Wild Speculation about expansions 5 & 6

In Chris’ interview with Real Basement Dwellers, at approximately 1:05:33 he says they have 4 more expansions planned, 2 that are like Rook City (2 heroes, 2 environments, 4 villains) and 2 that are very different and change how you play the game. I figured we could start some wild speculation as to what “changing how you play the game” means. My first guesses out of the gate are (in no particular order):

1. Having someone play the villain deck in some fashion as opposed to automated
2. PvP in some manner
3. Some sort of deck-building element that gives you some ability to customize the cards in a hero’s deck

What are ya’ll’s ideas?

Maybe a handful of solo or two-person villains?

Didn’t he say in the podcast that opposing these two points is part of why they made Sentinels in the first place?

I agree. 1 & 2 are impossible.

One of the rewards for this Kickstarter is designing a card for a particular hero which will later on be put to use in a further expansion, right? Well, if one hero could potentially gain a card through that, increasing his potential maximum deck size, it would be assumed that every hero will get similar treatment. It’s possible the decks may become larger, or as Broccoli suggested, there may be plans to allow the players to slightly alter hero decks before a play session, out of fifty or so cards, craft a deck of forty.

Alternate/villainous versions of the heroes. Legacy and Techyon both have cards depicting red/black-costumed versions of themselves (you can clearly see nega-Lecagy’s chest logo on “Thokk!”, IIRC). The guy receiving Visionary’s “Suggestion” is probably an anti-Haka.

I do not believe that reward is for designing a card for an existing deck, but rather to design the text and rulings of a non-existant card, and the company will then take that card concept and have it as part of a new deck.

TheJayMan is correct about that pledge level.

Deckbuilding would be nice…however, it looks a bit difficult to implement since they would have to introduce more cards for each hero (14+ Legacy promo at least). And that would make the heroes more powerful without increasing the difficulty of the game, right? who would deckbuild for enemies?

Making enemies that can be handled with different amount of players seems nice (solo bosses, bosses for 2 players, or more than 5 maybe?). However, it sound a bit silly, since you have the H mechanic already in place doing something similar

Maybe they could add a campaign mode, or something like that…but I am at a loss of what they plan to do to change the game mechanics while keeping the same spirit

I seriously hope that one of the later expansions is styled on a Secret War/Infinite Crisis event, where the heroes have to lay siege to a mega-villain or numerous villains with a “Crisis” deck that plays out events that change the game radically - like an extreme version of an Environment deck.

I love the idea of 5-10 hero decks trying to take on numerous villains in an epic comic book style. Fighting of Voss’s fleet and getting blindsided by barron Blade mid fight sounds amazing.

So that’s my big hope

Big crisis would be fun… I was already thinking about villain teamups although another way to do it would be to have a card or deck that makes the villain considerably more powerful, a la infinity gauntlet.

It looks like expansions follow themes so let’s explore a few comic themes: cosmic (probably #3), pulp/war (maybe #4) and… left field… MANGA (maybe #5) for mecha, kamen/power ranger style heroes and villains.

The sets do follow comic genres, and so far we seem to have had:

1. Silver Age
2. Dark/Street
3. Mystical

Off the top of my head this leaves the follow possible genres to follow up with:

-Time Travel (Golden Age and Dark Future styles)
-Cosmic (aliens, and universe spanning troubles)
-Multiverse (Alternate Realities - It’s in the title and has never been touched on yet)
-Meta Event (The big finish, it should draw everything together and radicaly change the game)

When Christopher says he has four expansions planned, is it a set four or at least four…?

Could they possibly be introducing sidekicks with one of the future expansions? We already know that one of the new villains (The Ennead) will start with multiple villain character cards in play. Why not the heroes? Maybe the sidekicks even have their own decks? Not sure how that would be different from just playing two heroes at once, but I’ve been impressed with their ingenuity so far.

I believe he did say they have four more expansions planned. Though I hope they decide to make more, because you can never have too many heroes and villians!

He said in one of the podcasts that they already have enough ideas for four more expansions. He implied that they would keep going as long as they kept getting new ideas. They would stop if they found that all they could think of was rehashing the old ideas.

Thank you Adam and Jayman for correcting me on that. I never assumed that ‘design a card for a hero, villain, or environment’ would ONLY mean a yet-to-be-created hero, villain, or environment. The whole thing makes more sense, now.

I feel as we keep going with the game and expansions, we will naturally move up from Silver Age to Golden Age, etc.

Maybe one of those “change the game” expansions will be a PvP sort of thing, but more specifically, we’ll be able to play as those look-alike heroes we’ve been so curious about. As for actual expansions, I’m thinking (hoping) one of those will be a sort of “final bosses” expansion, where all of the villains are incredibly powerful, and the thing that “changes the game” might be something like using more than five heroes to stand a chance against these mega-villains.

As awesome as final boss type thing would be, I can speak from experience in saying that having too many players/turns in a single round of gameplay can really kill the placing for games like this. I’ve even seen it in some instances with five heroes, and having more than that could definitely slow things down for people who are not taking their turn.

True. Five players/heroes seems like a good maximum number to stick with. In that case, I hope the final bosses are just on “insanity” mode, no matter how many heroes you have.

For ways to shake up the game, I thought of a few comic appropriate things:

-Villains teaming up for a super team (some mechanic where they interfere with each other possibly?)
-Heroes fighting heroes (or possibly dopplegangers)

I think I would rather see the >G team come up with a brand new game that had PvP than a SotM expansion for PvP. SotM is so great because it’s cooperative, besides Plague Rat already has a mechanic wherein the heros are forced to hurt each other (which is neat!).

Christopher can confirm that I not-so-secretly love things like this happening in games. In our D&D campaign, my character was possessed a few times to great effect. ;D

What would be cool is if they had an expansion that only had one villain, but that villain was so friggin big that the heroes have to defeat different parts of him. So you would still have 4 villain cards, but they are the same villain just a different section of him.

This succession seems most plausible to me. I’ve read comics since I’ve been able to read and these all resonate pretty clearly.
The closest thing we’ve got to a Time Traveler is Tachyon’s Barry-Allan-esque super speed.

Visionary is from the future.

A character named Chrono-Ranger is quoted on Plague Rat’s “Infection” cards; his name alone screams “time traveler.” I think a time-travel-themed expansion is almost a sure thing. It seems likely we’d also see the Visionary’s nemesis in that expansion.

-CSR

One thing they could incorporate into the game is the “Story Challenges” and “Sentinel Points” that could effectively be used for campaign play or scenario play. It could help integrate stories from the “comics” into the game. Or they could use the SC and SP like in Space Alert: the New Frontier where you gain levels as you play the game repeatedly and those levels allow you to use special perks. Having played and enjoyed the Space Alert expansion, I for one would love to see either of these things in future Sentinels expansions.

… Well I feel sheepish.

Maybe a larger expansion focusing on another superhero team? The heroes so far are largely the Freedom Five and a bunch of other, generally solo heroes. Yeah, teams don’t really come through gameplay, but I’d be curious about other heroes running around together.

I was thinking that perhaps they could introduce new game mechanics that would change how the game was played. Adding things like tapping cards so they’re not always available or dice rolls for things with random effects, or tokens to keep track of effects which play out over time rather than happening all at once could make the game feel quite different.

Unfortunately, any attempt to tap a card (even using a different term) results in having to pay royalties to Wizards of the Coast (as utterly ridiculous as that is). >:(

I’m betting there will be forms of randomness introduced. (Maybe even in the next set… :-X) I think they’re doing a good job keeping things interesting, so far, and I’m assuming the trend will continue.

Rabit

keep in mind this set coming up already has some randomness with the magic power of nightmist.

Yeah, I was just being silly; I am playtesting and all that. (Honestly couldn’t remember how much of her mechanics were already out in the wild. )