Month: February 2026

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.