Sentinels of the Multiverse

I like the concept, but neither the style nor the mechanics were good enough for me.

If you love superheroes and games based around cards, this game is for you. It's a cooperative game where you and your friends (or you alone) are pitted against a computer run supervillain. Each hero has unique abilities and it's fun to try different combos versus the various bosses.

This is a pretty deep game with interesting but potentially deeply unbalanced gameplay. It's great fun if you're already familiar with the physical game, but if you go in blind there are ways to potentially win or lose before you even make a move, which can be unfun for some people. Understanding that your setup choices have a great deal of impact is necessary.

With my primary hobby being tabletop games, this game has gotten a lot of love in the board game space so I knew I would have to give it a shot someday. However, some of the good reviews of this game even say they enjoy that it's just dumb fun with little player agency. The part of the board gaming community that reviews this game poorly says the same thing, that the card you play is always obvious, giving you the illusion of player choice. That criticism is half right. Many characters excel at stacking ongoing effects, growing in power, and then unleashing big attacks. That is probably always going to be the optimal and correct way to play them. You still need to make choices on when you push damage onto what characters, when you can be greedy about discarding, healing, or if you can sacrifice damage this turn to build up to an increase of damage in future turns. BUT.....I would argue that even if you remove nearly all the player choice during the game. The most important player choices you can make take place before the game even begins. I rolled a random team of characters I liked during the Citizen boss that spawns an army and becomes immune if you kill all of them and got rolled. The next game I decided to deal with the army I should take AOE characters to wipe the army and hopefully not kill so many the boss becomes immune. There was a flaw to this plan as some of the members of her army make you target them and reduce all damage, making your tickle AOE damage do absolutely nothing. I did manage to strategize around that but then in the final moments accidentally did too much AOE damage and rendered the boss immune when she only had 3 hp remaining and lost. I adjusted my strategy and decide I'd take a group of heavy hitter single target characters to manage the shield characters quickly and press damage onto the boss while throwing up passive damage reduction so I could mostly ignore her minions. That strategy paid off and felt good resulting in a win, specifically because of something I cooked up by learning through trial and error. The next fight went pretty much the same where I fought a boss and lost, then came up with a new strat that I thought could handle his mechanics and decimated him. For that reason I recommend the game and will probably even pick up some DLC for even more team variety and bosses.

This game is not for me. I bought this years ago, finally got around to giving it a try. The only positive is the art style, otherwise, it's trash. It's one of those rogue-like style games where you have to fight against overpowered enemies and a garbage RNG system. I can't stand super hero games that don't let you feel like you are an actual hero.

This game is amazing and a wonderful digital version of the card game. Plus the company themselves are fantastic and doing a wonderful job of working with the original creators and collaborators to make it great. Look forward to Part II!