Background: I started playing SotM a couple months ago. Maybe a half dozen games of just the basic set, another half dozen after adding RC/IR, and another ~20 with the rest of the expansions added in. I tend to run the Villain & Environment in about 75% of those games. Early on, the villain/enviro and my hero were not too complex and I could hammer through. Now everything tends to be more complex, bogging things down (which Ennead is highest/lowest, Civilians/Thorathians/Minions, Fowl all over the place, Guise interrupting everything, Constructs firing off, Favor tokens firing off all over, etc).
Do you have any suggestions/tips/tricks on how to make managing the Villain and Environment turns easier/smoother? What works best for you and your group?
I almost never have time to pre-plan my hero turn. Should I distribute the load more by having the other players rotate (once a game or every round) running the villain/enviro? Maybe use some sort of hitpoint tracker instead of the chips for the villain/enviro targets? Split everything up (one player runs the villain, one player runs the environment, one player manages the colloseum, etc)?
Things that work well for me:
I use six sided dice for Construct hitpoints and Favor Pools.
For the +/- Damage Dealt/Taken counters I place them at an angle off the top of the card if it applies globally, straight across the center of the card if it applies only to the card itself and at an angle off the bottom of the card if it is only for the next instance of whatever.
I feel like the current state of the game is much more geared towards being managed by a program than being played by people. :/
I have another player who is handling the game well and not playing a super complex hero run the environment.
I also use a token to show where I am in the villain turn when things are going to get tough, like when Dynamic Syphons and Adept and Guise end up doing 13 things part way through the start of the Villain turn.
I have a green token to mark progress through start of the turn and red token for end of turn, that way I can go back to the right card and know what is going on.
Lastly there is a reason I don't play Adept when I run the villain. I love playing him, but I can't keep track of everything and plan out my hero turn to my satisfaction, my brain doesn't work like that.
I tend to play heroes that I can run pretty fast, mostly because I know the deck very well, if the Villain is going to take a lot of work, while a villain like Blade, Omnitron, or Voss I can play a more complex Villain because I have much less to keep track of.
I used to play Legacy and Visionary a lot, simply because it let other players do better (which early on while they are learning is good). Now I let everyone else pick, and since there is almost always a support picked I go Fanatic or Expat, because those are my favorite heroes and I can run those decks without even reading the text anymore.
Kaargra Warfang we Split the Favor and Titles and Villain up, and then if we have 3 the Title deck operator runs the Environment.
We usually split the environment and villain management between two people. That's about the most I have to offer. It tends to come pretty second nature to me by now, though.
I second palming the environment off onto another player.
It also helps to have the player who's running the villain play a hero later on in the turn sequence, so they have a few other hero turns to think about what they want to do. Similarly, whoever's got the environment should probably have an "early" hero.
Example, because I'm not good at explaining with words.
Villain (Mary)
Hero 1 (Eric)
Hero 2 (Kieran)
Hero 3 (Ashley)
Hero 4 (Mary)
Environment (Eric)
This gives Mary and Eric some time after their villain/environment job to think about their hero turn.
Another thing that I find helpful is having a place to mark "universal effects". Spiff has a thing on his site with spaces for Heroes, Villain, Environment and All, so you can just drop tokens on there. For Obsidian Field you add an Attack+1 on "All", for Galvanise you'd put an Attack +1 on "Heroes".
I've got lots of stuff on my site which helps me manage the games (www.spiffworld.com/sotm). Sounds like maybe the universal effect tracker, the little reminder tokens, and/or the mini hp trackers could help.
Not having start and end of turn tokens and not liking using tokens for hp I use 20 10 sided dice of two colors.One color for the tens and one for single digits. This in turn freed the hp tokens to be used as start and end of turn reminders 1 being start and 5 being end I know inverted colors from the official tokens but easy to see with numerical order.
I tried playing Spite (I don't know why he's so difficult for me) with some friends and I got so bogged down I forgot to heal him whenever he did damage.
My biggest problem has been solved by the game on my kindle though, since 90% of the time I'm running solo games, now I just power up the game and don't worry about all those pesky effects and when they should be happening
I use 10-sided dice for most of the hp trackers. It makes keeping track of health MUCH easier. Especially if you realize one point of the die is adjacent to the odd numbers and the opposite one is adjacent to the even numbers. Also, I think the group I play with does it as a group effort. Whoever gets to a villain card first takes care of that card.
Typically I play with two friends. One player gets the villain and the first hero, the second player gets two heroes, and the third player gets the last hero/ environment. We all will normally review what the cards say for the environment and villain turns though but the main person in charge of playing their cards is the person next to it.
Spite is a more difficult villain with a lot of effects that are nigh guaranteed to show up on the field before the game ends. I would recomment decks like Baron Blade, Ambuscade, or Plague Rat. They're simpler villains with (for the most part) less to keep track of.
With my group I usually run the villain in the center of the table, and I play in the middle of the hero turns, while the last hero runs the environment. Gives me some time to think before it becomes my turn. Though sometimes damage dealt to the villain cards is taken care of by others, especially if I'm helping someone else with another game for a moment, such as help setting up or a rules question. I use dice for hp tracking, d10's for heroes/villains and d6's for smaller targets, have my tokens and d6's in containers set up around the villain so people can reach them.
Some games can be quick and others can drag on for hours, like last night's games against Apostate in The Enclave of the Endlings. The first card to come out for the environment was the one that plays another card if Jansa isn't out and she didn't come out for several turns. By then Apostate hit a Profane Summons and brought out his Tome, the Runes, his Periapt, and the Orb, I was tanking alot of the damage by staying the highest and having DR 2 or more and took me a while to find any good card for dealing damage, especially when we didn't want him to play extra cards when we drew. We also had 2 Relic Spirits out at the same time that the environment ended up killing bringing out the Relics we had already destroyed. The environment was doing more damage to Apostate than we were and made him flip. We did finally win that game in the end though.
With the exception of the London meets, I always only play with one other person - he plays two heroes while I play one and manage both the villain and the environment. We use dice for hp and don't bother with any of those other tokens or anything - I find they just get in the way and stuff. I know most of the decks well enough by now that I often only need to see the picture to know the name of the card and what its text says. I sometimes quickly plan my own hero's turn while my partner's first hero is going, but often prefer to just pay attention to what he's doing and sort my hero when it gets to my turn. Or I'll know at the end of my previous turn what I intend to do next or whatever. When we get new decks, we end to play old heroes versus a new villain or vice-versa. Same for environments. We don't play all new decks, we use some that we know so that we can concentrate more on the ones that we don't :).
I think that's really helpful. It might seem like it will be hard to remember where the villain (and env) fit in the order of the heroes when their decks are in the middle of the table, but I've rarely had a problem with it.
