Sentinels of the DC/Marvelverse?

DC and Marvel both have cardgames out now, and the general consensus that I am seeing is that they leave a lot to be desired from fans.  So when does >G get to say to DC/Mavel that they can do better?

Knowing Marvel and DC's willingness to put their products in the hands of competent people (Marvel Movieverse and DC Animated Universe aside)?

Never.

EDIT:  That was a jab at Marvel and DC if anyone is confused.

As much as I would throw my money at this in a second, I honestly think "Sentinels of the Big Two" would not be easy.  With 50 years of Marvel history and up to 70 years of DC history, I think one would be hard-pressed to distill any of the iconic characters down to 40 cards (and iconic villains to even less than that) and not just provoke a zillion arguments about how the characters aren't represented properly.

The beauty of SotM is that our understanding of the universe comes entirely from the decks, which makes it easier to appreciate the characters as they are presented.

And, FWIW, I've heard a lot of good things about Legendary and I plan to get it too.  (The DC one, not as much, but if it was cheap enough, I'd get that too.)

I'd would rather see a Sentinel of The Multiverse RPG using Champions or M&M system.

Legendary in my opinion isn't as good as sentinels of multiverse. Don`t get me wrong as a game it`s fantastic but as a superhero game sentinels still hold the throne of the best super hero card game. Here is some choices that make game not feel like a superhero game.

First are the cards - imagine that every card of wraith get the same ilustration - it`s not only frustrating but also kill the feel and don`t convey any message what this card should really mean. Also every card ability is quite of weird - it really seems like each card got some words or sentence wiritten at it that we can connect to the hero but still does some-weird strategic thing. For example - big responsibility spiderman. It gives us one fight and let us look on top of our deck if we have card of cost  less than two we can draw it. Where is big responsibility here? Where is the risk? Does the spiderman have responsibility of having only cheap, crappy abilities? 

And thats only starting folks how this un-superheroic this game is. Let`s see a fight - in fight you do fight effect then compare your fight value with enemy value - simple isn`t? Now imagine than many of the fight effects are beneficial like drawing cards. Just imagine how it kills the imagination - hello blade i am here to fight you , ok wait i am first gonna to heal you then we can fight. I have no words for this - just imagine that heroes in comics will prioritze which target they atack not by what threat they possess but how beneficial they are. But you now can ask why they would do it in the first place? Because in the Legendary there is a only one winner. There is three outcomes of the game - villain executes the evil plot and all players loses , there is a tie because deck runs out ( i am not kidding you - i am out of web lets fight other time ), or the players wins - and then they look how many points each player have - and decide who win the game. Yes that means that some of the players may deliberatly prolong the struggle so they can get how many points they could.

And one little cherry on this unheroic cake of strategy game in spiderman suit - if you hit the villain you activate its tactics and in most cases theyre beneficial to every heroes. Yes you hit the big bad guy and he gives you candies.

Don`t get me wrong it`s not a bad game. But i would never call it superheroes game - it`s a strategy game that uses some of the art and names and sentences to have bigger sales. It`s a good strategy game but to this day there is only one good super heroes game - and it`s a sentinels. There is coming new one in horizon and it copies some of things that sentinels does great in first place like each hero having individual deck. Maybe it would be better - but if youre looking for experience similiar to sentinels and you think legendary will give you that - be prepared for a being disapointed. 

I know that there's been a lot of work put in by a couple people, statting up M&M versions of the characters in the Off-Topic forum. I haven't heard anything about it in a while, but I believe someone is also working on an original RPG system for SotM. My personal vote is for MHRP/Cortex Plus, as it seems like it would be a fairly simple task to make data files and milestones for the characters.

I agree with drkrash1969. 

The Sentinels characters are so great because the creators of the game didn't just sit back and let years of comics history do the work for them - they created that history, sure, but they also are the equivalent of the absolute biggest Sentinels Comics fans in the history of fandom and literally know everything about the brand (because it's their brainchild). I can't imagine that being possible with DC or Marvel at this point. 

I was actually thinking about putting together a little strategy mod for sentinels. Think 4th edition D&D movement strategy with miniatures and using the decks we already have as our available actions. Actually it would play a lot like Last Night On Earth where melee damage requires touch and everything else has a range, say 4 spaces, and line of site. Though it would leave someone playing the villain and the environment.

I like that idea, Orphanleni. Nice to know I'm not the only one who'd love to push Sentinels minis around.

@imprimis5

You're definitely not the only one! From what I've heard, it seems that a *lot* of people are interested in Sentinels minis :)

Hearing that from you may be one of the most exciting things I've heard today.

Maybe when >G makes a game that uses minis there will be super special SotM promo minis for it aswell! Though who knows when they will be coming out with a game that uses minis. Still waiting for their next game to see how awesome those will be.

+1. Nobody wants to play Super Heroes RPG around me, but it is the system I would use.

But even more than an adaption to RPGs, I'd like a "campaign" boardgame !

Sentinels Minis ? Cool idea !

Maybe >G should talk with Reaper about that. Especially if they can move their production stateside soon.

Legacy

Absolute Zero

ExPAt

Bunker

That's what I've found so far, did some research months ago and then gave up. There are so many damn mini's on that site.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I don't want to see any spin off games. I love minatures (i play 40k when I can) i love RPGs (i table top every tuesday night) and i love other games.... But I don't want to RPG Sentinels - cause I want to know what stories >G has, not make up my own. I dont want to play minatures, because to me thats war games, not Superheroes (never got into Heroclix) and other games? eh. I dont want to dilute my SotM fun!

But maybe I'm alone in that :p

I love how this forum goes on tangents, and how often we are rewarded for doing so XD

As for Lynxfox, I completely agree.  I'd love to see what non Sentinels ideas >G has, and I'd like to be able to get all of the Sentinel's storyline within the cardgame, since I know I will be invested in that until the end.

I’ve played all three and I can say that none of them are bad; based solely on how well the game executes it’s mechanic from a purely technical standpoint DC does it best followed close behind by Marvel with SOTM coming in at a distant third. There are many times in SOTM where I’ve run into particular combinations of card’s/characters that when combined made for a defective game (and it didn’t make sense thematically making me think it was something overlooked as opposed to a design decision); that has yet to happen in either of the other games (and please don’t take that as a dig against SOTM, SOTM is good for other reasons and the technical problems aren’t bad enough to detract from those aspects).

The mistake is thinking that Marvel:Legendary and DC Deck Building game are Marvel and DC versions of SOTM… they aren’t and I don’t think they’re trying to be, they’re Marvel and DC versions of Dominion (and in my personal opinion they are better/more interesting than Dominion). If you approach them from that standpoint I don’t think you’ll be disappointed unless you just don’t like deck-building games.

On the other hand if the problem is that people think that SOTM is a deck-building game, I can’t help you other than to tell you that, no it’s not; it’s closer to a card driven RPG-lite than anything else; if it was a deck builder it wouldn’t be as good.

Different beasts. Different goals.
Personally I prefer Sentinels by far out of the three but that's because i love the 'rpg' element of it all.

Legendary from what I saw is also exceptionally good but aimed at teamplay yet still lacking some content. And even with an addon or 2 will probably not be as good as Sentinels. Though still a great game.

I ordered DC's because it scratches a completely different itch. It's a quick, easy, simple yet beautiful pvp game.

Superhero fans are rather spoiled nowadays. I do hope Sentinels will become more widely available though as on average it outdoes the other 2.

Frankly, and maybe this is heresy, I'm kind of sick of deck building. Variations on a theme are great and all, but there are only so many times I can buy things with things in order to buy things again before I want something a little deeper.

It got a little oversaturated for a while there. There are definitely some really good deckbuilding games but I'm a touch burnt out on them. I kinda feel like the co-op deckbuilding that Legendary does could be different enough to get me interested again.

Have you ever played Ascension? That's deckbuilding, but not the "buy more cards…okay, now buy even more cards…" kind of deckbuilding that you get with games like Magic. The entire game comes in one box. You start with a deck of ten cards, eight of which are resource cards and two of which are attacking cards. Cards are then dealt from the main deck onto the board (six of them, I think) and you can use your resource cards to "buy" new cards from there. You use your "attack" cards to defeat monster cards. The other player(s) do(es) the same, but you're not directly trying to defeat each other. Every time you defeat a monter card, you get some Honour points (the value depends on the monster you killed) in the form of small plastic token thingys - small clear ones are worth one point, large red ones worth five. When the combined total (between players) of these tokens adds up to a certain number (60 for two players, 75 for three, and I think 90 for 4), the game ends as soon as the last player has finished their turn. At this point everyone totals up their Honour - as well as the plastic tokens, all bought cards (not the ones you started with) have an Honour value. Whomever has the highest Honour score wins the game. The cool thing about this game is that it can turn out differently every time because you don't know which cards are going to come up. If the starting batch is all monster cards, do you work on buying attack cards in order to defeat them, or let someone else do that while you buy resource cards in order to buy the cool stuff once that comes out?

It was the game we played the most before I got my hand on Sentinels. Erm, we haven't played anything else since then ;).

Ascension is the one I still play. I have it for my iDevices and play online with people. I'm even getting a touch burnt out on it, though.

You can play Ascension online? How does that work? Is it like the online games of Sentinels people have been playing, where one person has the stuff laid out and tells everyone else what's going on?

It's an iOS app.

I refuse to play Ascension with more than 2 players anymore. With the newest expansions, there's just too much downtime for how random the game becomes with that many players. With 2 players it's still great though.

I'm also still playing Thunderstone (man, did that game get better with each expansion), plus Eminent Domain and Mage Knight if you count those. They're pretty different from the core Dominion model, though.

One deckbuilding game I bought for $15 at Gencon at a booth that had lots of older games was Heroes of Graxia. It's one where you can also attack the other players with your units you bring out. It's similar to Ascension as it only has a limited amount on the board at once, but a few from 4 decks instead of just 1.

Blehh, Heroes of Graxia is a terrible, terrible game. I really like liking things, so I very rarely come down on games this hard, but it just is not good. There are severe balance problems and the pacing is jittery. I appreciate what they were trying to do, but they just didn't have to chops to pull it off.

I didn't know Ascension had expansions - I've only ever played the plain normal game, Chronicle of the Godslayer.

When I'm playing Ascension with a large amount of people, I tend to ignore what's availbe until it's my turn, because, more than likely, anything out will be gone before my turn comes up.  By ignoring it, I don't have to make out plans for what I'll do, only to have to change them 5 times over because someone took the card I was planning for.

I love the raven card though.  It's surprising how often I manage to get it to work well for me.

Can't remember a raven card, but it's been months since I last played it. I like erm, whats-'er-face...Cephra or something, Keeper of Stars (or something like that)...she's a Lifebound hero who costs about seven runes to buy and her ability is to let you take any hero card for free. Defeating the Avatar dude is always good as well, since that lets you take or defeat any card on the board.

Also, if you can manage to get enough Mechana constructs out you're pretty well-buffed. Plus those cards are the ones with the highest Honour score of all - I think the Hedron Cannon is the one with the highest (though it costs about eight runes to buy).

The Raven allows you to name a card, then draw a card.  If the card drawn is the same as what you named, then you obtain an honor.  In the cases where I hadn't already known my top card, I'm well over 50% correctly guessing the top card.

Erm…that must be from an expansion then, 'cause I've never even heard of that. As mentioned, I have only the base game and didn't even know there were expansions till such a thing was mentioned in this thread.