Author’s Note: Sorry in advance mobile users. This is going to be an image heavy post. Further apologies for any quality issues from my phone’s camera.
Today was a good day – after several days of playing cat and mouse with the FedEx delivery driver, I got my Kickstarter copy of the Sentinels of the Multiverse Definitive Edition from Greater Than Games. When I first saw this Kickstarter I was a little bit hesitant – after all, I had put a lot of money into the original game, buying all of the major expansions and most of the individual mini-expansions as well (most of them twice over after I lost access to the originals), and now they wanted me to buy another version of the game? But, the longer I thought about it and read the reasons behind the changes and saw some of what they were bringing to the table, the more I thought “you’ll kick yourself if you don’t get into this at the ground level.” And after getting my copy and tearing into it this evening, I’m really glad I did.
When they say “Definitive Edition” what they mean is they are taking the lessons they have learned since first releasing the game over 10 years ago and using them to create the best version of the game they could, the version they wanted to release from the beginning. Streamlined and expanded rules, clearer and cleaner text, and consistent art throughout their releases is their stated goal going forward and at least from this release, they’ve delivered. The new core box set includes twelve heroes including members of The Freedom Five (and Unity) as well as the six members of the Prime Wardens plus a variant “first appearance” card for each of them, six villains (but keep reading for more on that), and six environment decks. One of the biggest things I noticed immediately was a complete overhaul of the complexity and difficulty numbers for both heroes and villains. Whereas hero decks were rated between a 1 and 3 in terms of complexity and villain decks from a 1 to 4 in terms of difficulty, both of them are now rated on a scale of 1 to 10, allowing for more granularity between decks, especially as more sets get released in the future. Nearly every complexity is represented in this release on the heroes side, from Ra’s complexity 1 deck to the Argent Adept’s complexity of 10. Furthermore, the environment decks are now rated in terms of their overall level of “peril” helping players further refine the overall difficulty and challenge of their individual play experience.
Cards that have effects that take place or trigger during certain parts of a turn are now better called out on the individual cards. A number of new keywords and rule terms have been added into the cards such as the ability to “bury” a card at the bottom of a deck or “salvage” an item from a discard pile. Furthermore, certain key terms within decks have been completely erased from the game – for example, no longer does Tachyon have to worry about counting “burst” cards in her trash pile. I’ve only had a chance to play with a few of the decks so far, but I’m really excited to dig into the rest of them and see what makes them tick, and maybe even break them down here over the coming months. Below are several side-by-side shots of some cards from The Wraith and Legacy’s deck as they appear in the Definitive Edition versus the original releases so you can see the changes in art and even some of the rules changes.
The cards themselves are nice and solid cardstock and the art direction is absolutely fantastic. They’ve really dialed in on the “silver age style” that the game draws so much of its inspiration from and the new cards have been a joy to look at. Furthermore, the new card dividers have a very nice decklist on the back as well as a quick reference to their complexity or difficulty. And no longer do we have multiple villain cards – instead everything is displayed on a 5 1/8 x 3 1/2 inch card that contains all the setup and rules for running that villain. Likewise, the heroes now boast slightly oversized 4 7/8 x 2 3/4 inch cards to help set them apart from the rest of the deck. And finally, the environment cards are printed in landscape instead of portrait to help differentiate them at a glance. Again, you can see the differences in both the hero cards and villain cards between the definitive edition and the original release.
They’ve even added something of a “campaign mode” to the base game through “events” and “critical events” which are major events and story arcs that come from the pages of the comic universe that Greater Than Games has created over the last decade. By defeating these villains with new challenges and twists involved. Successfully completing the event allows the heroes to add it to their “collection,” giving them powerful abilities that they can use in future events. More challenging events will allow the heroes to bring more of their collection to the game to assist them. And “critical events” are even more difficult scenarios to really challenge veteran players. The game includes 6 events and 6 critical events, each of them using one of the included villain decks. And while each of these events suggests certain heroes and environments be present in the game, they can be taken on by any group of heroes in any environment. I’m excited to see where they continue to take and evolve this idea in future releases.
At the end of the day, the game plays exactly as you remember, just maybe a bit more smoothly with these new and clarified rules. This is a great evolution for those who are familiar with the previous release. But more importantly, this is a perfect jumping on point for people brand new to the game. They’ve already teased their next release, likely titled Rook City Renegades likely coming to Kickstarter later this year featuring the silhouettes of Setback and Expatriette. (And the purple spray paint that marks the title makes me think we might see another fan favorite, even though he’s not based in Rook City – fingers crossed.)
If you’re interested in picking up this game as soon as possible (and I hope you are), you should still be preorder it from the Kickstarter page.
Ben Erickson
