What Do I Know?

If you have been reading for a while, you have read about the various defeats my friends and I have suffered at the hands of the villains of the Sentinels of the Multiverse game.  I am happy to report that the good guys finally managed to eke out another victory against the Ennead.

But before we pat our team of able superheroes on the back for saving the universe, let’s talk Sentinels of the Multiverse.  I hadn’t gotten to play in a while, and got a bit behind on my Sentinels goings on.  While I had been out of the loop, the Enhanced Edition of the original game came out, as did the Infernal Relics expansion.

I loved the original game, but it was obvious it was a labor of love.  While the game was solid and the art was evocative of the comic books they wanted to emulate, the box itself and the way the components were packed did suggest that the game could have been polished and spit shined a bit more.

This was even more evident when the packaging for the expansions looked nicer, and wasn’t standardized with, the original packaging.  The Enhanced Edition fixes all of this with a huge box that not only has room for the original game, it has dividers for all of the hero, villain, and environment decks, and counters to track buffs, debuffs, and hit points, and it’s got enough space left over to store the two expansions that have come out so far as well.

I was really pleased with the new box and the overall presentation, and at the same time I picked up the Enhanced Edition, I picked up Infernal Relics.

As you might be able to surmise, Infernal Relics has a specific theme.  While Rook City evoked the same feel as Batman, Daredevil, or Moon Knight might, Infernal Relics is aimed at the kind of action you would see as Doctor Strange or Doctor Fate.  Magic folk, gods, demons, and alternate dimensions of weirdness abound.

Just for fun, the three of us playing the other night took two band new characters and played against a new villain in a new environment.  We played Nightmist, the Argent Adept, and Mister Fixer against the Ennead in the Realm of Discord.

I was pretty lost with Nightmist for a while, since a lot of her abilities have to do with discarding cards, taking damage from some cards while healing from others.  Unfortunately, we kept getting cards drawn on us that utterly eliminated my hand, which kept me from doing much of anything with her.

Argent Adept and Mister Fixer had a better run of it, and ironically things really opened up when Nightmist went down and I could just use her incapacitated options on my turn.  While Argent Adept and Mister Fixer were in the low single digits, Agent Adept managed to get a few heals and buffs on Mister Fixer and we took out the last of the Ennead to show up.

What made the situation more interesting is that the environment was actually helping us quite a bit, because there were several effects that were targeting the second highest or the top X hit point characters, and with the Ennead being a team of villains, they took more of the brunt of that than a single villain would have.

All and all, it was different, but still the same kind of fun that I have expected from the game up until now.  I’m looking forward to getting back into playing this on a more regular basis, but I’m also planning on hanging up the more complicated heroes for a while, at least until we get more than three people playing.