I have gotten a reputation for only ever griping about Sentinels of the Multiverse, the Letters Page podcast, and other things Greater Than Games, particularly the core two (and really particularly Christopher mostly, since Adam spends so much of his time in the Art Mines that I assume about 2/3 of the decisions regarding things like game rules are made by Christopher more than anything). I really don’t want to come across this way; SOTM is far and away my favorite game of all time, the Letters Page is a fun expansion on the lore that the game starts with, and overall the creation of this company have been a huge positive influence in my otherwise fairly crappy life.
But when my feelings about a subject are positive, I tend to think that there’s not much to discuss there; if a burger tastes really good, you don’t sit there and talk at great length about the taste, you just eat it. It’s when there’s anything wrong that I think it’s relevant to talk at great length about what is wrong, exactly; this is how you successfully diagnose the problem, and can then work on constructing a solution. With SOTM being about 94% perfect as a game already in my opinion, I really want to try and put my finger on the relative handful of specific issues which niggle at me about the game sometimes, and try to identify whether there might be one root cause (or a few of them) which underlie these assorted minor flaws. At last, I feel like I have kind of a handle on what that central thing I’ve been groping to identify might actually be.
Basically it comes down to the approach they take in crafting the game’s story, which is “This is the story that we’ve decided to tell”, rather than “This is the story of what would happen, if the situation we’re telling a story about happened”. Certain cards in the game are more narrowly defined in their acting parameters than they should be, because they were designed to represent a specific moment in the story of the Multiverse, and thus when that card comes up in a game whose scenario is structured very differently, the card may not behave as IMO it should.
This thought occurred to me while playing a game against Heroic Infinitor in the Time Cataclysm, and several of the cards in the latter deck especially really highlight this issue I have with the approach of the game as it was published. There may be better examples out there, but these will do for now.
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Why is Marsquake so named? Because the purpose of that card’s existence is to tell us, the audience, about a specific story involving Tachyon and Ambuscade (and Chrono Ranger, it later turns out), which happens to take place on Mars. So does that mean that every time this card is played in a game, the heroes and the main villain and the villain’s minions (including those still waiting in the proverbial wings) and a couple Environment targets all got sucked through a portal to Mars right in the middle of a quake? Possible, particularly for some villains such as La Capitan or Gloomweaver or even Warlord Voss. But it stretches credulity to assume this happens every time the card is played in every game. With a slight change to the card name and maybe the flavor text, the card could have a more generic concept of “your current environment has become unstable”, and it could still have the picture from the Ambuscade On Mars story presented as an example of the card’s concept in action, rather than the definition of said concept.
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Surprise Shopping Trip has most of the same issues as Marsquake, though it represents what is probably safe to call a less important story beat. It shows a time when Nightmist was invincible and Spite utterly failed at hurting her, yet the vast majority of the time when this card is played, the heroes won’t be immune to it, and it will very commonly hurt them more than the villain. I would have to call this the worst card in the Time Cataclysm deck, in terms of enabling it to create the story of your encounter with the villain you’re fighting there; the only other such failures are the Typhoon, which creates miserable gameplay experiences intentionally to memorialize the miserable experience of delays in manufacturing the game, and the Tumbleweed which is just in there as a joke.
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Fixed Point represents not a specific moment in time, but a general concept central to the Multiverse’s overarching story. While I have nothing against it in story terms in and of itself, the minimalist writing with which it breaks one of the game’s most central rules leads to all manner of bizarre situations. As much fun as it is for Natch to be able to get into his Rhino and Croc forms at the same time, there’s no internally consistent reason why this should be caused by the same effect which also makes it temporarily impossible to kill anything, makes Pushing the Limits or Ground Pound stick around for an extra round, or enables Fixer to wield two Pipe Wrenches at once, which for some reason he never can otherwise.
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Tendrils of Madness shows a creature from the Realm of Discord which has showed up to parasitically feast upon someone, usually the main villain, and thereby cause them to be more aggressive and dangerous. That’s very cool, and I have nothing against this card itself, but the fact that it’s a target you can attack seems a bit strange, and the fact that Rift in Time or Passing Tumbleweed affect it like any other card strikes me as being a bit off. Really, this just kinda segues into a broader point of how the definition of “a card” can cause issues with translating the flavor of the game… things like having Emergency Evac destroy the two Treasures from the Tomb of Anubis along with all of its various threats, Into the Stratosphere being equally capable of affecting either Citizen Truth or a Luminous Leadership, and Cedistic Dissonant having the power to kill Citizen Anvil when he’s a mook in Dawn’s deck but not when he’s working for Ermine or Biomancer in what is pretty much an equally mookish capacity.
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Moving beyond the Time Cataclysm itself, I could look at Infinitor’s deck, maybe to talk about how the total absence of Ongoings and his inability to destroy hero O/Es limits his design space, making prolonged games against him painfully repetitive. Or I could talk about how his promo version is weirdly awkward in its post-hoc adaptation of the core deck, having to take the Crushing Cages out, yet leave the Ocular Swarms in while they don’t do anything (except after the flip, and then not if he’s on Advanced). But all of these points are much better illustrated by the Rook City villains; Plague Rat has the same lack of O/E destruction, Matriarch lacks Ongoings, and Spite has a promo version which clearly and awkwardly works around the limits of the deck it was retroactively designed to go with. But above all other RC decks, the Chairman shows how narrowly defined the design space gets when being too literal with card concepting. Nearly any environment other than Rook City or Pike Industries will force you to get really creative about what the cards Corrupt Cop, Prison Break, “Rook City is Mine” and so forth actually represent in the setting of the current battle. And, bringing it back around to my central point, because C&A’s approach to this is simply to say that Pike canonically never leaves RC, we don’t get any help from them about answering these questions. There’s no possibility that if the Freedom Five fight him literally in Freedom Tower, that him successfully Prison Breaking all his minions will be any less likely than in his own Industrial Complex.
I think that’s as much sense of the subject as I’m going to be able to make for now. Hopefully these thoughts are taken in the spirit that I intended: not as me saying at great length how much the game sucks, but rather me trying to pinpoint exactly what would turn it from the best game I’ve ever played, into the best game I ever could play.