It has been a long, long time since I last wrote about this game, so long indeed that the post was on my old blog. I only revisited this because I was curious about the video game adaptations of some of the board games I already know and so bought the Humble Bundle of board games. It also happened to include this mini-pack for Sentinels of the Multiverse and I didn’t want it to go to waste.
It’s been so long that I had to essentially relearn the game and I still have no idea how to play the advanced heroes like Absolute Zero. As I originally wrote however this isn’t a difficult game to learn and despite the advertising blurb for this pack, I don’t see how it adds any truly new mechanics. This pack includes two heroes, four villains and two environments. I think the environments are supposed to add the new mechanics but the Block just has its guards and prisoners mostly interact with each other while Time Cataclysm adds a lot of chaotic weird effects.
The two new heroes are Omnitron X and Chrono Ranger. The former is underwhelming at first but he can put a massive number of components into play and they all stack. As usual all these go away when the villain pulls out a board clearing card. I prefer playing Chrono Ranger who seems like he does piddly damage at first until he deploys his Bounties, which are ongoing cards that are played on enemies. Naturally these can get wiped from the board as well but he has many cards to retrieve Bounties from the trash or from the deck so it’s easy to rebuild momentum.
The best part of this pack however are the four villains. I remember writing about how the villains in the base game seemed pretty easy to beat. Kismet here seem pretty easy and La Capitan is a decent challenge. However I found both The Dreamer and Iron Legacy to be extremely difficult. The Dreamer requires you to beat her minions without doing any damage to her while Iron Legacy at all but is instead a super powerful single character. You can’t just throw any hero team at them and expect a victory as you will definitely need a strategy. The latter in fact is so powerful that with the right card combo he can reduce your heroes by almost half their hit points before they even take a single action. Having a poor starting hand of cards is almost enough to make a victory against Iron Legacy impossible.
Finally some time since I last played the game they’ve updated it so that you can instantly unlock card variants without having to go through what is a very convoluted process. This vastly increases the diversity of hero cards and therefore the richness of the strategies possible. Plus they’ve also added Steam achievement though many of them are really hard to get. Overall it’s a nice addition to a solid game but I still don’t like it enough to buy more card packs. I can see it being a lot of fun to play in person with friends however.