Oblivaeon would have been fine...

Games Sentinels of the Multiverse
1

with 1 environment and 1 scion, the missions, and a whole lot less of "if...then" cards.  I feel as if more than every other card has checks for: if a target enters play, if someone takes damage, if the coffee is ready, and if you've taken out the trash.

as a big fan of every single deck and card, and every expansion of SotM that came out so far, I honestly do not understand why this humongous mode was created. 

it feels like a deranged version of Excel, which randomly shifts rows and columns every time you enter a number.

I like to play complicated board games, I have a PhD in physics, I do not lack the brain capacity, but this is not SotM. it's as if you took the single very slight weakness of SotM, which showed occasionally in certain deck combinations (bookeeping) and decided to create a game entirely around it.

am I supposed to feel like I'm saving the multiverse? I feel as if I'm studying for an actuarial certification. I think I had more fun studying calculus in my first year at university, my least favorite math subject.

so, if you like Oblivaeon, great for you. I'm not here to change your mind. and if you disagree, I'm interested in hearing why you like Oblivaeon. I'm only here to tell the game designers what I think. I'll always be a great admirer of Chris' work in designing SotM, but not of Oblivaeon.

I do like the missions, it's an interesting addition, and would have been enough innovation for me. as much as I love SotM, it's not a game that has an incredible depth, complexity wise. what I mean is that it is not chess, it is not Gaia Project, it is not Scythe. it's a wonderful game and has interesting interactions and combos between cards, but at the end of the day, you're doing algebra. Chris and Adam have done an amazing job at putting a theme on the cards that really makes the decks come to life, so much so that you forget you're mostly doing algebra. this is the hallmark of a great game.

but the underlying lack of complexity means the game should have remained simple, in my opinion. adding 2 environments and multiple cards, villains, play areas, it's like forcing Sotm to become a game with more strategic depth, when the underlying mechanism does not support it. you're now doing algebra simultaneously in different pages of your notebooks, and for me it just does not work. in a board game, complexity best arises from simple rules. the rules of Sotm were not made to support a higher complexity than the original Sotm. they are overstretched in Oblivaeon, becoming a game of deranged bookeeping.

I'm a bit sad, and puzzled...but fine, in the end it's not a big deal. it's just a game. : )

2

We talk about this in a few other threads, and in one of them we've been exchanging house rules that help speed things up.

https://greaterthangames.com/forum/topic/90-minutes-my-akashbhuta-simplifying-oblivaeon-games-12375

So far, my favorite is one posted by user Ironic Fist:

 

1 - Oblivaeon starts on his second side with H tokens on the devastation counter and no shield card. Do not activate any of his 'when Oblivaeon enters this form' effects at the top of his card. A Scion starts in both battle zones, both randomly selected from the bottom of the scion reserve.

2 - Each turn, only one of the two battle zones are active. First turn you play the environment and scion/aeon men turn for battle zone A only (Oblivaeon still goes each turn, regardless of where he is). The next turn, you play battle zone B's environment and scion/aeon men turn. Keep alternating this way each turn. The rule about adding a token if the scions outnumber the heroes still applies even if the battle zone is inactive however. 

3 - Oblivaeon never automatically replaces a missing scion; a new scion can only appear if specifically brought into play by a card.

(I also added some optional addendums)

4 - If you find this makes the game too easy, then simply play with the advanced rules.

5 - Try to avoid environments that have overly-complicated cards, like: Realm of Discord, Wagner Mars Base, Omnitron 4, Celestial Tribunal, Tomb of Anubis, Madame Mittermeir's, Magmaria, and Temple of Zhu Long. 

6 - Don't use the 'Sanction' Scion. It's not one of the harder ones. It just involves a LOT of bookkeeping. If nothing else, make it the last Scion to enter play.

The last time my group played with these rules, the game was about 90-100 minutes, with no loss of fun.

3

It was what Christopher decided to go with for an epic feeling game.   I think no matter how it was implemented there were going to be folks who liked and those who don’t similar to the Vengeance format.   Unlike Vengeance format though Christopher didn’t intend for this to be a regular scenario used.   I’m sure there will be plenty of mods people do over time with various aspects of this game and I’m sure Christopher will be fine with it.  I’m moreso looking forward to when this is implemented in the digital game since that will make this much more accessible for solo play. 

4

Do you like Vengeance style games?

5

I do want to find a way to cut down on the time a little. That said, it's the end of the Multiverse it's supposed to take a while. Cards even reference that. Part of speeding it up is applying the rules properly. That said, I've been studying the character booklet and rulebook repeatedly, and I think the game would have gone faster and less in the favor of the heroes if I had been applying the proper rules.

It's not like Argent Adept and OblivAeon can just have a dance off and the winner does their thing.

6

I, for one, like both Standard and Vengeance mode. Even if not playing the App, I have usually no problem to do a 5 villains vengeance game in a complex environment IRL.

But yeah ... OblivAeon was pushing my book keeping abilities to its limit and beyond.

I gave up my first game after a few turns and seeing I massively screwed up the rules. (hint : soloing 5 players in OblivAeon : Bad Idea)

I tried with only 4 simple heroes, simple environments ... And it went a lot better : I made some rules mistake but nothing game shattering, and in 7ish hours (6 hours play and some pauses between)  Obliv' was defeated, and I was drained.

Defeating OblivAeon was the most epic, intense, rewarding and fun thing I won't do again any time soon in tabletop because my brain felt pretty liquid once the game ended. I guess it was the first time a tabletop game left me physically exhausted ! In that regard, Christopher did a very good job, I really felt I saved the multiverse and now could rest thinkig of the billion of lives I saved.

While I don't think Obliv' won't be fought IRL by me anytime soon, I'm very impatient to do it on the Video Game version. With all the book keeping handled by the App, I will have only to enjoy the epicness of the fight.

7

 

yes. I don’t play them as often as they are slightly more fiddly than a base game, but they are still fun. I even play Vengeance solo at times. in fact, I’ve often played 3-4 heroes vs a normal villain, solo, and I had plenty of fun.

I think one problem I have is the 2 battlezones which are variable. I build in my head a pretty consistent start of turn - turn - end of turn phase, and the battlezones in Oblivaeon mess it up, because you can move the heroes, and Oblivaeon moves, and there are multiple triggers everywhere. 

every single time I pick a hero card to play, I have to check what battlezone it applies to. every time a villain card plays, I have to check which targets are in its battlezone. all the triggered cards (when a target enters play, blah blah) I have to check which battlezone it applies to.

it’s exactly like playing 2 simultaneous games of normal SotM, but the games are not independent, the targets move between games. it’s insanity. it’s not fun for me

 

8

 

yes I checked out that thread. while I may try a simplified version, even the full set of simplified rules you list is already more complicated than “play power draw”. I mean they even have a tshirt that says play power draw. it’s a catchphrase for the simplicity of the gameplay. I backed expecting a SotM expansion. Oblivaeon is not a SotM expansion in my opinion

9

I remember greatly disliking games against Spite because it was too much work to keep track of what all the Drugs do. I know them well enough now that it's not a problem. I wonder if you might find something similar happens w/ OblivAeon games. I've only played a handful of OblivAeon games, but now that I have a good idea of how everything fits together, the amount of mental bookkeeping no longer seems overwhelming.

If you're simultaneously learning what Shields are and how to deal with them, what devastation tokens and the inevitable countdown track and environment destruction is like, what missions and rewards are and how to deal with them, how to handle two battle zones, and how the OblivAeon turn fits in, well, THAT'S A LOT.

Even if you get to the point where understanding all of this new stuff makes dealing with it easier, however, there's still a question of whether all of this new stuff is actually fun. You noted you like the missions/rewards. Me, too! That's by far my favorite part of OblivAeon. The concept of jumping between battle zones seems fun to me, though in practice it has turned out to be pretty pedestrian, as the whole team has tended to be together and to often just camp out in one place. It's kind of neat to have a bunch of new characters in the Scion pile and I can kind of see how having to face a bunch of them ramps up the fear factor, but I'm usually much more interested in heroes and environments than villains, and I've found in my limited plays so far that the right choice is generally to ignore the Scions as much as possible. After the missions/rewards, the inevitable destruction chart is probably the best part -- really playing into the sense of drama.

I spent some time during playtesting trying to come up with a fun way to have _all_ the environments in effect at a time, giving the heroes a feeling of becoming backed into a corner as the environments were destroyed, but everything I thought of led to having more and more cards/stuff to manage in a game that was already very long. 

10

I think the single most physically exhausting gaming experience I ever had was playing one of the first playtesting versions of OblivAeon with my sister, it took 3 days for us to complete it with about 5 hour sessions each day.

I really can’t recommend playing OblivAeon solo (until the video game version is out). I did a bunch solo games of it in playtesting and even in the final version it’s a bit much. With 2 people I think it’s pretty manageable assuming they’re both experienced players. OblivAeon is really at its best though with each player running 1 hero and most players being able to help with the book keeping… even then, it’s just not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

11

Just to be clear, OblivAeon has speeded up dramatically since that first version.

12

Fifteen hours!?!  That's not even Twilight Imperium-level crazy.  If that were me, by hour 7 I'd have just put the game down and told Christopher to try again.

13

I will take Hankroyd's experience into consideration when I finally get to play it. c.c Cuz my plan is to solo once or twice so I can learn the general flow and then help my gaming groups learn it.

14

I've only played OblivAeon once so far.  It was just me and my girlfriend controlling two heroes each and she's only played Sentinels around a dozen times (although it is her favorite game) so I was keeping track of mostly everything.  I have no idea how long it took to finish, although it was definitely a while.  We didn't play it all at once though, but split it across a few days.  By the end she had actually gone off to college and it was mostly me soloing while facetiming her for some input. 

It didn't feel gruelingly long to me and pretty much every game I play ends up taking longer than the time on the box.  We did admittedly stack the Scion deck with the easier Scions coming out first (although randomized the harder ones so we wouldn't know when you-know-who might come out), picked a Shield that seemed easy (the Borr one), and picked easy environments (none of which got destroyed!).  We also for the most part only used heroes we already knew, except for me taking the Idealist at the end because I had the Mecha-Knight reward.

So yeah, it's a long game, but we knew going in that it's supposed to be and that didn't make it less fun for us.  Besides, I've already played regular games of Sentinels that took 3 hours.  This just won't be the mode we go to all the time, but I don't think it was ever supposed to be.

15

The problem I have with Oblivaeon's basic rules is it's too much time sitting around, figuring out the villain turns.

The average time for a standard game of oblivaeon with my group is 3 hours (house rules bring it down to 90ish minutes). Let's say an average game takes 15 rounds. 3 Hours divided by 15 rounds equals 12 minute each. So after playing, each player has to wait around 10 minutes before they can go again. That's a lot of dead time during a board game, and it's caused a lot of my friends to fiddle with their phones, or leave the table until it's their turn again.

With house rules, 90-100 minutes divided by 12 rounds (the average so far), is 7-8 minutes per game round, and around 5-6 minutes between turns.

Oblivaeon's first form, combined with activating both battle zones each turn, doubles the length of the game, but on average only adds about 3 (25%) more player turns. That means around 45 minutes of each game is being spent on going through the trouble of activating both battle zones each turn, and keeping track of all the Scion abilities/interactions. An extra 45 minutes each game where players just sit and wait for their next turn to begin. I'm sorry, but that's not epic. That's just slow.

I'm not saying you need to use the rules Ironic Fist came up with. I'm just saying you need to invoke some sort of house rules in order to bring the game down to 90-120 minutes, like it says on the side of the box. Just my opinion.

16

Thinking back to our games, I actually have to disagree with this - my wife and I were playing two heroes each, like the poster above, and it seemed like the hero turns too the most time. The Scions and villain turns move pretty mechanically - I think they did a pretty good job limiting the Scion and OblivAeon decks to fairly simple effects - but the hero turns are ones that take a lot of brain power. I found myself playing Ra - RA! He’s so simple, he’s just Fire Guy, Shoot Them With Fire, Why Are We Still Talking - but I had the OblivAeon shard, we had incapacitated abilities on the table, and OblivAeon was on his third form. In our mentality that we had to take him down ASAP, I’d be stuck thinking, "okay, do I play the Fire Blast for a bunch of damage? or, wait, no, Flame Spike is worth more with the bonus from this Shard - but the next hero can let me use a power with an incap, so hmm, if I play Drawn to the Flame I can ALSO cream all these Scions - " and that’s what really dragged the game out. Granted, maybe this over-analytical approach came from our Pandemic Legacy experience…

Still, when they estimated the length of the game, basically it’s a Miss Information game followed by an Akash’Bhuta game followed by a game of your choice, then flip a coin to see if you would play a Voss game. That’s not 90 minutes.

17

I’m quite surprised that there hasn’t been more backlash over the estimate on the box. Looking at the comments on here, BGG, Reddit, and on the various online reviews, it seems pretty unanimous that it’s extremely inaccurate. Unless the testing team were having far different experiences (which, from the limited feedback they’ve given, doesn’t appear to be the case) or there was a fairly major screw-up during production and they forgot to update the box art template, that would mean that GtG intentionally cut a big chunk of time off the estimate, to the point where you could convincingly argue that it’s only 50% of what it should be. I can see why they might feel the pressure to give an overly optimistic estimate - having 3-4 hours+ as the official estimate is going to put off a lot of potential customers and cost them significant money, after all - but it feels a little underhanded to me, and I do wonder if when this goes on sale to casual fans if GtG aren’t going to be in for a fair bit of negative reaction at just how far from reality the time they’ve advertised is.

18

There'd be more of a stink if *every* board game box wasn't phenomenally inaccurate in terms of play time.

It's something of a joke that "90-120 minutes" is the default for any sort of long game, regardless of how long it plays.  Beyond that, long playtime hasn't put off players from Twilight Imperium, Arkham/Eldritch Horror, or the 18XX series.

I only have 2 plays in on OblivAeon so far, but it's my thought that the scenario is literally base SotM cranked up to the extreme.  If there are things you don't like about SotM (complex card interactions, 'fiddliness' with tokens), it's going to have more of that.  If there are things you like, (the thematic elements, the teamwork, the unique combos), you'll get that in spades.  I definitely fall into the latter camp.

19

Ah, OK - Sentinels is the first of these sort of games that I’ve played so I wasn’t aware this sort of cheap tactic was an industry-wide practise. I’m not sure that really excuses it, but it at least explains why there’s less outcry than I expected. Thanks for the info.

20

Well, Loony Labs' World War 5 is deliberately built to be a short war game. That said, there's long games and there's "clear your afternoon" games. Although my friends enjoyed the Oblivaeon game they did say it's not a way they'd want to play Sentinels often.

As for those clear your afternoon games: Risk, Talisman (especially with any expansion at all), and probably several others I can't recall right now.