Send in the Clones

Regrettably, this is no tie-in to the derided Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Up the Long Ladder.” Rather, the first weekly one-shot of Sentinels of the Multiverse post Vengeance release features the team villain mode, in which Baron Blades brings some allies, Proletariat and Fright Train, to help take down America’s Youngest Legacy, the Southwest Sentinels and Setback.

All three hero decks in this one-shot feature HP recovery, often as a rider on dealing some damage or some other useful feature, which is often helpful, especially for the Sentinels, since they’re a team of lower HP heroes.

The advice going into this one was to focus on hitting Fright Train first. Proletariat injures himself depending on the number of clones in play, so he did more to remove himself from the game than anyone else, though the Idealist lent some psychic damage to speed things along. Destroying Genetically Fused Physique with Setback’s “Whoops! Sorry!” means Blade starts injuring himself as well, and no one’s doing very large instances of damage, so Superhuman Durability seemed like a decent candidate to sacrifice.

Unlocking Dark Watch: Setback

The Dark Watch: Setback variant identity in Sentinels of the Multiverse has one of the more challenging unlock conditions: defeat the Chairman in Rook City with Setback and the rest of the Dark Watch team as their variant selves: Nightmist, Mister Fixer and Expatriette. This is a challenging setup, top to bottom.^[1][2] Thus, I turned to cheese.

This is a challenging setup, top to bottom. Thus, I turned to cheese.

Now in fairness, I slogged through a lot of total failures before turning to cheese. Most of the initial batch of games, both the Chairman and his flunky, the Operative, stayed at or had been restored to full health. I think I now hate the Fence more than I do any other of the Chairman’s underbosses. But after the unmitigated suffering of a team line-up where the heavy hitter keeps destroying the equipment and ongoings that makes the other heroes effective, I turned to the internet and came upon the Friendly Fire/Dual Crowbars combo.

In short, Friendly Fire allows Setback to be dealt 2 damage anytime a hero target would deal damage. Mister Fixer’s Dual Crowbars allow him to damage a second target any time he would deal damage. So Mister Fixer hits a target, Friendly Fire allows him to hit Setback, Dual Crowbars allows a new instance of damage to split off Fixer hitting Setback, then Friendly Fire allows Fixer to hit Setback again because he just dealt damage to a target, and so on and so on until Setback is incapacitated from getting whacked on the head with a crowbar.

In the context of this particular match-up, you are essentially sacrificing Setback to take the Operative out of the game in the first turn. And that is an excellent trade. Taking out the Operative means that underbosses enter play more slowly and destroying villain targets doesn’t incur retributive damage. And incapacitated Setback gives you half a regular hero turn with a card play or power use by someone who is, frankly, probably going to be more useful than he was, so . . .

So I shifted gears from “let’s fail fast repeatedly and figure out what worked at all” to restarting the game repeatedly until Setback and Fixer had the two key cards in hand. Aside from the amount of clicking between viable setups, I made more progress than before, but it still needed tweaking. Setback should lead the team, for instance, to allow Fixer to destroy the Operative on the first round. Others have suggested Fixer should go last, to increase the chances of playing a piece of fodder for his Bitter Strike from Nightmist or Expatriette.

It can all still come down to the flop, though. The final run through led off with the Contract coming out and an unbelievable string of Falling Statuary. Once the Operative was removed, there were, amazingly, some do-nothing turns waiting for the Chairman to flip as underbosses trickled into play and were sent to the trash. Several Perfect Human Specimen plays while the Chairman was at full HP didn’t bother me at all.

Once the Chairman flipped, his retaliatory damage took out Mister Fixer in a couple hits. I lucked out with Nightmist^[3] and got an Amulet of the Elder Gods out just in time for the Chairman to hit her, which she redirected to him with the amulet, causing the Chairman to hit himself in response to hitting himself. That was pretty gratifying. Expatriette did the final bit of damage on Setback’s turn, so everyone got to get their licks in by the end.

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^[1] Note that the weekly one-shot Ridiculous Challenge Time, which wrecked a number of mint streaks, pitted Dark Watch Fixer, Nightmist and Expatriette against the Chairman.

^[2] And why I put this one off, much like Price of Freedom of Wraith and Ra, Horus of Two Horizons. The second being one achievement I still have to earn.

^[3] I lucked out twice, in fact, because an early Mists of Time/Mist-Fueled Recovery one-two put Nightmist back at full health and ready to take the “highest HP” punches while everyone else hovered at the brink of single digits.

Arkham Horror LCG: The Devourer Below

Wendy finds herself confronted by two Deep Ones, by way of Monsterpocalypse figures.

For the third and final scenario of the Night of the Zealot introductory campaign for Arkham Horror: The Card Game, we found ourselves short one plucky librarian, owing to the whims of the weather. So Ray, Tom and I decided we’d call this a practice run and see what happened before playing “for real” when Carlo could join us.

In short and without getting spoilery, we got housed. We had one decent shot at achieving anything resembling a victory, but the path to that pyrrhic, ethically ambiguous victory was clogged with extraneous monsters and there was no way to clear it.

The general consensus seems to be the introductory scenarios are highly variable. Some people report walking through them without breaking a sweat. Others, like I and my friends, get walloped every time and seemingly without any ability to fight back. I imagine we’re just not playing very efficiently and that people who are more used to this style of cooperative card game — Arkham reportedly shares as much DNA with Lord of the Rings: The Card Game as it does with Netrunner, if not more — are more used to the deck design and play style that gets stuff done in spite of the endless series of obstacles the game throws up.

Umordhorth, the Devourer Below, as rendered in a Monsterpocalypse figure, is unimpressed by investigators who futilely scrabble to throw tasty morsels in its maw.

Also, Tom wanted me to talk more about what he did during the game, so I guess I’ll mention that Skids got trapped in the woods and spent the remainder of the game, which was four or more turns, completely unable to get out of that location or contribute to the nonsense happening just one space over.

Furthermore, during setup for the game Tom couldn’t find his tokens — they were hidden under a Terry Pratchett novel — so after tearing his basement apart, we mocked up a chaos deck with a stack of playing cards.

BPRD: The Celestial Legion

Sifting through more stuff in the wake of purging empty boxes, I came across a trove of materials from convention games I’ve run over the years: several Ghostbusters scenarios from Carnages past, Unknown Armies‘ archetypal Jailbreak, and this particular gem, The Celestial Legion. It’s a Hellboy/B.P.R.D. adventure I wrote back when I was getting around to more conventions in New England than Carnage. Forgive me, purists, because it was written using mainly Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy film as inspiration, because that was my first real experience with the character. Only in the case of my conception of the B.P.R.D, most of the team members are weirdos like Sparky here — the Russian werebear assassin, the psychic supermodel — plus the much put-upon token normal agent, whose most-used piece of gear was the clicker gadget on his belt to track the collateral damage tally.

The sharp-eyed may note that the player materials I make are heavily patterned after the sample characters in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel role-playing games: short bio, some notes to guide how the character might act and look at things, and a full character sheet on another page. In this case, it was because I ran the game using Cinematic Unisystem and may have borrowed more than a few pieces of art from the sample character spreads for character portraits. (Sparky’s particular portrait is a work called Creacion del golem by Gabos on DeviantArt.com.)

I still feel proud of The Celestial Legion for being one of the more robustly documented adventures I’ve written, but I think the second and third acts need work. As is my bad habit, I came up with a great concept, detailed how it all kicks off and then the detailing and robustness of what might happen trails off as the narrative progresses. The more I think about it now, the more I realize I can’t tell you what the climax of the adventure is, or how it pays off the prior scenes.

Arkham Horror LCG: The Midnight Masks

Playing with old school Arkham Horror standees and fancy tokens from Stonemaier Games, courtesy Carlo.

Picking up after playing through The Gathering, Ray joined to make the group a quartet. Ray played Wendy, while Carlo, Tom and I kept Daisy, Skids and Agnes, respectively.

This was not an easy scenario. Three players handled The Gathering really well — way better than my two player attempts previously — but we struggled to get any traction with Midnight Masks. Every other encounter card took away the resource we had to accumulate to advance to victory. Carlo thought it was just a rough draw, but I’m inclined to think it’s a deliberately tough scenario, with the intent that the players do the best they can and get out. Possibly it’s to teach players that knowing when to resign is important in campaign play like this. It’s certainly in keeping with the themes of Lovecraftian stories and role-playing. Most anecdotes about doing well in a Call of Cthulhu scenario — for relative values of well — end with “and then the survivors ran.”

Second time out with Agnes, I found her even more perplexing. She’s not a strong investigator, but that’s what I found myself doing. In retrospect, I should have looked more closely at her spells, as they’re more about dealing with enemies and interfering with the encounter deck.

Next time we play, I’ll keep that in mind as discover whether what we uncovered during “The Midnight Masks” will be enough to help us through the final chapter of this Arkham Horror mini-campaign.