A friend and I were putting together some matches of groups so we could perhaps run introductory sessions at local gaming cons. What are you opinions of the following match-ups?
Easy mode, four color goodness- Baron Blade versus the Freedom Five (Legacy, Bunker, Tachyon, Wraith, Absolute Zero) in Freedom Tower
Novice, street level Citizen Dawn versus Mister Fixer, Expatriette, K.N.Y.F.E., Parse, and Unity in Rook City
Harder level The Ennead versus Ra, Fanatic, Tempest, The Sentinels, and Chrono Ranger in the Tomb of Anubis
Difficult, Mystic Masters The Dreamer versus Visionary, the Argent Adept, the Scholar, Nightmist, Naturalist in the Realm of Discord
What do y'all thnk of these as match-ups where there may be a mix of new players and people who have previously played?
I like these overall, but I would say a few might be pretty punishing. Which, depending on the group, could be a good thing or a bad thing
In particular, I would definitely not call Citizen Dawn in Rook City a novice level challenge. I think she gets underestimated a lot since she's from the base set, but she's pretty nasty. And Rook City makes everything worse.
Also, I don't know if there's a consensus on the Tomb of Anubis, but I find it to be annoyingly distracting - it's basically an extra villain deck. Could just be me. Combined with the Ennead, it's going to be a lot to keep track of.
As for the hero teams, they all look like they would be fun, with a good spread of complexity levels so new and experienced players can both enjoy it. The Mystic Masters would probably be the most difficult to work with new players (Visionary is the only of those I would even considering handing to a newbie), but I imagine that's why you marked it as difficult
We were trying to be thematic with the grouping. What would you suggest for street level villain and environment then? The Organization with the Chariman and Operative seemed obvious for street level action but we thought that would be too difficult.
If you wanted to keep the city theming, you could always do Dawn in Megalopolis. It would still be on the high end for "novice", but much more manageable.
I think the easiest fix, would just switch the Novice and Harder games. The team you have for The Ennead game will make it quite easy, most notable being Tempest. Once he gets Gene-Bound Shackles and Electrical Storm, all heroes just have to focus on keeping the Ennead as close together and allow Tempest to do 6 damage every round.
Ah, Dawn in Megalopolis home of my worst nightmare of a game.
Sweat Tears Anvil to start, we get rid of Anvil, tears and sweat low, then Hostage Situation, Blinding Blast, no cards in hand, can't draw, just what we have in play -ongoings destroyed by citizens.
From there we got return, hammer, anvil kept getting returned and hammer kept coming back, then an Aurora, we never recovered from our hands being wrecked, and Megalopolis compounded that quite effectively. Most frustrating game I've ever played.
Well, we gave our original concept a shot this weekend and boy, howdy, did we get hammered. We had several Citizens played in the set up which did damage to all heroes in the first layout, so we ended up getting hammered before we even got a chance to go. In addition there was also the Citizen who makes all other villain targets immune from damage so we had to take him out first before going after any other targets. We were also unable to get much in the way of damage mitigation or healing going, so it was a inexorable march towards defeat from the word go. We had back to back Toxic Sludges show up out of the environment deck as well. It was brutal.
I introduced some friends to Sentinels last Friday.
1st Game - Baron Blade, Megalopolis vs Legacy (Me), Ra and Wraith He got pounded into soup! I couldn't do much but buff the other heroes, but they got cards that increased their damage and reflected damage. Just brutally bad for BB!
2nd Game - Citizen Dawn, Insula Primalis vs Haka, Ra and Argent Adept (me) Her radiant auras kept wiping our set-ups, but she ended up being slowly roasted by a volcano whilst Ra kept us safe from fire. Wasn't as challenging as I hoped, though it wasn't too much fun as AA when all the music was getting trashed (everyone's a critic)
Overall, BB works nicely for the intro game, but I think next time I'll try to pick something a bit less friendly for the second as Ra with Insula Primalis can nerf that environment! Has anyone tried looking for positive/negative synergies in the stats project (so equipment heavy characters tend to lose in certain environments vs certain villains for example)? I notice the formula is quite raw, so I don't know if I could use that to plan demo scenarios, though I'd like to have a few in mind as I'm planning on demoing the game on TableTop Day in my local store
I've actually played the Ra-Dawn-Volcano game before - we had problems, though, in that the Volcano killed enough citizens to flip Dawn, so we had to turn it off so that she could get enough citizens back to be killable.
I was in a demo with two new guys a few months ago. There was no real set up, just pick and play, but the guy running the demo did give brief points about some heroes to the new guys (I knew what I was doing, so I didn't count) We played NightMist, Wraith, and Team Leader Tachyon vs Spite at Rook City (Becuase thematic powers had activated)
We actually won that one thanks to triple Hypersonic assult. In my opinion, Spite handled the Enviroment by destoying it when it showed up so if you want ot use Rook City in my opinion, maybe Spite would be your man for themeatic and mechanic purposes.
