Gambler's addiction

How do the slots hook you? Every now and then you get a big pay out, so it feels like if you just keep playing, you'll get another one soon.

How does Sentinels hook you? What makes me keep wanting to play, even in seemingly impossible situations? Sometimes you find a way out.

Playing The Chairman, five HP left on three of my original four heroes. End of Days saves me from a Prison Break, but leaves me with no equipment to face a 20+ HP Chairman and 10+ HP Operative.

Work on the Operative. On hero turn three Fanatic gets Operative down to 2 HP, then draws Wrathful Retribution. On hero turn four, incapacitated Wraith lets Fanatic play WR, one-shoting The Chairman. The environment takes out the Operative. Heroes win! DID NOT SEE THAT COMING.

Awesome!  Nice work!

I've had similar experiences where I thought all was lost but somehow managed a victory.    Due to those cases, I have a hard time quitting on a game that looks hopeless. 

I think this is one of the things that separates out more experienced players. Beginning players will tend to want to give up when it looks hopeless, but experienced players know that victories like Expatriette finishing off The Matriarch while on her last HP can happen.

Another big aspect of this is whether you're playing alone or with people in person.  It's a lot more commitment to continuing a slow game where half of the people playing don't get to do anything but choose an incapacitated power on their turn.

Good point.

So the other day I was playing a solo game - Argent Adept, Expatriette, Ra, and Dark Visionary vs. Apostate in the Tomb of Osiris.

The game got to a point where there were three mummies, some scarabs, and two traps out, and Apostate had a relic out that would bring four demons from the trash. Further, both Argent Adept and Expatriette were knocked out on the same turn and Ra and Visionary were down to 3 HP each, so I exited the game due to frustration with the situation. Also, Expatriette saw exactly one firearm card, and it came out right before she was defeated. She did deal some damage because Argent Adept kept cycling her RPG out of the trash, but for the most part she was not doing well.

A couple days later, I loaded the game back up, and I decide to finish the game. At this point, I notice Ra has Scorched Earth, with six environment cards out. So I played that, killed the relic, killed the four demons the relic put into play, badly damaged one of the mummies, and killed the other two mummies and the scarabs. Visionary went into her cocoon, the spike trap killed the last mummy, the other trap was removed by discarding six cards, and Apostate hit Visionary for no damage.

On the next round, Argent Adept gives Ra a power use, then Expatriette gives Ra a power use, and then Ra plays some card that does a ton of damage and uses pyre a third time and Apostate is out. Yay. :)

I actually JUST did this sort of thing. I was working on getting my Mr. Fixer unlock on Steam (have all the unlocks on iPad already). So I am fighting Chairman in Rook City and I've got on my team (in order) Grandpa Legacy, Argent Adept, SS Tachyon, Mr. Fixer.

To get the achievement, I purposefully suck, and Mr. Fixer and SS Tachyon die horrible deaths. SS Tachyon has given AA most of his deck, though, in play. Legacy also has a huge swath of his stuff out. I have the achievement, and now, AA is at 6 HP and Legacy is at 1 and The Chairman is at 6 HP. I am about to quit the game when it occurs to me: "...can I win this? I just have to take down 6 HP!"

Welp, I do that, and the Chairman is down! But the game isn't over, because I've never taken down Chairman first and didn't even stop to realize I needed to K.O. him AND the Operative. Operative is at full health-- I've ignored her the whole game. However, now, Legacy is at 4 HP and AA is at 11 HP, from both of them doing healing tricks. Chairman's (now Operative's) deck then shuffles, and he has no trash. I take a gasp-- I might be able to do this! So slowly, turn by turn, I manage to get AA back to full and Legacy to half, while slowly working down the Operative by using Legacy to block incoming damage from sources, immunizing Legacy to melee, and using Legacy to stop villain deck play (and force-returning both cards to the top of Legacy's deck and force-drawing them via AA and Incap SST and incap Mr. Fixer). It took nearly forty-five minutes to duo down Operative, but it happened.

Afterwards, I just sort of sat back stunned I'd won a game that I'd written off not once, but twice.

You were lucky the Chairman didn't come back out–he gets shuffled into the villain deck, and can come out again. (Or at least, I'm pretty sure he's supposed to do that. I'm not sure if the electronic version implements it.)

The video game does implement it and the steam forums has a section about it in this post about interactions that may seem like a bug http://steamcommunity.com/app/337150/discussions/0/611701360827682901/ 

I'm not THAT lucky. Because of deck manipulation with Argent Adept letting Old Legacy keep shutting down the villain deck, the villain deck played twice total, ever (well, once I started trying to win-- which was when Chairman died.)

Well done.

I read this thread, and I was thinking to myself, "By this point, I can tell pretty well if a game is winnable." Turns out I have more to learn.

I loaded up a game with random heroes against the Ennead on Mars, and came up with Dark Watch Nightmist, Bunker, Expatriette, Visionary, and Unity. This should be tough, but doable. I burned down Set and whittled down others of the original five villains.

Then I got the hammer dropped on me. The environment and the Ennead tore apart my team, leaving only a critically wounded Expatriette and Nightmist, who had been healing herself. Three more of the Ennead had come out, leaving me facing four fully-healed villains and two moderately injured ones who were healing at an alarming rate. I closed up my tablet, thinking "Forget this!"

But I came back later. I had to know how it would end! A Meteor Storm gave me some breathing room, letting me build up cards and HP before Desert's Wrath took that away. Expatriette went down fighting, putting a dent in the villains' HP before succumbing. Now I had only DW Nightmist, who was cowering in Mist Form and trying to build up her hand (Osiris and Tefnut's incap were making that difficult).

So here's the situation: Set, Shu, Tefnut, and Nephthys were down. Atum, Geb, Isis, Nuit, and Osiris were out, all in good shape (15+ HP). Nightmist had managed to get her Amulet of the Elder Gods out, and she had around 20 HP. The environment deck was empty; Maintainance Level, Fire in the Biosphere, and two Oxygen Leaks were out.

Are you seeing where I'm going with this? My team destroyed Maintainence Level and Fire in the Biosphere, leaving two Oxygen Leaks and 13 cards in the environment trash. Nightmist deflected the first Leak onto Nuit, and the rest...

...it was glorious.

Edit: I imagine Nightmist luring the five gods into an airlock, then smiling and waving at them through the glass before punching the button and ejecting them into the void. Mm.

I have NEVER implimented that rule. It's ridiculous in my opinion. He's a villain character card, and as far as I know no VCC ever gets shuffled into the deck.

Never implimented this in the real game, and I never will.

I won't do it playing the card game especially with oversized villain cards but I know it can happen in the video game.  Though it hasn't been an issue for me since I normally try to take out the Operative first.  

Think of it this way.

How many times have the heroes taken down the Kingpin or Luthor, only for him to get back out of jail relatively quickly, with his organization still intact and ready to menace the heroes?

It doesn't say to remove him from the game or anything when you beat him (if the Operative is still out), unlike, say, Omnitron, so yeah, he would shuffle back in as there is no instruction to do anything else with him.

There are no rules on how to handle a villain character card in the main rulebook beyond the standard "When the villain is defeated the game is over with a hero victory", as such unlike Hero Character cards (which have the flip function in the rules, replacing normal destruction rules), if a villain character card is destroyed and a card is preventing a hero win, and no card in play specifies what to do with the character card (or the game like in the case of The Dreamer) the card winds up going into the villains trash like every other villain card.

It's impossible to remove The Chairman from the game, even in The Final Wasteland, as the only card that would allow him to be removed from the game is an environment card and specifies that he'd have to be destroyed by an Environment Target, since the Chairman is immune to Environment Damage he can't be removed from the game.

End result, official ruling is that the Chairman can get reshuffled back into the deck, if you're using the oversized villains I recomend keeping his small character card around for this eventuality, or just use a card from a deck not in play to represent him.

Of course, as with all the official rulings you're free to play as you please and completely ignore everything written above.  But I thought I'd clarify why The Chairman is an exception to the normal villain character card rules.