Scaling for Larger Games

So my friends and I have been really taken with this game (we nabbed a copy of the vanilla unenhanced version on sale).  As we went on, we'd end up with another friend joining in on the game.  Now we're up to about 8 or 9 people who want to join in on the game.  That's enough to play 2 separate games simultaneously, but we found that to be mostly unfun and unsociable.  We all wanted to play together, and we were willing to bend the rules to make that happen.

Now, SotM is balanced around 4 players.  With about 8 players in the game, we basically decimated any villian that came up.  It was still fun, but mostly unchallenging.  We started tweaking some rules around to see if there was a way to keep all of us playing, while boosting the difficulty enough to keep it fun and interesting.  Here are just some notes of what we've noticed:

Vanilla SoTM:

Problems

• Villian  dies too fast.  Too many heroes means many damage sources
• Villian does not do enough damage.  Most damage is distributed around evenly.  Very hard to die in this setup
• Hero buffs were too strong.  Legacy is OP in this mode.  +2 damage output to 8 heroes is a lot of increased damage.
• Negative effects don't last long.  Someone always had some way to remove or mitigate these effects

Multiple Villians:

Naturally, our first attempt at making the game more challenging was to stack up villians.  Essentially, we'd pick two villian decks and play as normal.  This did increase the challenge a bit, but not by much.  Essentially, one villian was focused down pretty quickly, then we moved onto the other one.  The extra villian did not accomplish much before going on.  We were hesitent to add more than 2 because it made the villian turn take way longer than we'd like.  3 would probably be our limit.

Modified Rules:

So here's a small list of rules that we came up with to make the game more challenging.  None of these have been tested yet, but we'll probably try some of them out the next time we get together

• Villian effects apply to all villians in play.  For example, if one villian is invincible, all villians are invincible.  Increased damage/defense also applies to all villains
• Villians do not die unless all villians are reduced to 0 HP.
• Hero cards can only affect adjacent heroes.  If Legacy increases the damage of all players by 1, this power only affects the players to his left and right
• Villians and environments still affect all Heroes, though.
• Villian gets multiple turns per round
• Villian gets to play multiple cards off the deck per round.

I'll probably report in on our findings as soon as we get to try this out.  I know it's pretty rare to be able to get a large group of people together like we do, but If you have any insight or input on this, I would love to hear them.

You said you had the unenhanced version. That's really only balanced for 5 at most. Even Citizen Dawn advanced should be easy with 8. If you really want to try with 8, get one of the expansions or the new enhanced version. The villains have an (H) mechanic that scales by the number of heroes. The damage ramps up quite a bit with more heroes. Honestly, though, if you have 8 players I'd split off into two games.

How about playing against a single villain, but giving them multiple turns in a row?

I noticed that in the enhanced version, and will probably try to implement those rules.  I still think most of the damage will be distributed too much to matter, though, but we'll see.

We thought about splitting up the game into two separate games, but it seems most were pretty disappointed in that idea.  SotM is a very social game, with a lot of table talk and people trying to work out combos, and general conversation.  I think my friends don't want to split the group and make it feel like we're missing out on half the fun.

Oh, I like that.  I drop it on the list.

I think doubling the villain's hitpoints, and doubling the villain play- and end phase (i.e. play two cards, and then go through all end of villain turn effects twice) would pretty much do the job without too many complications (giving them two turns in a row makes some cards that trigger at the start of the villain turn very unfun).

Apostate on 666 hit points.

Go.

First post, pretty new to the game but already quite taken by it. 

I too have been trying to figure out some way to play with maybe 6 or 7 players to be able to play it with one of my monthly game groups.  I was thinking of using two villains and putting them at opposite ends (so the turn sequence goes villain, hero, hero, hero, environment, villain, hero, hero, hero, environment in a 6-player game), then having each hero choose one side to face.  On each turn a hero can only affect the villain or environment targets that he/she is facing , but can receive damage from both... in fact, there is a flanked damage bonus (an increase of damage when received from the side he/she is not facing).  The hero can skip one of the phases of his or her turn to have his character turn (but has to skip the entire phase, cannot use one power and then turn as a second power if allowed, or can't play one card and then turn instead of playing a second card if allowed).

I literally just thought of this right now as I was reading this post, so it isn't really fleshed out at all, much less play-tested (which I will do at my next game night), but I thought I would put it out there to see if any of you experts can find something terribly wrong with it before I waste a lot of time and effort in attempting it.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!

cries