We’ve played a good number of Renegades games by now, cycling through all the villains, environments, heroes, as well as many of the variants and combos with core set heroes. Here are some more organized thoughts.
I feel like with Renegades, the Definitive Edition really hit its stride. We weren’t really playing the Core Set any more, after going through all the villains vanilla and then in each event. But with the injection of new stuff from Renegades, we’ve been playing games almost every night and haven’t even touched the events yet.
Several of the heroes are a total blast to play.
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Expatriette sets up quickly and gets in the fight, her ammo actually feels like you’re getting special effects, and she’s got great team leader abilities. I love her plans. I mowed down the entire Organization twice in a game. And her Dark Watch variant is simply fantastic. About the only bad thing I have to say about her is that she’s got some real walls of text.
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Setback is everything he should be. It’s so much fun. He’s got some of the most powerful cards to just make targets disappear (what Relic, Gloomweaver?), but of course, you can’t always get them to work. And the cards themselves are very silly.
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Mister Fixer’s deck is clearly geared toward encouraging players to swap out tools and styles. I’ve never really gotten that to work – most games aren’t long enough and he’s been plenty useful with whatever he has – but it feels very versatile. The Black Fist variant in particular is fun.
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Nightmist I have played the least. She takes a lot of hand management and planning ahead, really emphasizing the symbol and how to control it.
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Harpy also takes a lot of control and planning, and has some risk of collateral damage. I haven’t yet played a game where I have a hand full of birds and just put on the mask, but that seems fun. Someday.
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Alpha! The prior hero she’s closest to is Benchmark, and I’m glad we have that sort of tableau-programming available to us now. She’s got a huge amount of damage available, but some of it…might be collateral. I really enjoyed the balancing act that her Reporter Alpha variant created, focusing her more on her special effects and on maintaining control.
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Haunted Fanatic is so OP. Even if you have to spend every other turn re-summoning the Aegis, she still hits the thresholds on all her one-shots and her other powers and it’s so much damage. But in the games we’ve seen, she usually doesn’t have to keep summoning the Aegis anyway – villains target heroes with the highest health!
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Werewolf Haka is an underrated addition. It’s like he gets to summon time bombs whenever he wants, sometimes multiple at a time.
The villains are, on balance, great additions. They’ve also made some marked improvements.
- My least favorite are Plague Rat and Kismet. Plague Rat is just…uninteresting. He’s a largely unchanged single-target damage race. Kismet, though, is the most annoying villain out of this box. We played against her with Setback on the team, and she kind of…actively punished us for doing anything, especially if Setback was doing it. My guess is I will play against her exactly two more times (her events).
- Spite is interesting! He’s got a worthwhile mini-game that is sometimes optional, sometimes not; and you always have the option of hitting him. He doesn’t have all the stupid retaliation or environment negation that made him so terrible before. I’m interesting to play against him with Detective Wraith and Reporter Alpha.
- The Organization makes you do bookkeeping, and ran us out of tokens despite the new 1s, but overall does not feel as punishing as before and gives you ways to break its links. It’s a fun opponent if you want targets on the board.
- Gloomweaver got an upgrade, but we still beat him twice. I can see how he’d get out of hand though!
- I really enjoy the alternate victory condition on the Fey-Court, though getting enough cards in play to let you trigger it is a far from sure thing. But that kind of twist is the story of thing that makes me think differently about Sentinels, and I enjoy that a lot.
- The werewolves’ gimmick looks really cool, especially if Alpha or Werewolf Haka is around, but we didn’t get it to trigger. By the time Apex was lower health than another wolf (Alpha), he was also low enough that we finished him off that round. Still, I look forward to more crazy games against them.
- I was a little disappointed to find the Terrorform didn’t have much to it on its flip side. The access gimmick is good but mainly that villain was a “typical” punching baddie with minions.
I’m also pleased that the environments really seem to add “peril” for everybody and not just the heroes, just like in the core set.
Now that we have both the core set and Renegades, there is one thing I really, really wish they’d included here: more organizational stuff in the box. We, like many of you I’m sure, put the heroes in one box and the other decks in the other. But we also decided to get some foam board and make ourselves a two-layer insert to hold the tokens in the token box, without bags. This phenomenally reduced setup and teardown time, and is very convenient during play. It made enough of a difference that by now I’m surprised there weren’t any token-sorter inserts in the first place. The next project we’ll do is to make a little card-flipper/rolodex compartment to put all the heroes and their variants in one of the remaining open sections, and the villains and events in another. That will make picking our matchups faster and easier. In the future, it would be cool to have randomizer cards, too, like Dominion does, so we could shuffle a deck and pull villain, environment, and heroes if we want. We can also make that ourselves.
With Rook City Renegades, this really feels like the definitive edition. I only hope that in the second printing, they make the type a little larger and the to/by tokens different shapes.
Happened to check doorbell camera and saw the FedEx guy when I wasn’t expecting anything else. So just a happy surprise!
I’m going to have to think about how I might be able to create that character card storage option. 
It’s a great idea!