Sentinels of the Multiverse

This one lives or dies on who’s at the table with you, more than almost any cooperative game I own. When it’s working, there’s a nice back-and-forth, well I can do this, so can you do that, or maybe I should play this first, everyone contributing to the plan without anyone dictating it. When it’s not working, the smartest person at the table just tells everyone what to do and the rest of us are executing someone else’s turn, which is the multiplayer-solitaire problem in its purest form and it kills the game dead.

The hero variety is genuinely great, dozens of heroes with wildly different power sets, and pairing the right villain against the right team composition is where the real strategy lives. I like that the villain deck acts almost like a puzzle you’re solving collectively rather than an opponent bluffing against you. When Marcus brings this we usually have a house rule, no telling anyone else what to play, only what information you have, and it’s made a real difference.

App integration doesn’t apply here, it’s a pure card game, no digital layer, which I actually appreciate given how I feel about companion apps generally. Setup and teardown is reasonably quick once you know your hero deck, and it travels fine. It’s not a game I’d rate above three without that house rule though, the quarterbacking problem is real enough that I’d hesitate recommending it to a group that already has one dominant strategist, because that group will just watch that one person play a solitaire game while the rest of us hand them cards.