Has anyone thought perhaps of trying to figure out alternate villain cards to play a more traditional one-villain game with the Vengeance villains? It'd definitely need some tweaking but I think it might be interesting to try to come up with rules allowing you to face off against them individually, especially Proletariat and the alternate Blade.
It'd definitely need some tweaking but I think it might be interesting to try to come up with rules allowing you to face off against them individually, especially Proletariat and the alternate Blade.
I agree about Proletariat, not so much about Blade (he already has his own deck, after all). My #2 want-to-see-alone villain is Ermine; as a Catwoman variant, I think she could play a very interesting "you can't touch me" sort of denial game, where she's almost impossible to damage and you're mostly trying to stop her from stealing precious loot (a la Spite's victim cards) and escaping with it. I don't see her as ever being the type to stand and fight without a lot of backup around…frankly, I'm a bit surprised she even does it then. Friction is a distant third; the two musclebound guys who mostly just punch stuff would probably make underwhelming solo decks compared to Plague Rat and Iron Legacy.
Funny you should mention Ermine as a Catwoman type of character... Early in the play testing for Vengeance, some of us were speculating on the personalities of the villains, and Ermine was cast in a catwoman/seductive thief role... When I spoke with Adam and Christopher at a con about it, Adam laughed and said something along the lines of her being about as seductive as Paris Hilton. She is apparently very annoying (and thus starts the game with "Constant Prattle" in play.)
All in all, the villains working together does usually create a good dynamic and challenge, their character cards would definitely need some overhauling or a return to their earlier builds to make them a singular challenge. (Early builds we're unplayable as the villains were so tough, 2-3 of them was a good challenge for 5 ppl {IMO}. Also, earlier builds did not have the built in weaknesses that they do now. Such as clones causing damage to proletariat, etc.)
Proletariat is fun to play a against, but if you focus on only him, he can be less of a challenge than some of the other vengeance villains. The difficulty is that he has soo many targets PLUS the other villains and nemeses, and if you don't keep the clones under control, they can quickly gang up on you.
Fright Train hits hard, but also takes extra damage at the start of the game, so if he's the only target, you can whittle him down quickly as well. Minor changes for him could make him more difficult pretty easily, but it's usually the other villains that would shut us down.
Ah, the bad old days. Remember when Ermine removed Hero Cards from the game?
I still have nightmares yo
It was a dark time.
Yeah, my worst playtesting nightmares are early V5, early Gloomweaver, and early Apostate.
What was nightmarish about early versions of Gloomy and Apostate?
You know how Apostate can get all the DR on his Relics then protect them with the Orb? Well, imagine that situation but multiplied a few times.
Yah, make the DR worse, and add more hp to ALL his relics. I honestly forget (have blocked out) the specifics of early Gloomweaver; I just remember blood and tears....so much blood.
Are there traces left of those early versions? I'd like to try challenge games against those nightmarish editions at some point. I might not play it random but try and find teams that work well.
Unfortunately, that's all playtester stuff, so not public. That said, if you look on BGG, under the variants section, there's a variant or 2 for Gloomweaver that are pretty close to the original.
I figured as much, but it was still worth a try. As much as the variants presented are nice you don't get to say you challenged the stuff of nightmares and still stand to talk about it.
Edit: Thanks anyways for the official answer that you can't reveal those.
The vengeance villains were HORRIBLE originally. Like, Omni-blade had 25 HP and dealt 5 melee damage to whoever had the most cards out. Crackjaw Crew did X psychic damage to 1 target, where X is the number of non-hero targets (!) in play. You know how Last Stop divides by 2? It didn't always. Ermine's flip side used to remove the top 3 cards of each hero deck from the game. permanently. EACH TURN. Plus, she didn't have her current abilities; she used to just do a Constant Prattle the first time she took damage each turn. She was really boring, honestly.
And the MDP... Don't even get me STARTED on that.
Oh my, I'm so sorry for bringing up early versions here. I thought this was in the play tester forum, I certainly did not intend to tease with information not available to those in this conversation. I will make sure to double check such things in the future. :)
I think the first builds are aften done that way just to screw with playtesters.
I mean there are really legit reasons for doing it, but screwing with playtesters sounds like a lot more fun.
When Christopher has builds he releases to us, I am sure he is trying to find the upper and lower limits of the villains difficulty. You can't begin to pinpoint exactly where you want to tune things unless you know where your threshholds are.
He goes through many many more builds than we ever see on the forums I am sure.
Absolutely! It's particularly fun when you're playing a game with Christopher around and he picks up one of your cards rewrites it and puts it back into play. It's hilarious and amazing.
Well it's good that >G is creating a distinct characterization for her, so she's an indirect homage rather than an outright clone. But that really doesn't have anything to do with what I was proposing. Catwoman is a "thief" much more than she is "seductive" - she really only seduced Batman AFAICR, and that could just be due to chemistry between them, rather than part of her standard MO. I was just thinking in terms of Ermine being a "cat burglar" in the conventional sense of the term.
(Early builds we're unplayable as the villains were so tough, 2-3 of them was a good challenge for 5 ppl {IMO}.
My idea was that each of the Vengeance villains would be playable solo as a difficulty-1 villain, but that there would be synergies in their decks which would make them essentially square in difficulty for every one of them you fought (which I didn't assume was necessarily slaved to the number of heroes). Two of them together would be a difficulty-2 challenge, three would be a "low 3" (a la the un-advanced Ennead), four would be a "high 3" like the Dreamer or Miss Information, and five would be a difficulty-4 challenge akin to The Chairman.
Sounds like La Capitan.
La Capitan doesn't remove them permanently. Ermine did.