to help make ends meet. The other projectionists and I would game between change overs and other major film disasters to help pass the time while the movies played. We demolished all the classics like Munchkin and Bang, and we had fallen in love with Cooperative games like Pandemic and Shadows over Camelot. It was by pure chance that we were looking for a new co-op game the day it hit shelves for the first time. I found my first copy at a locaf game store (I believe Foam Brain, who had several runs of SotM memorabelia) and we fell in love with it. We had the entire theater hooked.
Over the years I think I have bought nearly the entire verse three times as I have donated my sets to previous gaming groups as a farewell gift. That theater still has my original version of the game and play it weekly to this day.
