On Monday we showed you a few Kickstarters we have our sights set upon but it’s also important to look back at incredible board games that our group plays regularly. Today, gentle reader, I’m going to reveal to you two card games that our gaming group has played a few times. And by “a few” I in fact mean several hundred. We play these games all the time.
Sentinels of the Multiverse
A game that began as a Kickstarter and has become something truly beautiful. Like a caterpillar that turned into a majestic and pristine cheetah. I’m not a biologist. Sentinels of the Multiverse is a cooperative card game for 2-5 players. Each player takes the role and deck of a superhero set in the Sentinels universe. These heroes are comic book archetypes that heavily reference other comic books, television programs, movies, science, etc. For example, it has the fastest woman in the world, a lesbian scientist who regularly references Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother. I don’t know why more games don’t have one of those.
Players use their decks to build their superhero with equipment and powers, all the while contending with a unique villain and a unique environment. The villains are also archetypes that want to power-murder the heroes and they play themselves, following strict rules for when they draw cards and use their murder-powers.. The environments range from a Mars base to Atlantis to an interdimensional prison and they also want to power-murder the heroes but sometimes also the villains.The environments are what I would call “neutral.”
When we first got this game we played it a few times and it was alright. Then we started getting expansions and we started to hone our strategies for each heroes deck. This game got deep real fast. We play it all the time. We buy every expansion that comes out. We have favorite heroes. We can quote the flavor text on a lot of their cards.
Don’t let my dull description and lack of enthusiasm fool we: WE LOVE THIS FREAKING GAME!!! They have since posted online comics tying into the game, they regularly have new Kickstarters to add expansions on, and there is always a hero you haven’t played and a villain you haven’t fought.
I would give this game a rating of: Buy it. Play it. Buy the expansions. Play them.
Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer
This game is a personal deck builder. By that I mean that each player begins with the same 10 cards and use those cards to buy new cards or destroy monster cards in order to acquire points. It sounds simple enough and it doesn’t get much more complicated than that. You can play in about an hour with 2 people and each person you add on adds about 10-15 minutes of game time. You really shouldn’t play with more than 4.
The theme of this game appears to be some soft or pre-apocalyptic fantasy world where you are helping four factions (Enlightened, Void, Lifebound, and Mechana) to … do something. I have to be honest I really don’t understand what’s going on in this game I just know I have to beat other players because they’re bad and dumb and I want all the points and I hate Zugg’s player and his Enlightened decks.
That got away from me. Allow me to explain. Each deck has a specific flavor that lets it do things better than another deck. Void gives you a lot of monster-slaying power and lets you banish cards from your deck in order to cut out some of those 10 beginner cards that are less valuable than the other cards, Lifebound gives you plenty of purchasing power, Mechana allows you to more easily buy more Mechana cards which are worth the most out of any other deck at the end of the game, and Enlightened lets you draw more cards each turn. Zugg, I may have mentioned Zugg before, regularly builds Enlightened decks that let him cycle through his entire deck - buying new cards and slaying monsters all the while - several times before he grows bored with his omnipotence and takes pity on the other players. I’m not bitter. I win sometimes. Shut up.
This is another one of those games that we started playing slowly and then about a week later we played it all the damn time. We play it at game nights. We play it when we’re bored for an hour. We play it half an hour before we need to be places and we can’t just stop mid game that’s crazy talk we can be a few hours late it’s cool.
I would give this game a rating of: Wait it has expansions? The game store is like right down the street let’s get them right now.
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