Tag: writing

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.

 

 

Designer’s Diary for Sidekick Saga

As we pass the 6th Anniversary of Sidekick Saga being on Kickstarter, let’s look back to the original design and development process! This was a labor of love for me; I have collected comics since I was 10 years old, and I think I still have every comic I every bought! I love comic books and Super Heroes! I wanted a cooperative Super Hero game with a story, as none really existed at the time!! Let’s look back and see how this design came about! For the record, all pictures in this diary are from my own personal comic collection! See below as I go hunting for comics!

Inspirations

But let’s jump in … what inspired Sidekick Saga?

Sidekick Saga started life from an inspiration in (surprise) a comic book: Future Imperfect by Peter David and George Perez.  There’s one very notable scene in Future Imperfect when Rick Jones, (the sidekick of the piece, and sidekick of many heroes like Captain America and Hulk), keeps the Maestro at bay using a collection of “artifacts”: Iron Man’s gauntlets, Captain America’s shield, Thor’s Hammer!

The sidekick, by being smart, was able to hold his own (with a little help) with the Maestro, an incredibly powerful villain!

The scene above, with its collection of items, stirred something within me … 

Another comic that inspired Sidekick Saga was the 1990’s Robin (by Chuck Dixon, Tom Grummett, and Scott Hanna). In this era, Tim Drake became the third Robin, and frankly, was the smartest of all the Robins! He figured out Batman’s identity! In this series, the Tim Drake’s Robin patrols Gotham without Batman, but has help from The Huntress, Oracle, and even Commissioner Gordon!  Tim Drake is mostly just a normal human doing the best he can to ward off evil, using his smarts and his fellow heroes to fight crime!  The cooperation of the Arkham Sidekicks was pivotal to their success!

Another unlikely source of inspiration was Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 5 finale.  Some SPOILERS: in the Season Finale, Buffy used pretty much EVERY WEAPON at her disposal, from other episodes in Season 5, to fight the big bad at the end! There was something familiar about this approach; it’s what Rick Jones did in Future Imperfect!  In this case, it inspired more of the idea that some important items persist from game to game.  It also kept alive the idea that “collecting stuff” was an important part to battling the big bad!

A final unlikely source of inspiration was a game called Seven Wonders.  You heard me. It was interesting that, at the time, my friends were very bi-modal on two games: they either loved Seven Wonders and hated Sentinels of the Multiverse or hated Seven Wonders and loved Sentinels of the Multiverse!  What if I could unite these groups and have the notion of cooperative drafting? What if, rather than working against each other in a drafting game, you could pass each other what we needed? This created the whole idea of Supply Lines: cooperative drafting, much like Seven Wonders (it even had a directionality of the Ages): see above.

Putting all these elements together served as the basis of Sidekick Saga: I wanted a cooperative drafting game (where players would pass each other cards they needed) where players explored the city looking for technology to help them fight the big bads! And every card should matter!  You might not think something matters (like stuff in Season 5 of Buffy), but then all of a sudden, it becomes important!

Leads and Legacy

As the development of the game progressed, I need to refine the exploration-type mechanic to the game.  For the Sidekicks to succeed, they had to find stuff (like Buffy or Rick Jones)!  Some stuff was incredibly useful, so it seemed like you had to “pay” for it somehow! This introduced the idea of Leads (originally they were called clues, but I was worried this might invoke too much of a Clue game comparison): if you hunt down enough Leads, you can find where Jor’s Hammer (I didn’t want to get sued), the Star Shield, or the Cave Warrior’s car (which looks nothing like the Batmobile) would be stored!    I originally considered the idea of having to have “different kinds of Leads“, but dismissed it quickly as it would too frustrating if you got the wrong types of Leads.  Leads were generic: if you got 6 Leads, you could get the Cave Warrior Car which would help you move around the city faster AND protect yourself!

We dubbed these very special Items as Heroic Items: these were very special items that were hard to find!  They might take three to six turns to get one of them during the game, so you didn’t want to lose them between issues!  So, Sidekick Saga became a “legacy” game when any Heroic Items you obtained persisted from game to game! 

Honestly, I really liked the idea of a story spanning multiple issues! It’s very typical of comic books of my era: a massive story would unfold over 4 to 6 issues of the comic!  Think of the amazing story that unfurled from Issues 1 – 4 of the original Wolverine mini-series!  Things would change massively from issue to issue, and what the heroes did really mattered! So, the idea of a legacy comic story was something I really really wanted to embrace.

(And the time Sidekick Saga was in development, there were NO Super Hero board games with an ongoing /legacy story)

In this case, each “game” would be an issue of a comic book series. What was the story? All the Super Heroes had disappeared!  What had happened to them?  All that was left were the under-powered Sidekicks!  Could these lowly Sidekick keep the bad guys at bay while they tried to solve the mystery of what happened to all the Super Heroes?  That was the story I wanted; that was the story that would make the Sidekicks take center stage!

So, Heroic Items, would persist from issue to issue. It introduced a tension; do heroes pursue Leads to get a Heroic Items, at the cost of making it harder to defeat the current bad guys?

To help alleviate some of this tension, The Leads became multi-use cards; you could either save them up to get a Heroic Item, or you could use them directly (Leads would also do something useful for you). This gave players more agency, more choice: they could pursue Leads, but could also just use them as needed (for immediate help or later help)!

Exploration

The exploration idea came from playing cooperative deck-building games like Aeon’s End; nine different things you could get! I liked cooperative deck-building games, but to me it always seemed an inversion of what I wanted: In deck-building games, you know what you buy, but you typically have no control over when it comes out!  What if you inverted that idea and made it so you don’t know exactly what you get, but once you get the cards, you can  play them whenever you want!?

That’s the idea of the city; each Location in the city has 8 cards, and those cards are “related” by a theme: The Police Station has Police cards, Rincon Labs has Scientists and Technology, The Suburbs have a lot of Research/Lead cards, etc. You have an idea what you will get, but maybe not exactly. Then, once you get stuff from a Location, you can play it whenever you want!

But through Heroic Items like the X-Ray glasses, you might have a little more control. And X-Ray glasses are an inside joke for anyone who grew up with comics; there were always ads for these things in the comics!

So, players move around the city and explore locations looking for technology and Leads to help them in their quest to take down the big bad!

Secret Identity and Hero Modes

Another thing I wanted was the tension of Secret Identity vs Hero form. The Secret Identity is absolutely am essential tool to keep the Sidekicks out of trouble!  (At the time I was exploring this idea, Marvel Champions had not come out yet, and to my knowledge, it was an original idea to have players go from Secret Identity to Hero and back. I documented my playtest here on my Unpub play of Sidekick Saga, which was 6 months before Marvel Champions was released; so, don’t go saying I copied Marvel Champions on this!)

But, I also wanted the Secret Identity mode to be useful; when you go into Secret Identity, you escape combat, but that’s also a main way to get Leads in the game!  The Secret Identity is all about doing research away from combat!! When you are in Secret Identity mode, you get BOTH a Lead AND a card on your Location!  But, of course, while you are doing this research, the Bad Guys are getting more and more powerful since you aren’t fighting crime!  It’s that tension you see in comics all the time! When do I go into Secret Identity mode to research (and stay out of the Bad Guy’s way) and when do I go into Hero mode to fight crime? That’s a big part of being a Sidekick!  It’s also a big part of the game!

I still remember a particular scene in The Amazing Spider-man #18 where Spider-man changes back to Peter Parker to escape the Sandman.  See above!

Those original Stan Lee/Steve Ditko Spider-man comics (which I read when I was a young kid), had quite the influence on me! I still remember those scenes! (I didn’t have the original Spider-man comics that are worth tons … I was just a kid! I just had the little collection of books : see above). But Peter Parker used his Secret Identity as a tool so many times in those early Spider-mans … I really wanted a mechanic like this this in the game to capture that!

Advancement

One of the funnest part of Dungeons and Dragons is leveling-up: I wanted to make sure there usually some notion of leveling-up between issues: new powers, new Heroic Items, new heroes, … something to give fun choices between issues! I also wanted to make sure losing wasn’t so devastating!

If the players lose an issue, then new items, new Heroic Items, new things are introduced into the game .. and they get to try again! I wanted this to be a self-balancing game; if it was too hard, then new stuff would come out to help the Sidekicks!

Protection Hierarchy

One of the final pieces of the puzzle was the Protection Hierarchy; I remember reading many Daredevil or Batman comics where the hero has to work from the bottom-up to uncover the network of the Kingpin/crime lord who is running the city! And typically, the phrase “Stop protecting your higher ups; they don’t care about you!!!” comes up when the good guys question the underlings … what if that were actually a mechanism?  What if you couldn’t actually even take out the bad guys higher up in the criminal network until you’ve “dealt with” with all of their subordinates?  What if the subordinates actually “protected” the higher-ups? 

And that’s exactly what the Protection Hierarchy is in Sidekick Saga: you can’t attack any upper level bad guys until you deal with the subordinates first!  The lower level bad guys protect the higher one! (But, of course, the upper level bad guys can do stuff to YOU … because it’s hard to be a Hero!)

Hacking

If there’s any one mechanism that is really inspired by the Robin or Birds of Prey comics, it’s Oracle and her hacking abilities.  

Oracle is a hacker who helps Robin (well, she helps the Dick Grayson Robin more, but that’s beside the point) by finding out information and “distracting” the bad guys with her hacking. How could we represent this idea in the game?  Delphi (inspired by Oracle) can hack the bad guys and put them into disarray!

 The idea of disarray is that the bad guy is so busy “dealing” with the results of Delphi’s hacks, they couldn’t do anything else. I loved the idea that even if you can’t take out a bad guy, maybe you can keep it out the way for some time. Thematically, the idea of “causing an alarm to go off”, “turning off the power in the building”, etc. are things that a hacker would do.  And what does it do?  It distracts the bad guy (puts them in disarray) for a few turns.

The idea of hacking was further improved by allowing hacking to bypass the Protection Hierarchy! Delphi can hack the upper level bad guys and keep them from wrecking the Sidekicks!

Art

I don’t love the art in most Super Hero board games: it always feels like they get artists who are great artists, but don’t “get” Super Heroes!!   It felt like they didn’t love Super Heroes like I did!  I just remember that I never loved a lot of the art of the first few Super Hero games I played, and I wanted something different for Sidekick Saga:  I wanted an artist who got Super Heroes.  I wanted someone who’s art really embraced that ethic!

One of my favorite parts of working on Sidekick Saga was working with the artists, especially Phil Cho!  I adored his art from Venom Assault (see BGG entry here) and his Deviant Art page showed that he really understood Super Heroes!   I contacted Phil, and he was very willing to  help out. 

To this day, the cover for Sidekick Saga is one of  my favorite pieces of art of all time, maybe because it has such personal meaning to me. Given more time, I would have had Phil Cho do all the art in the game, but I had promised my Kickstarter backers delivery quickly, so I did work with a few other artists to help out.

Christina Murphy did a fantastic job stepping up and “matching” Phil’s art! One of my favorite of her pieces is the army of snowmen! So creepy and so what I wanted!

I also had William Liberto help out, mostly with the Heroic Items: I wanted all the Heroic Items to have a similar and consistent vibe, and he did a  great job!

Final Thoughts

I am very proud of Sidekick Saga! It’s the game I wanted!  It’s a Super Hero game with an overarching story! It has exploration, it has cooperative drafting, it has every card being useful in one way or another (by being multi-use or directly useful), and it has ways for the Sidekicks to be clever in their combinations!  I play the entire Sidekick Saga at least one a year, and I am always happy that the game unfolds differently every time!  How could I use all the cards and powers I  had to defeat the bad guys?  It’s different every time!

I know Sidekick Saga didn’t have a great critical reception, but I am grateful to all my backers who supported the original Kickstarter and all the people who reached out to me over the years in support; thank you to all of you.