Month: February 2026

Crime Unfolds: How Do You Express That?

Welcome back to Detective Month!  Last week, we looked at the storybook cyber-noir detective game of LA-1!  This week, we take a look at the Escape Room game of Crime Unfolds!  A Pop-Up Escape Game 3D: Immersive Crime Game!

Every few months, my friends Charlie and Allison and I get together to play games … usually Escape Room games! They are my Escape Room buddies! This month, we are trying out the Crime Unfolds cooperative Escape Room game! Nominally, we are detectives solving a crime!

We’ll discuss our first impressions and thoughts on the Crime Unfolds system. It also brings up a few questions to ask yourself about Escape Room games. Why do you like them? Or maybe … Why do you dislike them?

Requires an App

Crime Unfolds requires an app!   That is maybe the first thing you should know.  Some people love Apps with their Escape Room games, and some people don’t.  It’s really not clear by looking at the book that this requires an App.  It’s not a big deal, as Charlie went and got one real quick.

There are 6 cases interspersed in this game.  We started with case 1.  We also, like many escape room games, started with lots of “random stuff we know will be useful later”.

 

Solve The Puzzle vs. Express the Answer

Over the course of one night. Charlie and Allison and Richie embarked on the first case!  It’s supposed to take an hour … it took us more than two hours.  And we are experienced Escape Roomers?? What Gives?

The problem we had over and over was not “how we do we solve the puzzle” but “how do you express the solution”?  We easily solved a bunch of the puzzles, but inputting into the app was the main hurtle!

For example: At one point, we had “shifted” away from a screen that had the arrows for directionality, so we thought we had to express NSEW via UP/DOWN or North/South/East/West using letters on the command line?  We lost at least 15 minutes … when we realized the App had those arrows in another screen.  It was very frustrating!  We had solved the puzzle, but the app had made is less than intuitive to enter.

We were pretty frustrated after this game, but after thinking about it overnight, I have come to realize that most puzzle games are like this!  You have to do two things:

  1. Solve the puzzle
  2. Express The Solution

Solving the puzzle is usually the funner part, and some games make it very easy to express the solution.  We loved Doomensions (see our review here), as expressing the solution was easy; it always took the same form as a 3 or 4 digit code.    Here in Crime Unfolds, the solution expressed itself in so many different ways! Sometimes it was interacting with some widgets on the app!  Sometimes it was saying the right thing at the command line interface!  Sometimes it pressing the right buttons!  

Our frustration with Crime Unfolds was how to express the solution!  Many times during the game, we felt like we solved the puzzle, but couldn’t move forward because the solution wasn’t expressed in the way we expected it!

After cogitating on this some more, I realized this expressing the solution can be just as interesting as solving the puzzle!  To express your solution, you have to change your perspective!! What’s the best way to express this solution?  What’s the most thematic way to express this solution?  What’s the perspective of the player in the game?  All of these contribute to different ways to express the solution.   To be fair, sometimes the expression of the solution is poorly done, and that’s just a frustration of this genre.  I think if you reset your thinking that expressing the solution is part of the puzzle, then it can less frustrating. I realize how hard it can be to do in the heat of the moment, so it’s easy to say this. 

To enjoy Crime Unfolds, you will absolutely have to enjoy thinking about new ways to express a solution to a puzzle.

 

Pop-Up Cool!  But You Need A Magnifying Glass!

One of things that was very cool about Crime Unfolds was the pop-up scenes that came out of the book!  It turns out 6 rooms in the book, and you take a turns visiting some of these rooms in each case.  They look really cool!  See above!

Unfortunately, some of the text/symbols on the board are hard to read!  At one point, Charlie went and got his “fine work” magnifying glasses/helmet!  We also used our phones to zoom in so we could see things!  

The pop-up stuff works well, but be aware that you may have to really zoom on the board.  There is just a little bit of “Where’s Waldo” and “I can barely see that” in this game.

 

Conclusion

Did we like Crime Unfolds?  Yes and no.  We only played one case, but we think it is fairly representative of what this game is.  The pop-up system works and has a very “toy” and “fun” factor to it; that was something we definitely liked.   We liked solving the puzzles but found expressing the solutions frustrating.  I think, upon further reflection, that if you go into the game knowing expression the solutions is PART of the puzzle, that might help make that more enjoyable.   

I hope I can talk Charlie and Allison into playing more cases from this book; I think there’s some fun puzzles here, but I hope we can just get over the frustrations when expressing the puzzle solutions.

 

LA-1: The Heat Is On! A Solo and Cooperative Review

Welcome to the Detective Month here at CO-OP Gestalt!  This month, we take a look at several new games in the cooperative detective genre!  We begin the month with a Richard Launius design!

LA-1 is  cooperative cyber adventure and exploration game in a post-apocalyptic future with hints of the detective noir genre.  This was #2 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2025!  We were really looking forward to it! 

This was originally on Kickstarter back in Oct/Sep 2024, promising delivery in August 2025.  My Kickstarter copy arrived in January 2026, so about 6 months late.

So, this is not a detective game per se; see the back of the box as the game fully admits “LA-1 is not a deduction game, but a story-driven cooperative adventure …” There’s a lot of thematic detective things like clues, stakeouts, and police, but this is not a deduction game but rather a story game! That means this would NOT end up on our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games or Top 10 Cooperative Light Deduction Games, but it might end up on our Top 10 Cooperative Storybook Games!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing/Gameplay

This is a pretty normal sized box: see Coke can above for scale.

I ordered the Kickstarter version of this, which includes upgraded pieces, some minis, and a new case.

The base game itself comes with 4 case files for 4 cases: see above.   These case files give the flavor text, set-up, winning and losing conditions for each case.

The cases are on cards!  See above!  The game comes with over 800 cards in this box!  I want to emphasize this is where the story is in the game, on these cards.

For some reason, the cards were packed in reverse order that you might expect (1 is the very last card instead of the first?).  It’s not  big deal, but a little confusing on first unpacking.

Some cards are specific to cases (and marked by the case graphic: see above) and some are more generic.

Each player takes the role of one of the several cyber/noir roles in the game.  

The base game comes with standees and cardboard pieces for each character.

The deluxe version came with some plastic minis.  Eh, they are ok.  What they really needed was colored bases; I think the standees might be better for distinguishing the characters on the board because their colors are so distinct!  I am not sure you need the deluxe minis.

It is probably worth getting the Upgrade of the other components though!  Most of the base components (clue tokens, basic tokens, heat, etc) are all cardboard punchouts: see above.

The upgrade pack (which came with the kickstarter, and I think you can get separately) is probably worth getting!  These are some really nice wooden components!  

There are wooden heat tokens, plastic money, wooden Karma, … just really nice.  And you don’t have to punch them out!

Each character has their own deck: you can tell by the little icon in the lower left whose deck is whose.  As you can see above, there are different types of Skills in the game; and this game is all about the skill check!   Some characters are better at Mechanical checks, others better at Mind Checks, other better at Moxie … !   Each deck gives the character a different flavor.

See above as Tina Woo (Hacker) has her own deck!

Each character gets their own little board to keep track of resources; karma (karma is a resource!), money, passports (to get to the nice parts of LA), and heat tokens.  The back of each characters deck tells them what they start with.

There’s also a little flavor with each character (see bottom).

Each character also gets something called “Heat”: see the 5 tokens above.  Basically, it’s something you can trade in the game to get stuff done, but at a cost of bringing more interest upon yourself!  Play it safe, and you take no heat, but then it’s harder to get stuff done.  Take too much heat, and the cops rough you up!  You decide what’s the “right amount” of heat!

When a player is all set-up, you can see all the resources.  See above!  This is Tina Woo, and she’s a hacker!

Players explore the cyber-noir city of LA-1!  This is a huge 8-fold board that does NOT fit on my table very well!  See above with Coke Can for perspective!

There’s three parts of LA:  LA-1 (Old Angeles), LA-2 (Underworld), and City of Angels!  City of Angels is so exclusive, you have to get a passport to travel around there!

As players traverse the city trying to find out whodunnit, they will explore different locations in each part of the city. See Ashtown (jn Old Angeles) above.

This wouldn’t be a detective game of any flavor without clues!  There are CLUES (orange) which help you solve the mysteries, and basic tokens (which give you useful resources).  You need CLUES to solve the mysteries, but you need the BASIC tokens to keep your resources up! 

The clues are distributed all over the city!  See above as each Location in the city has “about” 4 tokens next to it!  Some are CLUES, some are basic tokens, and some are hidden so you don’t know what they are!

It’s not clear until you’ve played a little, but successful encounters at Locations allow you to (usually) take the top token at a Location!  If we have a successful encounter at the Mutant Warrens in Underworld (above), there’s a good chance we can take the CLUE (orange eye) at the top!  

Skill checks are resolved using the Fate deck and the player’s decks; we’ll talk more about those later.

The game  is somewhat on a timer; see the Darkness track above.  If the darkness marker ever gets all the way to the right; game over and you lose!

The Darkness track typically advances every other turn or so; it really depends on what comes up in the Darkness deck!  Many time, the Darkness just advances.  See above. But you also get to make choices, maybe you want darkness to advance in exchange for a clue you really need!  Most Darkness cards come with choices!!! See above  as you can choose to move to any Location and grab the top token (which could give you a CLUE you desparately need), but it costs extra darkness!

Every case is very different, but typically you do Detective-like thing like show Motive, Means, and Opportunity!

If you can solve the case before time runs out, you win!  There are usually several other ways to lose as well …

The game has a great production, especially if you get the token upgrades. See above.  To be clear; you will need a LOT of table space for this!!

Rulebook

The rulebook is generally ok.

My main complaint with the rulebook is the form factor; it gets  D- on the Chair Test!  It droops over the edges, being almost unusable on the chair next to me.  It barely works, which is why it doesn’t fail completely, but the “rulebook as large as the game box” needs to go the way of the Dodo Bird.  Please publishers, make rules reasonable sized so we can open them without needing a giant table!

The Components page was good enough: see above as it shows components and some correlating text so you know what’s what.

The set-up seemed a little squished onto one-page; see above.  It works, and steps are notated, so it’s good enough.

The set-up drifts into the next page, and that doesn’t work as well. Each case defines its own Set-Up and this was a little more unclear.  I would have the first “recommended” case have more info … maybe a first play guide like we’ve seen in many games.

The rulebook packs a lot of stuff in just a few pages. There are pictures but I wish there were a few more.

There is a nice summary on the back … which I used maybe once in the solo game and never in the cooperative games.

The rulebook is ok.  It teaches the game. I feel like this rulebook probably should have had an index: there are a lot of subsystems within the game, and an Index would have made it a little easier to navigate. 

One-Shot Game?

What I mean by asking this?  Most Detective games are “one-shot” games! Once you have played the game, you know the solution so you can’t really play it again!  The solution is indelible imprinted on your brain (that’s the legacy part), so you can’t play it again!  Is LA-1 one of these games?  

So, should I be worried that I am giving spoilers by showing some of the case cards from the game?  Yes and no!

Each case will have a basic outline which is nominally the same, but it will change when you play it.  How?  The cases are in the cards, and there are multiple versions of some cards!  See above as there are two 42 cards!  Sometime during the game, you will be given the instructions “take a Random 42 card”, and the card you take will cause a different path!   So the game will NOT be the same every time!  Sure, you can choose the exact same cards next time, but it’s unlikely.  It felt like there were about 12-15 points where the game could take a different path (by taking a different card).

So, there is a case, it has an outline, and it even has multiple outcomes.  But it’s not a detective game.  You aren’t trying to use your deductive reasoning like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (“Hmm.  There’s ice on the floor.  Clearly the murder weapon!”).  You aren’t being smart like Poirot or Sherlock or Father Brown or any of your favorite detectives to solve cases.  You are more “exploring” this world and this case, and trying to do well on Skill Checks!  Successful Skill Checks reward you with “progress” on the case.   

The text that comes out during the game is very thematic, as there is an outline to this case!  It does have a bit of a solution.  But, it’s exploration and skill checks that keep this game moving forward, not “Sherlock smarts”.

An analogy that will come up again and again: this game reminds me SO MUCH of Arkham Horror: 2nd Edition.   In Arkham Horror, you explore the city so you can kill monsters and close gates.  In LA-1, you explore the city so you can find things to solve cases. 

LA-1 is an exploration game with a detective theme, but it’s not a detective/deduction game.

Solo Play

So, LA-1 does support solo play! Congratulations on following Saunders’ Law!

It’s not true solo play, as you must play two characters and alterate between them: see rules above.  It’s very clear what the solo rules are and I applaud LA-1 for being so clear on this!

My first solo game was playing Tina Woo (hacker) and Roni Mace (investigator).  Usually, I put my characters side to side, but I ran out of room!  That 8-fold board of the city is SO HUGE it took up too much room!  

This was a bit of an ordeal, trying to operative two characters in my space!  See above!

I got a lot of rules wrong as I figured it out.  The rulebook is ok.

I was able to get a couple of solo games together before teaching my friends. There is quite a bit of maintenance as you play; it’s a little much to play 2 characters, but that load feels less and less heavy the more you play. To be clear, there is a lot of flavor text on the cards, and a lot of directions on the cards, and a lot of systems in this game (CLUE bag, BASIC bag, damage system, fate resolution, Location actions, darkening Locations, advancing darkness, dealing with heat, karma, money, passports, etc etc). It’s probably gonna take about 2 to 3 plays to really get the game down. My first two solo games were about 2 to 3 hours each. Granted, they were learning games, but LA-1 feels more like a 2 to 3 hour for the solo game than a 90-120 minute game. Especially if you are trying to read all the flavor text and immerse yourself into the game.

Did I have fun as a solo player? Yes. Will I come back to it and play it solo again. Maybe?

Cooperative Play

I think LA-1 is a better cooperative game than solo game!  For me at least, the game feels a little more immersive as I play just one character and interact with my friends.   The solo game makes you play two characters, but it’s usually a lot more fun when you can inhabit ONE character and become that character for a game!

See my friends smiling and laughing as we play!  We typically (as a group) really like storybook games, and this game really tickled our fancy.

If the solo game were harder to play because there’s more maintenance per turn, then the cooperative game shares the maintenance load and makes it easier to play!  See above as Andrew reads Sara’s storycard!

As a group, we enjoyed this.  I mentioned that there’s a campaign (you can play the 4 cases of the box in a full campaign), and my group seemed very interested in continuing our adventure!

The game was very interactive as we all shared the story, the reading duties, and the load for set-up and tear-down.   

This was a fun cooperative game.  The only real downside is that this game has a lot of systems and subsystems to maintain (Fate deck, karma, money, Locations, Skill deck, etc), so it might be harder to teach this game to less experienced gamers.   Still, if you know what you are doing (play the solo game first), you can teach this fairly easily.

The Arkham Horror Comparison

This game feels so much like Arkham Horror: Second Edition!  And it should, as Richard Launius (one of my favorite designers) is also the main designer of the original Arkham Horror!  I don’t love everything he does (see our review of Freedom Five), but I generally like his designs (see our list of Top 10 Cooperative Superhero games with Batman: The Animated Series game and Top 5 Cooperative Games Of All Time!)

Let’s be clear; the theme is very different!  LA-1 has you hanging out in a cyber-world in a post-apocalyptic future world as a noir detective!  And Arkham Horror: Second Edition has you hanging out in a 1920s world, fighting horrors from the Cthulu mythos!   And yet, the core gameplay feels the same.

  1. Move around a world and search for stuff to help you: In AH, you visit places in Arkham, In LA-1, you visit places in LA.  
  2. Perform Skill Checks: dice based in AH, Fate deck based in LA-1
  3. Take Damage: hit points in AH, Damage cards in LA-1
  4. Read Thematic Text off Cards: In AH and LA-1, when you visit a Location, you read a card with thematic text (scary Cthulu stuff in AH, creepy cyber stuff in LA-1)
  5. Perform a macro-level Task to win: In AH, everything you do is in support of closing gates.  In LA-1, everything you do is in support of solving the case
  6. It’s a big game!  Both in board space, time, components, rules, both AH and LA-1 are big games!

This isn’t meant to be a ding against LA-1, not at all!  Arkham Horror: Second Edition is one of my favorite games of all time!  See discussion here of my Top 5 games of all time, and a discussion of what I want in Cooperative games!

Some people don’t like Arkham Horror: Second Edition because it is a little dated.  Does LA-1 fix these problems?  I think LA-1 does fix a lot of problems modern gamers might have with Arkham Horror: Second Edition.  Let’s take a look!

A Sense of What’s Coming

One of my favorite things that Arkham Horror: Second Edition does is that it gives you a “hint” of what kind of reward you might get at a Location!  See above at Walder, as you might get money ($) or an Item (gun).  If you are looking for money because you need to buy an Elder sign, or need a plain weapon to fight Horrors in the street, maybe you’ll choose to go to Walder? 

In LA-1, when you go to a Location, the card gives you a “hint” of what Skill check you might have to do there!  See above as the Mutant Warrens indicate you’ll “probably” need some mechanical skill or some punchees!  Tina Woo isn’t very punchee, so maybe she’ll suggest Mace goes there!  You can make decisions on what Locations to visit to go based on what Skill you might need!  What you might get at the Location is “generally” the top token (but not always).

So, when you visit the board, you have a better sense of whether or not you’ll succeed because you know what Skill cards you have ready!  

You can make a much more informed choice of places to visit based on what skills you have in hand, and what the Locations offer!  And this feels very thematic; “I knew, going to the Mutant Warrens, I might have to get into a fight to get any information … but I was ready for it.”  

In some ways, this is an improvement over AH because you have a better sense of whether or not you might succeed, based on your cards and hints on the Location!  You will “probably” get the top token, so you also have a sense of what you’ll get!   There are also lots of places in LA-1 where you can “flip” or “swap” tokens to have a better sense of what you get!

“Sometimes you spend your time just trying to find out what information you need to even find a clue.  It’s just the life of an investigator.  It’s just the way of life for us.”

It doesn’t feel like just random exploration: you have hints of what you will get, and that makes it feel like your choices matter.

Fate Deck vs Dice

One of my least favorite things about Arkham Horror was how all skill checks depended on a roll of the dice. There were clues to help mitigate that, but in the end, you just rolled dice.  I remember one game of Arkham Horror extending to 6 hours because of 1 bad roll … and everyone just sort of died inside.  What should have been a 3-hour game (which is still quite long) became a 6 hour game. Oi!

But Skill checks in LA-1 feel much less debilitating and random via using the Fate deck now.  It’s just a little deck of cards, and it’s basically some randomness (plus or minus) to a skill check.

A Skill Check usually comes form an encounter.  See above as I can choose to do a Mind (6) or Moxie (5) test.

Looking at my hand of cards, I think I have a better chance with Moxie rather than Mind, so I discard two Moxie (1) cards to give me a base of 2.

I draw from the fate deck; I always keep the first card (see above as I add another +1), but since the card matches the test (Moxie), I can keep drawing!  

I draw until I don’t match anymore … oooooh, bad luck … -2 Fate.  So, my test fails. 1 + 1 (two cards) + 1 (Moxie fate card) + -2 (Fate -2 card_= +1.  I fail

If you have Karma tokens … you can discard one to keep drawing and ignore that last -2 Fate cards!   Karma tokens from LA-1 remind me of Clue tokens from Arkham Horror: you can discard them after the checks have been made to keep going!

What I like about this system is that you have choices along the way: if it’s clear you CAN’T make the Skill check, you can try to mitigate the resource cost and not invest any Skill Cards or Karma tokens: you just take it.  But, if you really really need that test to succeed, you can use Karma and special abilities, and others can help you (of in the same Location or maybe even same CIty Block).   But of course, if you went to a Location that needed Brain and you had NONE, that’s your choice!  

This Fate Card system is a little more complex than rolling dice (and it takes a few tries to explain it and get it right: “Wait, I keep drawing because I matched the test?”), but this system gives you choices and decisions (rather than just rolling dice and spending clue tokens from Arkham Horror).  I feel like this is a major improvement for resolving Skills checks in the world of gaming.

 

Storybook Game

The card below is a little bit of a spoiler, but out of context, it’s not too bad.  I show it below to show you how much story is on the cards in this game.

This is absolutely a Storybook game like Vantage from last year (see our review here) or any of the games in our Top 10 Cooperative Storybook games! 

Players read cards to each other as they choose what kinds of skill checks to make and advance to story!

One of our favorite things about Storybook games (and what we loved about Vantage) was reading story to each other!  See above!  This keeps everyone involved as one person reads one person has to make choices, and everyone else hears the story unfold!

I think if you saw that cover, you would NOT think that this is a storybook game!  “Oh, it’s s detective game!”  Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.  This is definitely a storybook game with lots of text to be read!  You can choose to read your own encounters, but’s it a lot more fun and interactive if everyone reads aloud!   The story becomes shared as we team of investigators try to figure out what’s going on and share this adventure together!

Replayability

This is a little more replayable than most story games because the story cards can come out randomly. See above as there are multiple #3 and #5 cards!  The story you experience depends on which #3 and #5 card you draw!

 

Heat

One last thing I want to mention is the Heat system.  This worked so well!  Players can CHOOSE to take Heat to move the game forward faster (“Hey, if I take some Heat we can get a CLUE sooner”), but taking Heat will likely have some repercussions later in the game!  Taking Heat is just adding tokens to the Heat space (see above).

Many Bad News (Darkness)  cards will target players with too much heat, making the Bad News even worse!  But, you can “lay low” for a turn to reduce your Heat.

Each player starts the game with 5 Heat (see Heat tokens above), but taking Heat is almost always a choice.  And you can always “lay low” for a turn (so thematic in a Detective Noir game!) to lose Heat.

Heat is a really neat mechanism that is thematic, adds tension to the game, but it is still a choice; you have to deal with the consequences of taking too much Heat …  but maybe you have to take Heat to get the case solved!  

Campaign Game

So, there is nominally a campaign here: you can play the games in order and keep a few of the cards between games.

And you gt a few extras too.

But honestly, it’s not really much of a campaign with lots of “continuing story”.  It’s more of an excuse to continue play all the cases in the box.  I have to tell you, I am surprised how much my friends wanted to continue playing this (kinda lame) campaign.  When you are enjoying the experience, I guess any excuse to keep playing will keep you going!  So, the campaign, while not “too campaigny” (in terms of story or holdovers), it was an excuse to keep playing.

Conclusion

I think LA-1 might be a Hidden Gem!  Unfortunately, it’s Kickstarter only had 597 backers, and it only made $68,000 … which is not a lot of money in board game Kickstarters.  But if you like the theme and like Storybook games, this is a fantastic game!  There’s plenty of choice and hints in the game that the exploration of this Cyber-Noir world feels directed and fateful, and not just random.  And the mechanisms of the game (Heat, Fate deck) make the Skill checks seem like that have much more agency than a random die roll!  You still have choice, even if sometimes things go against you!

Be aware that this is NOT a Detective game (like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective), but more of an exploration and Storybook game!  I admit I was a little disappointed that this wasn’t a detective game … it’s more of a detective-themed story book game.  Just be aware of what this is before you jump in.

As a cooperative game, me and my friends really enjoyed LA-1; enough to engage in the Campaign game over 4 Cases!  The choice, the story, the gameplay, makes this a 8.5/10.  I like the solo game, but this is much more fun to play with my friends reading and sharing, so I’d give the solo game 7/10; it still works, but the shared story among friends is what makes this great. UPDATE: this might even drift to a 9/10 for the cooperative game!

If you know what Arkham Horror: Second Edition is and loved it, I think you will really enjoy LA-1 as well!  LA-1 has the same feel as AH in many ways, even if the theme is completely different.  If you didn’t like Arkham Horror: Second Edition because it was too random or too long, you might still like LA-1; it takes a lot of the mechanisms that lengthened/randomized games of Arkham Horror … and fixes them.

 

Appendix: Remembering Arkham Horror: Second Edition

For many people, Catan was the modern game that brought them into the hobby.  For me and my friends, it was Arkham Horror: Second Edition.   It was complex, overwrought, way too thematic, but we adored it!  It was a cooperative game before cooperative games were popular.  Many people say it was Pandemic who introduced them to cooperative games; for us, it was Arkham Horror: Second Edition.  And Arkham Horror: Second Edition came out BEFORE Pandemic! 

There are some things that Arkham Horror: Second Edition still does a little better than LA-1.   For one, the city feels like a city!  When you need to get it healed, it’s clear you need to go the Hospital!  When you need sanity, it’s clear you go to the Sanitorium!  When you shop you go to the General Store!  It was intuitively clear, based on the board, where to go.  LA-1 doesn’t quite have that intuition; it almost feels like a Worker Placement game (partly because you can do actions on spaces) than a city.

The thematic immersion in Arkham Horror was also a little more complete; the monsters wandering the streets, the other world encounters, the spells, the closing of gates, it just felt … a little more immersive.  And these characters felt a little more real; I can still tell you the name of my favorite character: Mandy Thompson.   Something about this game was magic for us.

I think LA-1 is a better modern game than Arkham Horror: Second Edition; it’s less random, more streamlined, cleaner systems, and modern sensibilities.  Yet, there’s something magic in Arkham Horror: Second Edition that anything has yet to capture.  

The Peak Team: Solo and (kinda) Cooperative Review

The Peak Team is a cooperative game for 1-5 players.  This feels like a pick-up and deliver game, as you traverse a map trying to reach flags; strictly speaking,  BGG doesn’t classify this as a pick-up and deliver (see here) but more hand management and pattern movement.

It’s also odd that the BGG entry lists the name of the game as The Peak Team, but the cover clearly seems to show The Peak Team Rangers?  Shrug?

This is a game about players working together to traverse a map and find animals!  The first few games, we joked, were like Pokemon!  Find them all!  You are traveling around a map to complete missions and, along the way, record seeing some animals!  A very fun theme!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

The box is a little smaller than normal; see above (with Coke Can for scale)

There are two rulebooks; basic rules and then advanced manual: see above.

There’s a little bit cardboard to punch out.  The carabiner hooks are pretty thematic for a game about traversing the wilderness.

There’s a really neat map: it has two sides!  One side for 1-3 players, one side for 4-5 players.  The map is easy to read and well-notated.

The most important piece in the game are the Supply Cards!  See above. These are nice linen-finished cards that are the heart of the game; they are multi-use cards that players discard for actions.

There’s simple Missions cards which note Missions a ranger might be undertaking.

There’s also some nice player aids.  Note that this game has 5 levels (!) of play.  We’ll discuss that later.

There’s some player mats (above) with unpunched tokens.

There’s some neat little wooden flags, wooden player tokens, and wooden marker.  These really look nice on the board. See above.

Overall, the components are pretty great; they are easy to-read, well-notated, and have a fun zingy quality to them.

Rulebook

We need to get this out of the way; this is one of the worst set of rulebooks I have read in a while.  They have three major failings.

First of all, these rulebooks completely fail the Chair Test!  Each rulebook is some sort of weird multi-fold rulebook that is impossible pull apart.  It’s not a rulebook with staples; it’s 4 pages in a weird quad-fold.  This is SO HARD to access!  I can’t really set it on the chair next to me, it totally droops!  The font is pretty small, so that doesn’t help.  It does have a lot of pictures, but that doesn’t save it.  This rulebook is almost unusable.    I can’t emphasize enough how horrible this form factor is.

Secondly, splitting this up into two rulebooks seems a weird choice.  The solo rules are in the second rulebook, but the solo mode requires you knowing all about how base game plays.  Each of these rulebook is clunky enough with it’s weird quad-fold, but now, when I go looking for rules, I have to scan two horrible quad-fold rulebooks?

I think abstractly, I like the idea of slowly building game that gets harder and harder, but breaking all those rules into two rulebooks (with rule text scattered everywhere) just makes it that much harder to learn.

Finally, the rules just seem poorly organized and missing some edge cases.  I feel like they did everything they could to make the rules on as few as pages as possible, with a tiny font, and tiny examples you can barely read.  And the solo mode is the worst; the way they solo rules are set out, you can’t “really” play the solo mode until you absorbed ALL the rules of the 5 base games.   The solo mode was just so poorly specified, I had to just make a few judgement calls to move forward.

Let’s be clear: most of the rules are in the rulebook (modulo a few edge cases), so you can pick-up these rules and get through a game.   The set-ups and components lists are fine.

This was a horrible set of rules: the form-factor was terrible, the decision for multiple rulebooks seemed a mistake, and the poor organization was frustrating (especially the solo mode).  BUT you can learn the game.

Once you know this game, you can look back on learning the game as a distant nightmare.  I got through it.  Done.

The real question is; once you know the game, is it a good game?  That’s an interesting question!

Gameplay

The crux of the game is going around the board trying to get your missions (notated by a flag on the board) done.  You get your mission done by moving to your flag.

You discard supply cards to move along paths (each card tells you which path you can take and how far: see above).  These are multi-use cards; you can also discard the card to “record” an animal!  Find them all!!!

You can see a game in mid play (above) as the flags notate where each ranger needs to go!  And you can also see the paths: each one different.  The colors of the Locations indicate which animals are in the area; if you have an animal card of the right color for your spot, you can discard it and see it!

To win, you need to get all your missions done AND see all the animals!

The game graduates from level 1 to level 2 to level 3 to level 4 to level 5!  Each new level adds new mechanism(s) which make the game more challenging: more bad stuff, more good stuff, more mechanisms, more choices!  By the time you get to level 5, you are playing the full game with Special Missions, Weather Events, special Powers, Wildlife with special powers, and road blockers!

Solo

So, The Peak Team does have a solo mode; thank you for following Saunders’ Law!  See above as the Advanced Manual has an entire section on it.

Unfortunately, this solo mode is a “variant” of the base game: you have to read the full rules for the base game (for ALL FIVE LEVELS) to play the solo game.   See above! This was very frustrating.   I muddled through the base game rules for level 1 and had to figure out which rules did/didn’t apply for the solo game.

The solo rules are there (see above) and I did get through them, but the experience with this rulebook was (again) sub-optimal.

The solo game has the solo player take control of 3 rangers on the board.  See above.

The solo player then puts out a grid of 12 cards (3×4 for row-major).  See above.  This is a shared hand (among all three rangers) for the rangers to do stuff.  Note how you can see some of the cards, but not all of them!  The hidden cards will be revealed as you take other cards below, but you still have enough information to make some plans (as you can see the cards at the top).  Cards MUST be taken from the bottom of some column to play it.

The game starts with each ranger having a starting mission; they need to go to that Location to complete their Mission!

To get more missions, some ranger has to end his turn on Ranger station, and then Missions can be doled out. Note that each ranger can “only” have two missions at a time!

Once the solo player decides he’s done, he can stop and go to the next round, exposing new missions.   Remember, however, that all missions must be completed to win, so the missions simply move up to the next day!  And if too many missions are unsolved between rounds, you also lose.

The solo player soon learns to do the bare minimum to not take any penalties, because he can keep cards from previous round!  See above: We have an extra card leftover from the previous round, so the next round will have 13 cards (instead of 12) to be able to do more!

You start the game of Level 1, the simplest mode.  Once you feel comfortable with that game, the next level adds a few rules and makes the game more challenging.   I generally played about two per games per level; the first game was a learning game where I wold lose horribly, but then the second game typically felt like a comfortable win.  I think I played 12 games overall in the solo mode!

I want to make sure this is clear; I wanted to play all those 12 games in the solo mode!  This was a real fun solo mode!  I felt like I had lots of choices (but see House Rules below for more discussion), and I really enjoyed traversing the board to get all my missions done!  There’s a lot of fun decisions; When do I travel?  Who travels?  Do I discard 4 symbols to get a wild so I can force a travel?  Do I pick up an animal because I am here, or do I wait?  Should I force a completed mission so I can have space for a future mission?  Because I am making decisions for 3 different rangers on the board, it always felt like some of the cards I had were useful to at least one of them!! But, it goes without saying that the game is definitely subject to the whim of the cards you get.

It turns out, because this rulebook is such a stinker, that I played a lot of rules wrong.  As I played my 12 games, I’d realize “Oh, I got that wrong” and “Oh, that seems dumb”.  By the time I played my 12th game, I think I had the rules correct.  But I also realized places I cheated, and frankly, some of my cheats made the game more fun.  I’ll note those in House Rules below.

I liked this solo mode a lot.  I was excited to show my friends the cooperative mode!

Cooperative Mode

So, in many ways, the cooperative mode is a very different game than the solo game.

Each player takes the role of ONE ranger and will only have 4 cards to “do something” (keeping leftovers from previous rounds)   The cooperative game uses a form of cooperative drafting; each player gets 4 cards to distribute, passing 2 cards to their left and 2 cards to their right.   During this drafting phase, there is NO TALKING.  So, each player has to just look at the 4 cards they get, then try to decide what your neighbors need.  See above as Teresa passes 2 cards to me (her left neighbor) and 2 cards to Sara (her right neighbor).

Note: This is the same number of cards (4 x the number of rangers) as the solo game, but now the cards are evenly distributed among the players for their turns.

Abstractly, I thought this cooperative drafting would be a really neat idea!  But what happened was that me and my friends got very frustrated quickly.  First of all, there was no communication, so each player had to make choices for their friends.  What if it was the wrong choice?  I am now choosing what cards my compatriots play!  Let’s be clear; this means I AM BEING TOLD WHAT TO PLAY.  Because I have no choice in what cards I get, I have to play what I get.  Sure, this is a cooperative game.  Sure, my friends want to help me. But when I am playing, I feel like I lost some agency along the way; I can only play what I was given!  Even worse, what if my friends had terrible cards?

In the solo game (see above), I could usually apply my cards to at least one of 3 rangers on the board.  But now, in the cooperative game, each player is stuck with ONLY 4 cards, and may have a turn where they can do absolutely nothing.  With one ranger and four cards,  each player is much more at at the whim of the deck.

And what if my friends, when drafting, chose different paths for me?  My friends can’t talk, so they might choose different directions for me to go!  This feels like a dysfunctional family!  We can’t talk about what we can do, so we just do something.  That’s really not fun.

Another interesting part of the cooperative game; each player has a wild action, but you can’t use it directly; only your compatriots can use it (by asking).  You can always refresh your token by discarding 4 symbols.  It was kind of neat that you had this option asking someone else, but it was just so expensive to refresh.

So, my friends and played two Level 1 games one night.  We lost horribly the first game.  And frankly, we only did a little better the second game.  Nobody really wanted to play any more.

Besides the dysfunctional nature of the limited communication, we often found ourselves either overly constrained or simply at the whim of the cards and couldn’t do anything.

Overly And Arbitrarily Constrained

What do I mean by overly and arbitrarily constrained?  It often feels like you only have one choice or no choices many times during the game.

For example, when playing the Missions from a Ranger Station, you choose a person to take the mission and THEN choose the next mission!    You simply are stuck with the missions in the order given!  First of all, this severely limits your choices.  Second of all, it doesn’t seem thematic … I am at the ranger station giving out missions: I can’t see them all?  This just feels like an arbitrary constraint that does nothing but increase the randomness and make the game harder.

Another place: I can only have one animal token (with possibly special powers) at a time.  Why?  This seems like an arbitrary constraint just to force you to use the other animal powers before getting more, even if they aren’t useful.  It just seems like you have to “throw away” some animal tokens sometimes just to get the power of the next one.  What a waste!  I can’t even have two of these tokens at a time?  Dumb!

Another place:  For quite some time, I was under the impression that you could discard an animal to get it because the rules said “if you are on a location in the same region”.  My original reading of this was regions like in Pandemic Iberia, so that at (for example, see above) Location 6 I could get EITHER the deer or the lynx!  Nope!  It’s the color that makes that determination (and it is in the rulebook) … even though 6 is in BOTH the regions.  I think this an artificial constraint; couldn’t it have been BOTH?  Give me more choice, don’t take choice away!!!!

Another place: The ranger station can only pass out missions at the end of the turn if you end there.  ONLY AT THE END.  If someone is on a ranger station, can’t you just distribute missions?  If someone is on a Ranger station at the start of their turn, what if that were their turn?  So, now to get missions distributed, you have to waste turns making sure someone ENDS their turn on a Ranger Stations when thematically, it seems like it should be an entire turn, or also be the start of the turn.   This one really made me mad; it seems very arbitrary.

House Rules

For the solo game, because the rules were so bad, I ended making a lot of calls to just move forward.  As I played more and more and understood the rulebook better, I got to know what the rules really were.   The more I learned the rules, the more annoyed I became with the game because of the arbitrary and overly restrictive constraints.  Here’s some House Rules that made the game more fun.

  1. If any Ranger is at a station, they can distribute missions.  It does not have to be the end their turn there.
  2. If you plan to distribute 3 missions, you may look at 3 missions and then decide how to distribute them.
  3. (optional) you can have at least 2 animal tokens with abilities

These are really House Rules more for the solo game.  This is (mostly) how I played the solo game, although I did play by the rules at the end … and I enjoyed the game a lot less when I played the rules they way they were meant to be played.

I have to admit, I think the cooperative mode just didn’t work for my group at all, so I don’t know if house rules would fix this game for me and my friends.

Conclusion

I am surprised how poorly the cooperative game of The Peak Team went for my group; so much so, that I can’t really recommend the cooperative game.  The dysfunctional communication rules and artificial and restrictive constraints just frustrated my group.  I can’t really call this a full review, because we never even got past level 1.  But it’s hard to move on to later levels when none of my friends thought the cooperative game was fun; they didn’t want to play again! My group was pretty unanimous with 5/10 for the cooperative game.

The solo game, on the other hand, was quite fun!  I found myself playing over and over and over and having fun playing 12 games to get to Level 5 of the game!  I “accidentally” had some House Rules (because the rulebook is so bad) that made the game more fun; with my House Rules, I’d probably give this an 8/10.  As-is, the solo game is still fun, but it’s too artificially and overly constrained, so it would be 7/10 as written; still enjoyable, but could be better.

I wanted to like this more.  I can’t recommend the cooperative game, but maybe that’s just my group.  Maybe you and your group will like it better.

Disparation: The Final Chapter? A Solo and Cooperative Review of the Sentinels of the Multiverse Expansion

I have a lot of reviews queued up to go out, but I really wanted to talk about this expansion a lot.  It means a lot to me, so it jumped the queue.

Never before has an expansion been so appropriately named: Disparation.  Why is that?  Because it is likely the final hurrah from the Sentinels of the Multiverse line of games!

To be clear; Disparation is an expansion for  the Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition; this is the most recent and modern version of Sentinels of the Multiverse.  For a full discussion of different versions (1st, 2nd, definitive), see a link to our review of Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition here.

In April 17th, 2025, Flat River Group (who owns the Sentinels of the Multiverse line of games and Greater Than Games) announced that they were essentially shuttering the business.  Essentially, there were shutting down the company in response to the tariff crisis: see link here.  The wording suggests that maybe they can come out of it, but it’s unclear. In a recent visit (in 2026) to my FLGS, I asked them about Greater Than Games, and they said “No, they’ve shut down”.

Now, as someone who had kickstarted (well, it was on BacketKit) the Disparation expansion  back in something like March 2023, I was concerned!  Would this mean they would just abandon this?  It had already been 2 years since the BackerKit project, and the project seemed to be taking forever.

In fact, one of the Updates about the time of the announcement indicated that they had just starting printing the expansion, but then shut it down?!!?!  Over the past year or so since the announcement, me and other backers of Disparation have been on pins and needles.  Would Disparation be abandoned in light of the current situation?

As you might guess, we finally got some good news back in September in this update!!  It was printing and would be delivered in Q2026!  So, on January 18th, 2026, my copy of Disparation finally arrived: see above!   I was overjoyed! I never thought I’d see this!

I do not know what the status of Greater Than Games/Flat River Group currently is.  I was a BackerKit backer and got my copy, but I don’t know if this will ever see retail.  If you see it somewhere, pick it up!  It may very likely never come back in print (at least, that’s the current feel).

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

Strictly speaking, this unboxing started ALMOST TWO YEARS ago!  Waaaaay before they had the tariff crisis, I was sent all the sleeves for the game!  That’s right, two years before the game itself arrived, I had the sleeves … waiting on a box (see above).  I put the sleeves with the original Sentinels of the Multiverse token box to remind myself WHAT these sleeves were for!  See above!

But, once I brought the game to my game room, it was 2:06pm.

In fact, I had gotten the foil cards and the Disparation box and sleeves for it.

See Coke can above for scale.

There’s a number of punchouts for this: most of these are little hit point wheels for the Ennead Villain set!

One of the bigger Villains in this set is the Ennead!  See above! There are (potentially) 9 Bad guys that may emerge as you fight the Ennead!!  So, this set includes 9 more spinners to note hit points.

These hit point spinners were a little clumsy to build, and they are a little clumsy to use.  You have to hold one of the wheels down with your fingernail while you spin the other wheel.  Not ideal.

But most of this expansion is cards: cards, cards, cards!

There’s 6 new Heroes, with 6 new hero decks and new Giant Hero cards!  (One of the heroes is a set of two twins called Darkstrife and Painstake, but they are officially one hero deck and one hero).  If you know the original 1st/2nd edition of Sentinels of The Multiverse, all of these heroes are familiar … except Darkstrife and Painstake are new.

Each new Hero actually has three base Hero cards for slightly different starting Powers!  They use the same Deck, but the starting power varies slightly! See Parse above with her three different multiverse characters!

And See Visionary above!

There are 5 new environments (anyone who has played the 2nd edition will recognize all of these).

There are Principles cards: these allow a slightly different way where you must adhere to some basic Principles as you play.  It sort of gives your character a direction/sense of how it should be played.    You don’t have to play with these; they are optional.  (They don’t change the game THAT much).

There are nine new Villains(!) !  That’s right!  Nine!  Those of you familiar with 2nd Edition will recognize most of them, but Grimm, Necrosis, and Ruler of Aeterna are all brand new villains.  See above.

Of course, there are giant cards to note the Villains. See above.

There are also Event cards which explore the Sentinels comics lore; they mostly set-up some special fights with special powers and rewards.

There are also Critical Event (cards) which are like Events, but replace the Villain with alternate version of said Villain; these are usually much harder fights.

As well as Hero variants for this set, there are plenty of variant Heroes from other sets!  See above!  (To be clear, I am showing the FOIL versions of these cards, not the ones that came with the game … these are the exact same cards, except for the foiling.  See more discussion of FOIL cards below).

There are also 1st appeareance variants, which allow you to play a hero with yet a different variant!

There are a TON of cards in here, and they all look cool.   I have to admit, this set feels a little … dark?  The vibe, the art, the basic heroes all seem a little .. darker than the base game.

The Sleevening

This is definitely a game that has a sleevening event.  (We coined this term way back in when we unboxed Obliveaon!  See link here!)

The worst part of this was putting sleeves on SO MANY cards!  Remember how I said I starting the unboxing at 2:06?

By the time I finished sleevening the game and finishing the unboxing, it was 3:48!  An hour and 42 minutes! Oi!

I’m of two minds about sleevening this game.  For one, I like it, because it protects the cards and I can enjoy years of play without worrying about wear and tear!

On the other hard, the sleeves make the cards much more slippery and harder to manage! See above as one slip-up caused all the cards for Parse to go everywhere!  The sleeves are just slippery!

The good news is that the game fits well (if a little snug) into to the box.  See the Villains above!

The Heroes and Environments fit pretty well!

And the rest of larger cards sit pretty well in the bigger compartment.

It all fits when sleeved, if a little tight. See above.

Foil Cards

As part of the BackerKit, you could get an optional set of Foil Card versions of all the large cards.  Basically, all the big cards have foil versions of them: see above.

It’s harder to see the foiled cards (see above) and how cool they look in my pictures!  See above as I try (and fail) to capture how cool the foiled versions look!

Do you need the Foil versions?  Not at all, and in fact, some people don’t like the foil versions of the cards because they think they are harder to read.  I STRONGLY disagree with that sentiment!!! I LOVE LOVE LOVE the foil versions!  They look so comic-booky, and capture the “foil versions” of comics from the 90s.   They also just have a cool table presence.

You do  NOT need the Foil cards; the game works fine without it.  I personally think the foiled cards are one of the coolest upgrades ever for any game, but especially for a superhero game like Sentinels of the Multiverse.  Decide for yourself; see above with a bunch of the foil cards laid out.

I also think that Marvel Champions is missing an opportunity; it would be so cool if Marvel Champions had foil cards AND oversized Hero/Villain cards like Sentinels of the Multiverse. Can you imagine how cool a foiled, giant Iron Man card would look???

Solo Play

We always get a little nostalgic when we discuss solo play for Sentinels of the Multiverse!  It was actually the original 1st edition of the game that made us coin Saunders’ Law!  The 1st edition did not have a solo mode, so we had to make one up!  It was our frustration with that which made us grumpy and said “there should be a law that all cooperative games should have a good solo mode!”  We were being a little silly, but it stuck.

The definitive edition has a solo mode; you must play three heroes.  Admittedly, this solo mode is a little clumsy because Sentinels of the Multiverse has a learning curve (it’s always had this learning curve;  you have to play a super hero deck a number of times to learn that hero), and throwing three new heroes at the solo player can be daunting!

So, it’s harder to recommend this as a solo game for newer gamers, but frankly, I think I have played Sentinels of the Multiverse solo more than any other game.  I have played it THAT many times (to be fair, that includes the app).  The solo game works great, just be prepared to read lots of cards to get a sense of everything.

 

Inspires A Story

What I like about Sentinels is how it inspires a different story every game. There’s a story in the set-up, what characters you choose, what environment you choose, what Villain you choose. And then there’s the story that unfolds as you play!

The Dreamer of Silver Gulch

“The Chrono Ranger is a cosmic ranger who wanders the multiverse seeking to help others.  He found an old Western town in trouble named Silver Gulch … it was a little girl who was having nightmares.

The townfolk were scared of this little girl .. they called her The Dreamer, but the ChronoRanger knew it wasn’t the kid’s fault; he had to help her.  He knew who to call to help her.

Darkstrife and Painstrike are brother and sister who knew the torment of bad dreams and what it does to little kids, having experienced their own in life.  He knew they’d want to help.

And then there’s Visionary.  She’s a little unstable, but her mental abilities would be perfect for helping this little girl.

ChronoRanger, Darkstrife and Painstrike, and the Visionary were an eclectic team, but they all wanted to help this little girl!  It was surprising how well they worked together, given how diverse they were!  Darkstrife and Painstrike were constantly pushing themselves too hard and discarding so much of their essense, but Visionary helped them find new energy and new avenues by constantly feeding them new ideas (and cards!).  ChronoRanger was the glue that held them together, just constantly keeping the pressure on the monsters in the little girl’s dreams! 

In the end, these heroes saved a little girl by keeping her nightmares in check .. and Silver Gulch, the town where she lived!

The Dreamer was just one of many stories that emerged as a I played 5 or 6 solo games over the first week of getting this!.

 

 

New Rulers

As Darkstrife and Painstrike finished helping the Dreamer, they were called BACK to their own realm of nightmares!  It’s time for a new battles for the realm of Aeternus, and Darkstrife ad Painstrike, having been from Aeturnus are called back!

The twins know they need no nonsense to keep the Ruler of Aeternus under control, so they call on KNYFE!  She’s no nonsense!

And even though Parse is a little goodie-goodie for their taste, her ability to see into the heart of any situation is needed! 

Can there heroes keep the new Ruler of Aeternus from branching out into our world?

The battle rages to be the new ruler!  Parse and KNYFE help keep the rulers under control, but it’s Painstrife who knows the way to end this; kill all combatants AT THE SAME TIME, so there is no one left to become a ruler!

After the battle rages, it ends anti-climatically with all hopefuls to the throne being banished at the same time.    But that’s the best way this could have ended!

God fight!

An archeologist went to the Tomb of Anubis and accidentally summoned The Ennead!  But this created quite the clash of Gods as Anubis  also fought to break free as well!  The gods were fighting!  

Always monitoring the world for problems,Omnitron-X was first on the scene!  Knowing that magic and gods were outside his purview, he summoned help!

Darkstrife and Painstake were the obvious choices, since they had a background in the arcana!

And the Visionary followed!  

This was a battle for the ages and members of the Ennead kept getting summoned!  

And inside the Tomb of Anubis, this conflict kept spilling out!

Finally, after some heavy fighting, the heroes were able to keep only 7 of the 9 Ennead summoned, before taking them out!

Anubis and his tomb of minions were surprisingly helpful in keeping the gods under control, as they were lashing out all the time!  Normally, this lashing hits the Heroes, but with so many powerful Ennead in play,  Anubis was focused on the Ennead!

Somewhat surprisingly, it was The Visionary’s Dark Side that made the difference! 

Basically, Visionary would lash out at everyone when she was under stress, and the heroes were lucky it helped them more than hurt them!

Cooperative Play

Despite never playing any of these characters … my friends and I had a fun time fighting: Grimm!

“Let us tell the story of a group of Heroes who almost got lost in their own tale!”  For some reason, Grimm sounded like the Cryptkeeper from Tales from the Crypt … not sure why … And this is the kind of detail that emerges as you play and have fun with it!  

The Sheriff of Silver Gulch hung out the entire game!  He sounded like Sam Elliot.  And he helped keep the outlaws of Silver Gulch under control.

We made a lot of mistakes as we played, but we really had fun.

It took a while: 2.5 hours, because my friends had to read all their cards!  But we still had fun.  

The story that emerges, the voices that emerge, the silly vignettes that emerge … that is fun.  We cooperated well as different ways to change ROLES (a Grimm villain thing) came out, Visionary kept pumping up the cards, Parse would double some damage …. so many different ways to talk, cooperate, engage, and have fun.

And we stopped Grimm from being … well, grim.  We won!

Back on Top

Every game tells a story (see above as the heroes battle Necrosis! Ewww!).  I had forgotten how much I love this system.  It’s so easy to explain the basic gameplay, but there is so much variety in the environments and villains and heroes, that each game plays out so deeply and differently.

Recently, Marvel United had jumped to the top of my list!  It’s such a neat game!  

But, Disparation reminded me of all the subtle interactions and cooperations that can emerge from the game!  As I played new games, the joy of playing Sentinels emerged!

I had never really embraced Parse in the 2nd edition, but she was really fun to play!  She has some neat ideas!  And she seems like a bright character! 

And holy cow, Darkstrife and Painstake are so interesting to play! They are a little messy and complicated, but once you get the feel of this set of twins, they are fun to play!

And Visionary, who was more of a support character became SO INTERESTING with her Dark Side deck!  I was able to keep Visionary’s Dark Side under control when we helped the little girl, but her dark side was SO CRITICALLY IMPORTANT when we took on the Ennead!  She also worked so well with Darkstrife and Paintake; this was a cooperation I hadn’t seem before!  She kept the twins in cards so they could fully utilize their abilities!

I saw new ways of cooperating and interacting emerge as we played.  

I think Disparation reminded me how great Sentinels of the Multiverse is: it’s my #1 game again!

 

Things To Look Out For

Expansion: TO be clear, this is an expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition.  First of all, make sure you have the Definitive edition (not 2nd edition) if you want to pick this up.   Strictly speaking, you need the tokens and rulebook from the base game to make this work.  BUT, if you really wanted to, you could get away with this being a standalone game … all you really need are heroes, villains, and environments!!  And those are all in there!  The base game has hit point spinners and the rulebook … but if you really wanted to, you could use paper and pencil to keep track of hit points (I did that back in the 1st edition of the game) .. and of course, the rulebook is on-line.  So, you COULD play this as a standalone game if you really wanted to … but it’s probably better to just make sure you have the base game.

Foil cards: You don’t need the foil cards.  But, they are pretty cool. If you do pick this up, try to get the Foil cards at the same time! 

So much text!  I love this game, but I always warn people about this!! It takes a while to get to know a Hero deck before you can use it well; you have to enjoy the process of playing with a deck you don’t know and reading lots of text to get to the point where you feel useful!  If you don’t love that process, then this probably isn’t the game for you.

Conclusion

So, this expansion reminds me why Sentinels of the Multiverse is my favorite game of all time.  I love the art, I love the stories it inspires, I love the gameplay, I love the new ways that cooperation emerges.  There was a time when I didn’t love the art, but the art style has grown on me.

There is also so much content in this box: 9 villains (with many variants), 6 heroes (with many variants), 5 environments.    I love Marvel Champions too, but from a bang-for-the-buck perspective, Sentinels gives you so much more content.

I have to apologize for gushing about this expansion because I am not sure if this will be available outside the BackerKit kickstarter.  If you see it, pick it up immediately: it’s my favorite expansion in some time (and I have seen some good expansions).  And it may not be around much longer … which is too bad.  It’s probably my favorite expansion of the year: 10/10.