Any ideas? We played pretty heavily for a while during the first part of 2013. I still love the game and look for any opportunity to play. The others in my group, while they enjoy the game, have become burnt out on it and no longer wish to play. With Vengeance on the way I'm getting excited to play again, but how can I reignite their interest in playing it?
Some might disagree with me on this, but I'd recommend taking a break from it. Play another game for a little while, bide you time - THEN GET VENGENCE! When you get Vengence it feel all fresh and fun again for them, don't worry.
I agree; you don't want them to get burnt out on the game again before Vengence.
I was basically going to say what has been said. When was the last time your group played? If you've played recently, I'd give it a break, but if it's been a few months:
I'd suggest maybe getting together a week before Vengeance or so to play 1 or 2 games. This might rekindle the fire a little, then mention "Oh yeah, a Mega-Expansion for this game will be out in a week or so. We should get together to try it out once I have it!"
What are they going to say? No!?! Psh. As if.
Plus that adds the excitement of discovering things together, since you'll all be new to it.
That's the problem. It's been several months. I need a SotM fix. We've played a lot of other games, but I keep thinking "Why aren't we playing Sentinels?"
You could play solo. (I recommend 3-hero games, but I know there are some proponents of some 2-hero variants around.) Yeah, it's not as much fun, but it does at least give you that opportunity to play.
Forum games are also an option. I would suggest letting your group have a break, then when Vengeance comes out press for a game, then hope for the best.
Solo games definitely are fun; they don't have as much satisfaction as a group of friends putting their heads together to take down a tough villain, but I still do solo games during the week so I can understand the hero/villain/environment decks better.
Bribe them.
"Pizza, brownies and soda at my house - but we ARE PLAYING SENTINELS!"
"I'm on a diet."
Play with us on G+!
But how can anyone be burnt out? Does not compute!
Hey, anything can get old if you push it hard enough. I've played just under a hundred games, and that's nowhere near enough to make me lose interest, but I can believe that if that number were to reach, say, one thousand, I'd want to stop, at least for several years. There just aren't enough different villains, environments, and heroes to reach that order-of-magnitude of replayability, at least not without a fairly prolonged delay.
I'm fairly certain I have played well over a thousand games within my 2 and half years of playing, and I have yet encountered a time where I am tired of playing Sentinels of the Multiverse. The complete opposite is actually true, I wish I had more time to play more.
Even though my group tends to play from about noon til midnight on Fridays it still doesn't seem enough time, glad I've also got Wednesdays now at Arsenal, may even start coming to the Tuesday meetings if I don't have anything planned.
I've almost certainly clocked more than 300 games in the 13 months I've had Sentinels (playing online means I get in more games than the "average" player), and like Ronway I'm nowhere near burnout. There has to be literally billions of different hero/villain/environment combinations, and even with the exact same setup you'll see different cards and a different game. Not to mention promos...
I believe randomising everything helps a lot. If you always play Haka or prefer to take Tempest every time you face Voss, you're more likely to get bored.
You can certainly try to pick a different way to set up the game--if you typically choose characters, go random. If you typically pick randomly, instead try to select thematic set-ups.
You can also try the campaign variants that people have created (boardgamegeek.com has some in their forums) where you play a linked series of games and success or failure affect future games. There are also variant heroes and villains to try (with some variation in quality).
Of course, you may have already done these things, in which case try another game for a while. Legendary is probably the best super-hero themed game (other than SOTM of course) right now. I recently picked up the Mage Knight board game and it's spectacular, but be ready for long games. Or check out some of the "modern classics" like Carcasonne, Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, or Agricola.
Now I know everyone loves Settlers, but I want to say right now that I hate that game.
My recommendation for a non-Sentinels game for people who like Sentinels would probably be Flash Point: Fire Rescue. It's a co-op where you really have to work together to win, and it isn't as prone to alpha player syndrome (i.e. one experienced player controlling everyone) as say, Pandemic. Plus it has genuine tension and moments of both panic and relief.
Another good one is Betrayal at House on the Hill.
Today was a monthly gaming thing that pwaston, Ameena and I meet at, we spent 6 hours playing SotM and I played the same character all day*. I am not burnt out.
Not saying which hero?
It would be rather rubbing people's noses in it if I said it was K.N.Y.F.E.
Ahhh, alright then. I won't reveal the secret to anyone.
Wanna know what would be fun for a complex 1 hero? If that hero was Ra, and the person playing Ra put Wrathful Gaze and used it every single round. Oh wait! We just did that on Friday. Or was it Thursday? Oh well, it was recently.
Saturday, wasn't it?
And didn't you get the killing blow with it too?
You could look at the statistics tracker to find out
I've played almost 100 games in 5-6 months. And I play different heroes nearly every time (for the Nemesis beatdown I played 8 games using the same heroes for 3 and then 5 of them, but that was an exception to my usual rule). Like I said, I'm not burned out yet, but I suspect I will be eventually, if only during the long cycles between expansions coming out (Vengeance is arriving before I'm entirely tired of everything before it, and those five new heroes will last me a good long while, but the next expansion is probably going to add only two new heroes, and so I'll likely be starting to lose interest by the time its successor is visible on the horizon). And the billions of combinations are only a technicality; realistically, the difference between Haka/Wraith/Tempest vs. Voss and Haka/Wraith/Tempest vs. Rat is not that huge, so in more meaningful terms (IMO), the number of possible games is more like the 200+ villain/environment combinations, times about 10 to 20 for the various ever-shifting roster of hero teams. It's likely that playing a lot of solitaire contributed to the sense of burnout, which is why I've cut way back on it…if I'm only playing one hero instead of an entire team, it helps provide more variety. But I'm still beginning to feel as though most of the villains are a solved puzzle. If you're against Apostate, kill his Relics. If you're against Iron Legacy, bring Ongoing destruction. If you're against Plague Rat, prevent damage. I have to work a bit to stave off the first stages of boredom, and that process will gradually increase…I'll need to come up with more elaborate scenario rules and so forth, in order to keep my interest up.
I've been able to teach new people the game over the last month while still getting solo (and some forum play) in. So I get a mix of "newbie games" in while also still getting used to the heroes and such from the RC/IR expansions. Some interesting highlights in the past few days that show that the game can always be interesting in new ways:
Group with 3-4 games under their belt and having just trashed Akash'Bhuta got tossed The Dreamer as a curveball. Went down heavy in the 2nd half of the game as a swarm of projections proved too much along with the Dreamer herself inflicting damage.
A 3-hero solo game I thought would be a boring kill (Nightmist, Young Legacy, AZ vs Baron Blade @ Insula Primalis) was anything but. Ended up with Nightmist in Mist Form fighting a flipped Blade and a swarm of dinosaurs. Game ended with a Volcanic Eruption finishing off Blade literally micro-seconds before it got Nightmist. (In other words, they both went down, but by rule I was able to make Baron Blade be snuffed first for the win.)
[Plus the realization that having an incap AZ giving Nightmist a +2 damage bonus to her next damage and having it accumulate for five turns is not necessarily a good thing for Nightmist when she has no chance to get a certain piece of equipment out first.] 
There was a time when I was getting notices of when people were playing online. Now I am not. I could rarely make those games, but every now and then I could.
Click here* to see all the events that are soon to happen, for some reason you no longer get updates of events people create.
Worked for me. Thanks.
Hope to see you in a game soon then! :)
And of course anyone else who wants to play online. We don't bite, honestly. Come and join us!
Ha! Speak for yourself.
I also don't mind being bitten…
Thanks for all the ideas. I think I've figured out a way. When asked what I wanted for my birthday, I decided I wanted the house to myself and friends for an all day game session. The only game I'm bringing is SotM. Hopefully my Vengeance pre-order will have arrived by then.