I don’t think they meant that there wouldn’t be variants and events for previously published characters. We got Core Set hero variants with RCR, so it seems likely to me we’ll get events and critical events in the future. 
But I could be wrong. 
Every indication I’ve heard so far is that they intend to keep anything in an expansion from requiring anything other than the Core Box. That way, anyone can buy the Core Box and any individual expansion, and not have “useless” cards.
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I feel that goes out the window for the OblivAeon box.
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Definitely! OA should also explicitly be explained as no ordinary expansion. People shouldn’t be buying it thinking it’s just any other expansion, like seems to happen with EE occasionally.
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A few more games on, my additional thoughts are:
- SETBACK IS SO MUCH FUN
- Dark Watch Expatriette is an amazing addition to her gameplay
- They really fixed up Spite. He doesn’t feel frustrating, and while you don’t get a “reward” for saving the bystanders, you are able to save them in actually meaningful ways. I don’t know that I’ll go play him all the time but I don’t mind playing against him.
- We stomped the crud out of the Organization with FA Wraith, DW Expatriette, Alpha, and Backdraft Ra, all ending with mid-teens or higher HP, and that feels like a brag but I don’t have a sense of the difficulty yet. “Abduct and Interrogate” is such a crazy card and Alpha got to lean into her wolf nature. Really fun despite having to grab extra counters to track whose Commands on whose End phase we were actually on.
- I enjoy the irony of Chairman Pike’s flip side being titled “handle it himself” when his End Phase (“Activate all Commands”) is anything but. But also, it’s very fitting that if you take out the Chairman first, the rest of the Organization does … very little.
I think it must be Washington. He’s also on “Take from the Weak” in the Operative’s side deck, which shows the Fence taking what appears to be the Staff of Ra from him. That must be quite the story.
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Loving RCR so far. Slick and beautiful.
Question-- Haunted Fanatic seems hella OP, she essentially has two lives, since she springs back to life with her third incapacitated ability, and together seem to be likely to live longer than any other of her variants. Am I missing something?
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Nope. She can be OP and that’s fine in a coop game. It also means your power is likely spent getting an Aegis.
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First time getting RCR to table tonight. I had tried to three-hand it myself the other day, but I just can’t wrangle that many decks after being acclimated to EE digital doing it for me. So I’m limited to plays when I can actually convince others it’s fun! Which is not often enough for my liking. 
At any rate, it was me as Setback, new player as Werewolf Haka, and two players with a few DE games experience as 1A Harpy & 1A Wraith vs. Ambuscade in Diamond Manor. So medium challenge on both villain & environment.
Haka was definitely the punching bag at first, and that really hurt being the nemesis too. But then Harpy got more birds than she bargained for via some Suddenly! cards. That upkeep cost is brutal, and pretty soon she was taking a beating from Ambuscade’s flip side as the lowest HP target. She didn’t last more than a few rounds because of the flock.
As far as Ambuscade, he’s definitely a bigger threat. I do like being able to spend a resource to search for him and make vulnerable again so there’s not a full round where you’re just sitting there like EE after destroying the Cloaking Device going, “We can see you, Ansel. You can come out from behind the tree now.”
We worried one hero down was the beginning of the end for us, and we had Balov’s Clock grant an extra villain turn to boot! But we managed to have a decent setup by then, and a few big Hakas and Inventory Barrages started to tip the tide in the heroes’ favor. Incapped Harpy’s extra play phase for a hero certainly helped too. Not everything was bad in Nightmist’s house either. We actually got a little help from a pixie and kappa.
I will say that new Setback is a blast to play and I feel an objective improvement! There seemed to be plenty of ways to put my thumb on the scale and get rid of my unluck before it came back to bite me!
I did feel kind of sorry for the Harpy, because she didn’t get a great setup and kind of had no way to stop the birds and prevent burning herself out.
Overall, very fun and I look forward to convincing others to play with me. This proved it can be a challenge to play something beyond EZ mode Baron Blade for beginners, but still be possible to win and be all the more satisfying when we do!
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We’ve played a good number of Renegades games by now, cycling through all the villains, environments, heroes, as well as many of the variants and combos with core set heroes. Here are some more organized thoughts.
I feel like with Renegades, the Definitive Edition really hit its stride. We weren’t really playing the Core Set any more, after going through all the villains vanilla and then in each event. But with the injection of new stuff from Renegades, we’ve been playing games almost every night and haven’t even touched the events yet.
Several of the heroes are a total blast to play.
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Expatriette sets up quickly and gets in the fight, her ammo actually feels like you’re getting special effects, and she’s got great team leader abilities. I love her plans. I mowed down the entire Organization twice in a game. And her Dark Watch variant is simply fantastic. About the only bad thing I have to say about her is that she’s got some real walls of text.
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Setback is everything he should be. It’s so much fun. He’s got some of the most powerful cards to just make targets disappear (what Relic, Gloomweaver?), but of course, you can’t always get them to work. And the cards themselves are very silly.
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Mister Fixer’s deck is clearly geared toward encouraging players to swap out tools and styles. I’ve never really gotten that to work – most games aren’t long enough and he’s been plenty useful with whatever he has – but it feels very versatile. The Black Fist variant in particular is fun.
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Nightmist I have played the least. She takes a lot of hand management and planning ahead, really emphasizing the symbol and how to control it.
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Harpy also takes a lot of control and planning, and has some risk of collateral damage. I haven’t yet played a game where I have a hand full of birds and just put on the mask, but that seems fun. Someday.
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Alpha! The prior hero she’s closest to is Benchmark, and I’m glad we have that sort of tableau-programming available to us now. She’s got a huge amount of damage available, but some of it…might be collateral. I really enjoyed the balancing act that her Reporter Alpha variant created, focusing her more on her special effects and on maintaining control.
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Haunted Fanatic is so OP. Even if you have to spend every other turn re-summoning the Aegis, she still hits the thresholds on all her one-shots and her other powers and it’s so much damage. But in the games we’ve seen, she usually doesn’t have to keep summoning the Aegis anyway – villains target heroes with the highest health!
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Werewolf Haka is an underrated addition. It’s like he gets to summon time bombs whenever he wants, sometimes multiple at a time.
The villains are, on balance, great additions. They’ve also made some marked improvements.
- My least favorite are Plague Rat and Kismet. Plague Rat is just…uninteresting. He’s a largely unchanged single-target damage race. Kismet, though, is the most annoying villain out of this box. We played against her with Setback on the team, and she kind of…actively punished us for doing anything, especially if Setback was doing it. My guess is I will play against her exactly two more times (her events).
- Spite is interesting! He’s got a worthwhile mini-game that is sometimes optional, sometimes not; and you always have the option of hitting him. He doesn’t have all the stupid retaliation or environment negation that made him so terrible before. I’m interesting to play against him with Detective Wraith and Reporter Alpha.
- The Organization makes you do bookkeeping, and ran us out of tokens despite the new 1s, but overall does not feel as punishing as before and gives you ways to break its links. It’s a fun opponent if you want targets on the board.
- Gloomweaver got an upgrade, but we still beat him twice. I can see how he’d get out of hand though!
- I really enjoy the alternate victory condition on the Fey-Court, though getting enough cards in play to let you trigger it is a far from sure thing. But that kind of twist is the story of thing that makes me think differently about Sentinels, and I enjoy that a lot.
- The werewolves’ gimmick looks really cool, especially if Alpha or Werewolf Haka is around, but we didn’t get it to trigger. By the time Apex was lower health than another wolf (Alpha), he was also low enough that we finished him off that round. Still, I look forward to more crazy games against them.
- I was a little disappointed to find the Terrorform didn’t have much to it on its flip side. The access gimmick is good but mainly that villain was a “typical” punching baddie with minions.
I’m also pleased that the environments really seem to add “peril” for everybody and not just the heroes, just like in the core set.
Now that we have both the core set and Renegades, there is one thing I really, really wish they’d included here: more organizational stuff in the box. We, like many of you I’m sure, put the heroes in one box and the other decks in the other. But we also decided to get some foam board and make ourselves a two-layer insert to hold the tokens in the token box, without bags. This phenomenally reduced setup and teardown time, and is very convenient during play. It made enough of a difference that by now I’m surprised there weren’t any token-sorter inserts in the first place. The next project we’ll do is to make a little card-flipper/rolodex compartment to put all the heroes and their variants in one of the remaining open sections, and the villains and events in another. That will make picking our matchups faster and easier. In the future, it would be cool to have randomizer cards, too, like Dominion does, so we could shuffle a deck and pull villain, environment, and heroes if we want. We can also make that ourselves.
With Rook City Renegades, this really feels like the definitive edition. I only hope that in the second printing, they make the type a little larger and the to/by tokens different shapes.
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Those are sometimes good. I described the old versions of Voss and Ambuscade using a comparison to one of the WoW bosses that was a “DPS check” (it made sense given the folks I was playing with). Was good when half the group hadn’t played SotM before.
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The difference is that Voss and Ambuscade have multiple targets to attack. In general, I think Sentinels is best geared to villains that have plenty of minions in play; the minions/devices are often how the villains get most interactive, and so many of the heroes have specifically area-of-effect abilities and, now, “deal 1 target … deal a second target” abilities. So having only one target out there on the board can actually limit the heroes’ ability to make progress, and makes players feel like they are doing less. That’s what just makes villains like Plague Rat and Kismet (and, in the future I’m sure, Iron Legacy and Progeny) much less fun for me. With Spite, they created additional stuff for players to do, which made that game more engaging.
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Since I mentioned storage above – here’s what I’ve done.
Character cards and hero decks are in the Core Set box, with all the teams in the long compartment and the three “affiliated” heroes in the short one. Right now there are some blocks of foam filling space, but that’ll come in handy for the next expansion. For the square compartment, I made a little insert out of foam board that fits all the hero character cards in an easy-to-flip-through manner, and then in the back has an angled support that fits the villain character cards, unplayed events, and earned collections in a similar manner.
The Renegades box has all the villain and environment decks, the token box, and the spinners. The short compartment in there just has the foil card boxes in it now; the space will later go to the Disparation villains and environments. What you can’t see here is the foam board token inserts I made for the token box, so here they are. (And a look at the character card insert without the cards in it. I used pins to fix the inner two separators so that we can reposition them when more expansions come out.)
Well worth an afternoon with an X-acto knife and some glue!
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That is awesome, Trajector! 
I’m going to have to think about how I might be able to create that character card storage option. 
It’s a great idea!
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Count me as someone who wanted to sleeve, including the dividers. And who ~2 months ago bought enough GTG-brand sleeves to fit the dividers for both DE and RCR.
…and now half of those sleeves are useless. 
Couple questions for anyone still in this thread:
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How are you organizing the event cards? In their own “section” or with the villains to whom they pertain?
Currently I’ve got the villains together with their critical event variants, and then the rest of the events afterwards (currently organized chronologically), but I don’t feel great about that. -
Is anyone aware of a good Tarot-sized card binder?
For EE I have all of my Hero Character Cards stored in two small card books/binders (they’re UltraPro ones, small with 4 cards per page), regular cards in the first and foil in the second. I like this because it’s a fun way to pick your hero/variant… you can just browse through to choose. I’ll also occasionally just grab one of the books and look through it simply to enjoy the art.
For DE I’ve got the hero cards all together in a stack, and I don’t like it as much.
Currently I have Events with Critical Events organized by date.
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I’m the same as Powerhound. First I have all of the base villain cards, then all of the Events and Critical Events ordered by date in case I want to do a historical campaign.
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I haven’t really organized them, yet. Kind of debating whether I want to organize things by villain involved, or make some kind of chronological “campaign.”
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Same as FrivYeti and Powerhound. Villains, then events in chronological order.
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We have them as:
- Villains, with their Critical Event if we’ve beaten it
- Un-defeated Events (normal and Critical), in chronological order
- Earned Collections
That way, we have a clearly defined campaign, it’s easy to pick Collections to take with us, and we have the alternate Villains right with their base versions just like the heroes. If we decide to start a new campaign, we’ll just pop everything back into the “un-defeated” slot.
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