Given the rise of cooperative games in the last decade, it's a bit of a surprise that one involving superheroes took so long to arrive. This is really the perfect setting for this type of game, since the players will have no problems acting as a league of supers with a common aim - the defeat of foes on Earth and beyond. However, true believers should feel it was worth the wait.
First Appearance!
In Sentinels of the Multiverse, players portray supers from the pages of the Sentinel Comics line. A game consists of three to five heroes fighting against a superfoe in a specific environment. There are ten heroes, four villains and four environments, so the range of possible combinations is quite wide. Supers, minions, and many of the complications of each environment have a certain amount of hit points, and the game is a battle to knock the hazardous cards out before all the heroes suffer the same fate. Anyone familiar with Magic: the Gathering already understands the concept, and comic fans will comprehend it pretty quickly. To assist this, many traditional things from the shelves of your friendly neighborhood comic store are found in the game, from the ancient terrors of Insula Primalis to Citizen Dawn's legion of super-supremacists. We were only able to stop Omnitron's robotic rampage when the Visionary wrested psychic control of an assault drone, diverting its attack just as a kraken tore through the sunken halls of Atlantis!
D(evious) C(omponents)
Other than the rulebook, cards are the only contents inside the box - but there are over 500 of them. In fact, there is a deck for every hero, villain and environment that can be a part of a game. The backs are customized, so it is easy to separate them into the correct piles if they get mixed. Each deck is unique, although some decks contain cards with differing names and similar effects. Many decks have more than one card of a particular kind, to represent things that can (or should) appear each time a hero is played, like Absolute Zero's elemental modules. The cards are colorful and cleverly evocative, with flavor text in the form of quotes from various issues of Sentinel comics. The art can be a bit cartoonish in places, but like The Incredibles, it's a well-done homage to the source material.
Heroes and villains have special flippable cards, which allow two states for these characters during the course of a game. A hero who becomes incapacitated in play gets a new list of powers, which keeps their players involved in a game (this represents the increased desperation of the survivors). Villains acquire different powers and immunities when their cards are switched as well. Sometimes this is a matter of turn progression, but more often this is a result of the heroes' efforts - for example, if Baron Blade's nefarious scheme is thwarted, he focuses on exacting revenge thereafter.
The rulebook reinforces the comic book theme, complete with short bios of the heroes and their enemies. A few more examples of some of the common setups would have been useful, but as the next section reveals, it does not take long to dive into a game.
Great Powers and Great Responsibility
The rules of play are exceedingly simple. One round of play is composed of the villain's turn, each hero's turn, and the environment's turn. The villain and environment turns are usually just the play of one card from the deck, and resolution of any permanents that were already in play (including the villain's own card). These cards' instructions are self-explanatory and function with little conflict. For example, if a card damages the hero with the highest hit points, and two heroes are tied, the players decide who takes the hit.
On each hero's turn, a player may play a card, use a power, and draw a card. Many cards have effects which resolve at the beginning or end of a turn as well, so there are corresponding start-of-turn and end-of-turn phases in each turn. The decks contain a mix of one-shot actions that take place before being discarded, and permanent cards that linger. Many of the latter provide new powers that can be used in the middle phase of a turn. Heroes given the chance to use multiple powers in a turn cannot repeat the same power unless they have two identical cards granting it (to prevent overkill, many duplicate cards are limited to having only one copy in play - so Ra can only wield one staff of arcane power).
The genius of card games is that simple setups become complex when cards start interacting with each other. This is the case with Sentinels of the Multiverse as well. The combination of cards in play - either associated with one hero or in synergy with everything on the table - makes each game interesting and unique. Once a game is in full swing, players will have many choices of things to and situations to address, but never too many to handle. Some characters are defined elegantly by the mechanics as well: the speedster Tachyon draws and plays more cards than anyone, for example, and many of her best powers are strengthened by the amount or cards in her trash. Likewise, Grand Warlord Voss conquers the Earth once he has ten alien minions in play.
(Back) Issues
No superhero is without an Achilles Heel, and Sentinels of the Multiverse has its weaknesses, too. Perhaps the greatest is that the game is optimized for four players. Since the villain acts at the same rate of the heroes, two- and three-hero games were struggles, while our five-hero games were universally victories. A two-player game almost demands that each player take two heroes. The random factor of cards means that some games are clearly over once the dust settles on the first turn.
The plethora of cards and combinations means there can be a lot of modifiers to keep track of, too. Damage from a villain may get increased by one of her cards, then reduced by another hero's, only to go back up because the combatants are nemeses! It is easy to miss a point here and there, and can take a long time to figure out exactly how much damage is dealt in some turns. In a lot of cases a single point would have meant the difference between standing and falling (this only becomes more annoying when noticed a turn too late). Likewise, some of the cards and mechanical effects were a little clunky when they ran into, or required, other cards to work. The occasional poorly worded card exacerbated this problem.
With so many characters on the table, monitoring the rise and fall of hit points was a chore, and there is no support for this. As the villains start with up to 90 hp, and the heroes average about 30, dice or paper are virtual necessities. Finally, while one hero's actions might assist another's, there is very little to do when it is not your turn beyond discussing plans.
The Thrilling Conclusion
Ultimately, anyone who has enjoyed comics cannot help but marvel at the touches which make this game shine. My favorites are the pictures of incapacitated heroes, from the armored Bunker cracked like an eggshell to the epitaph on the gravestone of the Wraith. The quotations and series titles in the flavor texts of cards really paint a picture of an established universe that reinforce the other tropes in the game. We sounded like a super team when planning tactics, and the moments in which we figured out how a combo would finish off the bad guy were straight out of the pages of a double-sized spectacular.
