What was your biggest rule botch?

Hey everyone! I've only been playing a couple of weeks but I'm loving the game and have already made a lot of use of the forums and the great community here

Anyway, despite my best efforts and being a pretty experienced tabletop gamer, I managed to really mess up a rule on Spite. For whatever reason, I thought that Spite's PL531 Compound Upsilon discarded (H-2) equipment and ongoings from each hero. Needless to say, this turned the villain quickly from "fiddly pain in the butt" to "this is literally impossible".

So, confession time! What was the rule / card you messed up worst? Did it make your game easier or harder?

I thought the card drawn from Headless Lash went into the trash instead of play, woops. 

That's really funny, because my wife and I botched the exact same rule which resulted in our first ever loss.  My reaction was "how is this guy a 2"?  

Another rule we botched in our favor in our first or second game was instances of damage couting seperalely.  Nightmist was in her mistform and redirecting 18 damage a turn to Apostate's relic since it all came from him, despite the fact that it was multple hits.

One of my biggest botches also came from Spite, I was playing solo and got confused by his end of turn effect. I ending up skipping his play phase for the entire game.

I wondered why it seemed like no challenge until I was packing up and saw my rulebook with the phases of play. I keep it in plain sight now, just in case.

On occasion I forget to have Akash'Bhuta deal herself damage when a limb is destroyed…in fact a few weeks ago my partner (playing Fanatic) put out End of Days becuase Akash'Bhuta and the Environment both had quite a few cards out and we didn't have too much stuff to lose (I was Chrono Ranger and just had the hat and a couple of bounties out, and of course Jim is great at recovering his stuff - I think I even had a Displaced Armoury on me to recover the hat on my next turn) so decided to go for it and smash as much of her stuff as we could to deal her a whole bunch of damage. And yes, I removed all those limbs from play and then my partner went "hang on, what about the damage?" or words to that effect so I had to pick them all from the top of the trash again (fortunately wasn't difficult as the card beneath the bottom-most limb was a Primeval Eruption so I knew when to stop) and tot up the damage. Came out at 103 (included bonus from the take-extra-damage-from-everything bounty which we conveniently chose to destroy after all Akash'Bhuta's stuff was gone ;)), our highest single-turn damage to date, I believe. And it wasn't even directly dealt by a hero!

I once played a whole game thinking that every time Fanatic used Absolution she regained an HP. That was fun!

I thought Omnitron's components were destroyed if he took 7 damage in a turn. I've started playing the right way and I don't think I've seen his death ray go off since.

Also thought Dawn needed H-1 or H+1 citizens in play, but forgot she counted.

Speaking of Omnitron, the first time I fought him I thought he had to deal 7 damage in a turn to destroy his components, sort like overheating I thought. After getting hit with disentigration ray, railgun, and polarizing card draw lighting I was starting to wonder how I'd ever survive until he was dishing out 7 damage.

And I still won that fight

The very first game that I played was against Omnitron.  We thought his front side rule said to shuffle his trash INTO his deck and flip cards until you got a drone or component.  As a result, we got hit by Sedative Flechettes 3 times in rapid succession (bad luck combined with it constantly being shuffled back in).  After getting smashed for 15 points, just from the one-shots, we thought he was crazy hard :)

Playing as Visionary and going into the telekinetic cocoon, damage immunity and drawing three cards per turn after the first turn, what's not to love?

What's that, you don't get three cards per turn? Yes you do! One from 'normal' rules, One from not playing/powering the turn and one from the card itself, just like Recharge Mode. No, I haven't read the card in a while but I'm sure that...

...

So going into the telekinetic cocoon while inside Bunker's recharging suit doesn't net me three cards a turn either? Well why am I cramped inside this smelly old robot then?!

I actually have another Visionary and her telekinetic cocoon. I used to read it for whatever reason that she couldn't play or use powers on her turn, meaning heroes with the incap powers that allowed people to play cards I would use on Visionary, thus still making her function while being immune. Now that was really overpowered, now just imagine if I would of been able to play NightMist at the time thinking that, oh boy that would be awesome.

The first time we played, with Omnitron, we forgot/didn't realize that villains played cards normally. "So he only plays a card on rampaging robot side, and just gets a card back from the trash on factory side!"

We still lost. 2 hero game. (Before we learned that was a... pretty bad idea.)

Forgetting Chairman's retaliation attacks. Similarly, forgetting Miss Information's as well. But we've always remembered Matriarch's and Operative's. Weird selective attention.

Do you sit at a desk all day?

Yes I do.

Citizen Dawn: My first three games against her were so easy that I thought there must be something wrong. Well it was: I thought she has to have 5 citizens IN PLAY to flip. 

Spite: Just the opposite, he seems to be unbeatable until I realized that when he flipped he doesn't regenerate when dealing damage anymore.

Visionarys Projection: forgot to count it as hero target by damage against each of them.

Once having the Aka' limb hit the lowest hero and making them cannot deal damage till next Hero turn.

Totally forgot about it so we didn't realize until we after packed up the win was invalid as the kill was done by CR with is "Cannot Deal Damage" status.

I don't know if it's my biggest, but every time I forget that Wraith's Smoke Bombs only applies to damage dealt by Villain cards (and not, say, the environment) I die a little inside.

My biggest might have been when we were playing against Spite in our marathon session and I somehow misread his end of turn power as damaging all heroes* (and thus gaining him 4x as much HP back). Fortunately I caught that after a few turns and we restarted.

*No thanks to Demon's Kiss and Mindphyre doing just that, I suspect.

Yup, we must be alternate universe versions of each other because I went back and looked at the difficulty and was righteously indignant. It wasn't until I reluctantly gave him another try that I looked at the card more carefully. D'oh!

I've forgotten villain damage on occasion, eg the Operative when you destroy a villain target, or Spite lifetapping when he deals damage. Also didn't realise that Dawn counts as a citizen for the purposes of flipping back from Invincible Mode until it came up on the forum a while back. And I did used to occasionally mess up with regards to stuff like Lead from the Front only being able to redirect villain damage and thinking that that plus Danger Sense meant heroes were basically invincible...but fortunately I don't think anything too bad came of this as we realised we were wrong before it really came up.

At PAX East I, a friend and a few people I didn't know had this awesome, epic, last-minute win where Nightmist redirected the damage from a plummeting monorail so all ten of it hit Iron Legacy, which was JUST enough to finish him off (and we had to use three incapacitated hero abilities to do it, too, getting the amulet out of trash, letting her draw a card, letting her play it, and then her skipping her turn so she would have the two cards needed to use it for the environment turn). High fives and congratulations and "great game"s all around.

And then walking back to the hotel, I suddenly remembered "Wait, Iron Legacy is immune to environment damage."

Only on his starting side, I think - if he only needed ten damage to kill him, he was already flipped therefore your win was valid, I believe :). If I remember rightly, it's only the Chairman who's permanently immune to environment damage.

I have to say, I like Spite's theme and he's a very different type of villain than normal, but he has so much to keep track of, it's really easy to overlook or misinterpret individual abilities. Especially playing solo with no one to "check my work", I always have a nagging feeling I did something wrong.

I found Kismet to be quite fiddly in terms of having loads of stuff to check, keeping track of what's going on with the Talisman, etc. Then again, we've only fought her once since I got hold of Shattered Timelines, and one of the reasons she won was that we didn't have enough Ongoing destruction to get rid of all the Jinxes she kept playing on us. But it's probably a matter of needing to learn how she works - I probably did find Spite quite complicated at first too but I can't really remember.

Kismet's "gain life for lucky cards" ability (on her flipped side, IIRC) always confuses me, since there are only like two or three of them that are ongoings.

reading akash’bhuta as every environment /card / not /target/

things got out of hand. fast.

The worst for me was using Ra's excavate on the Villain pile.  

I thought that citizen dawn was waaay too easy.

Yay, we defeated Spite!   What do you mean he regains HP on his front side?  Oops.

Yay, we killed the Materiach! How was that a 4?  What do you mean we lose equipment and ongoing cards when Tempest does 1 damage to each bird?

Lose stuff or take damage.

Unless I've been playing that wrong all this time… o_O

Yeah.. we were taking the damage. And by taking the damage, i mean that we had legacy immune to psychic and just cackled all the way to the end of the game.

And I'm not saying that we were right, but we were awesome.

I'm pretty sure that's perfectly fine. The Matriarch has ways of getting around that kind of thing.

Err, right.  I don't have my cards in front of me, so I forgot the damage part.  Heh heh.  Oops.

Hence, biggest rule botches come from… not reading the cards. 

So wait, can Kismet regain health from her one-shot jinxes?

Not unless I've missed something, which is why it confuses me.

No, and not from her one-shot Lucky cards either. I think, however, that she does get a damage boost from her one-shot Jinxes, if she has her Talisman.

On topic, I think my biggest rules botches have involved forgetting to destroy stuff at the start of the Villain turn when The Matriarch had her cohorts out.

Does Matriarch's card say "everyone takes X damage or destroys a card" or does it say "anyone who does not take X damage must destroy a card"? (I don't have the game in front of me, otherwise I'd check )

The Matriarch's action on a Fowl being destroyed (on her front side) is that the person with...erm, either the highest or lowest hp (can't remember now) must destroy one of their equipment (or ongoing?) cards or take something like H-2 psychic damage. On her flip side I think she just deals H-2 psychic damage to the hero with the lowest hp with no stuff-destruction option.

Highest

Hmm, For the longest time I didnt immediately end my turn after a mist fueled recovery. 

Nightmist was in mist form when we were facing the Ennead. We had incap'd the villain that plays the top card of each deck in turn order and Nightmist was playing cards from it.......in mist form.

I tend to miss triggers a LOT when facing the Ennead, it gets confusing when 1 plays a card on a red symbol, which pulls a green symbol that triggers another card play which bring up a purple, which triggers another card play..........GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

It's easy to miss Ennead triggers, true, but they're not nearly as bad as Akash'bhuta in that respect.  She just does so many things sometimes, many of which don't directly affect the heroes at all, that I'm convinced the number of games where she has been played 100% operationally correctly are fairly few.

Yea I am fairly certain sometimes we forget the discard after she flips or when she flips back to her normal side. A bit much to keep track ><

On 2nd Jan I was playing a game with The Argent Adept, Mister Fixer, Legacy and Absolute Zero: Elemental Wrath against the Ennead, I had control of the first two, my buddy the second two.  I've forgotten some of the details (including which enviro we were in). But loosely:

AA had a couple of songs, xu's bell.  Fixer had jack handle, grease monkey fist, harmony.  Legacy had inspiring presence.  AZ had null point calibration unit, isothermic transducer, focused apertures.

We said:
"Hey, Jack Handle hits your target and then the same again to all non-heroes. Ohhh, and GMF lets you pick a type for all that damage!  This could be fun!"
Fixer plays Bloody Knuckles, unses jack handle incorrectly.
Legacy galvanises.
Everyone survives the enviro and villain turns.
Argent plays polyphoric flare, performs syncopated onslaught on Fixer and AZ (Now on +7 and +2).
Argent performs/accompanies to allow Fixer to play Overdrive out of turn. Fixer calls fire and targets AZ, dealing 8 to AZ and probably double-dipping the modifiers for all non-hero targets.  AZ shoots 11 cold at himself to heal 10.  We do that again for overdrive's second strike AZ.  Everything's dead but we play on.
Fixer's bloody knuckles wear off but it's his go. We cheat some more,giving everything another dose of wrong jack handle
AZ does some weird maths with fire, essentially we picked up the box and emptied the tokens all over the twitching corpses of the Ennead.
Legacy does a victory flying smash.
We crown Fixer a king.

Later I found out that while Jack Handle is awaiting official ruling, it certainly doesn't act like that and quite possibly for that very reason.

Not knowing that you can opt out of drawing a card made advanced apostate a horror show…half his deck was played in like a turn

Biggest rules botch
first game we played we played it like pandemic villian phase 1 hero goes then the enviroment... then on to the next player ....
that game did not end well for us
 

oooooh, oooooh. holds stomach That hurts. So bad.

On the plus side, I bet it ended quickly. Geez…

Oh man, I think you might have just won the thread. Out of curiosity, which villain were you playing? How long did you last?

Triggering Omnitron-X's reactive plating subroutine even when he takes 0 damage from the attack. The Matriarch darkened the sky late in the game, and was dead two turns later from her birds bouncing off of Omnitron and into her face. In retrospect, there's no way that's the intended reading of the card.

I just recently got Sentinels and have managed to mess up at least one small detail every game. Today though was probably the biggest botch when I thought i could use the visionary's mental divergence on the villains deck while playing against Citizen Dawn. I just kept bringing Channel the Eclipse out of the trash every other turn after destoying it. It probably acounted for about 16 points of damage throughout the game...and kept nearly all the citizens from entering play... oops. I realized after the game that it only brought back ongoings out of hero decks only.

Well we had to be fightning Baron Blade because i destinctly remember before the last heroes turn have the 3 mobile defense platforms out ...
I don't think we completed (That games was run at my school for students and i think the lunch bell rang)

I just played my second game against the Dreamer. Solo, and with Legacy, Chrono Ranger and Haka. I draw "Dark Hero", "Illusory Demon" and "The Toymaster" as the starting projections. It could have been a rough start, but Haka played a "Rampage" after being galvanized, destroying all the proyections in the first turn. I continued playing and, by the end of second turn, Legacy had in play a "Legacy Ring" and a "Next Evolution". Chrono yanger had his hat and the bow, and Haka had a Dominion. The Dreamer had alreadz flipped and had 2 projection under her. I though it was going really well. Then I draw another "Rampage" and realized.

I played a galvanized Rampage the first turn against the Dreamer. Great, Haka. Now go to your Library and think about what you have done.

Can't remember if I mentioned this already, but something I've done before and also did yesterday despite reminding myself about it minutes before it came up, is forgetting about an unflipped Spite healing when he deals damage. He should have regained about 10hp or so on one turn but I forgot until later in the round so we just kinda carried on.

My biggest mess-uop was against la capitain. we forgot the "Whenver damage dealt by battle-forged destroys a target, play the top card of the villan deck". this helped us

I remember the first time I played against La Capitan we didn't read the setup, so she didn't get her ship the whole game.  We were all confused by how easy it was until we actually read the card again.

My first game ever I thought Baron Blade's first side said 90hp instead of 40.  We fought valiantly and beat his buffed up first side with two cards until moon drop.  Honestly I think it was a great semi-advanced mode!  Total egg on face moment after the game when I flipped the card back and noticed the thin font was the same - 40 hp.  

I screw up a rule in nearly every game, but probably my biggest one was when I played the Freedom 5 vs. Miss Information, facing her for the first time, and misread Misplaced Memo as "the Hero target with the lowest HP is immune to damage".  It seemed logical to me - every hero is suffering psychic damage wondering where their teammate has gone, but he's all by himself on a fool's errand and so is being extremely careful not to kill himself (or be killed by anything else).  Since that game ended with about 4 HP between two heroes, there's no way I would have won it if I'd played the Memo correctly.

In the vein of errors that similarly made a proper-rules loss appear to be a narrow and thus thrilling victory, five heroes vs. Citizen Dawn (both of these games were in Metropolis, oddly).  Absolute Zero died early, and we were playing his "the next damage a hero deals is increased by 2" as applying to every target Tempest hits with a Squall, and, even more obviously wrongly as soon as I thought about it, applying to both instances of Fanatic's Exorcism damage.  We ended up calling the game a tie because we weren't sure whether or not Dawn had 1 HP left just before we all died, due to my possibly having miscounted.

On the other hand, my worst screwup would be when I won a game by taking more damage than I should have...unlike the previous two "victory from the jaws of defeat" errors, this one made me win easily and feel lame as a result.  Due to misinterpreting one of Omnitron's "skittery stabby things" as damaging ALL targets, I killed Tachyon and thus enabled Unity to play Bots for free.  (It seemed appropriate to me that a disembodied Dr. Stinson would be advising her mechanically talented protege on how to quit fooling around with Bot-Fix and Construction Pylons, and just make the things go.  However the result was a ridiculously powerful Unity and the sense that Tachyon was more valuable dead than alive, which was not good for my ego, as I was playing Unity for the first time and Tachyon had been my favorite hero prior to that, so it felt insulting to her that she became nothing but a resource for this robot-making upstart.)

My biggest rule botch of all time: If you can use an additional Power, you can use the same Power twice.  Yup.

It was the first night I ever played (and to be fair, the friend who was teaching us to play told me this was okay, so I never considered checking the rule book against his word).  Our first game we beat Omnitron easily, so now it was time to really get dirty.  We started our second game as Fanatic (roommate), Legacy (friend who taught us the game), and Bunker (me).

We were facing Grand Warlord Voss and he was destroying us.  At one point he had like 15 minions out on the field, so we had to kill 6 of them before the start of his next turn, or else Game Over.

Well, I had the emergency supply unit card, which gives an extra power when trashed and I was in Turret Mode, so I was looking at 3 Powers that turn.  And of course, not knowing the rule against using the same power more than once, I used the Grenade Launcher three times in a row, which normally deals 2 damage, 2 damage, and 1 damage, but thanks to Legacy's buffs and turret mode, I was looking at 5, 5, and 4 damage per Power.  So I vollied ridiculous amounts of damage across the entire field of minions, killing like 8 of them just on my turn.

We all rejoiced; I had saved us!  I spent the rest of the game vollying minions and omnicannoning Voss until we won, all under 10 HP (oh, and of course Legacy was using his Legacy Ring to use his punch attack twice, healing everyone 2HP every turn.  So our win was twice as illegitamate).

 

My first game against Akash'bhuta, I misread her rules as:

• If an environment target enters play, play the top card on the villain deck
• If a villain target enters play, play the top card on the environment deck (instead of discarding it)

The first villain play was a target, which played Prison Riot, which brought out 3 inmates, which meant 3 more villain plays, which were all targets so more environment plays...

It ping-ponged back and forth until I had nearly every villain and environment target on the board; and all before I'd played a single hero card! Somehow, after playing 4-5 turns this way, I managed to come back and win. It was a ridiculous game.

I am going to have to get my group to try this as a game variant some time.

The hardest part is keeping track of how many more card plays are owed to each side.

My brother read Wraith's "Stun Bolt" as "That target cannot deal damage until the start of your next turn" instead of "That target has it's damage dealt reduced by 1 until the start of your next turn"; I guess he got it confused with "Throat Jab".

So yeah, I used the card that shuts down the villians deck with Nightmist two or three turns in a a row as well and we completely shut down Grand Warlord Voss' damage and deck on his 2nd side. We proceeded to clean up Voss quite handily. Only afterwards did I start to think "Huh, Stun Bolt seems kinda OP." me not having played Wraith that much.

Botched "Surprise Shopping Trip" from Time Cataclysm in a game where Kismet had "Inconceivable Obstruction" out.

Since I missed "the first time each turn" on Inconceivable Obstruction I got Surprise Shopping Trip triggering a recursive loop of damage and playing more cards which triggered Surprise Shopping trip more - triggering Inconceivable Obstruction again, and so on.

Caught on after I had damaged everything for six or seven points and put another four targets into play in the Environment and was thinking I had stumbled upon something extremely broken.

Scrapped that solo game and started over since I was unclear what the game status was exactly when I allowed things to spin out of control.

The combo will still end up hitting everyone (except maybe Kismet) for a few points of damage and be annoying along with putting a few more Environment cards into play or the trash, but it will not turn into an Environment Deck burner and hero plinking cycle.

That is exactly what it is against the Matriarch, though. *shudders*

We have had a couple, but two come to mind that effected the end of the game.

1) Once, while fighting Voss we believed that Sub-Zero atmospher would negate the effects of Forced Deployment for one turn, as the minions end of turn effects would be moved to the start of the turn, which had already "passed". However, as I now understand it, since forced deployment was destroyed in the start of the turn phase, the start of the turn minion effects would still occur. This allowed us that time to win the game, where we would have lost during that round otherwise.

2) Against Omnitron, we had always interpretted "All Heroes hit for" as being simutaneous, meaning at the exact same time, so when hit by electro-pulse, we would all take the nescessary damage at once. However, reading the clarifications and realizing that we would pick the order we were hit in, we would have very different results, twice. The first time, with Tachyon's Synaptic Interruption I believe the pulse would have been destroyed with her re-direct, sparring my team mates. The second time, both Wraith and Omnitron-X had, "if hit, do 2 return damage" cards, which would have reduced it's HP before it hit our third team mate, Tempest. This would have saved his life, which in turn would have won us the game in that situation, as it was a very close finish.

Anyways, I have read pretty much the entire rule supplement now and hopefully will be able to keep the game changing mistakes to a minimum.