Games Review

When I reviewed Copper, I mentioned how little I care for most episodic cop shows. The formula of catching a different bad guy every week is trite and unrealistic, and becomes painfully difficult to believe. Hell, some of those CSI shows are practically science fiction.

But The Wire is the kind of television that lets us know cop shows can be awesome. There's no formula. There are no neat ribbon-tied endings. There's no needless drama or hair-raising feats of derring-do. There are cops who do their jobs, and there are bad guys who do their jobs, and there are all the people affected by this cycle. And then there's the story.

If I had to pick one word to describe The Wire, it would be 'natural.' Everything about The Wire happens naturally, never forced, never gimmicky. The acting is superb. The story develops organically - there's no pre-determined ending, just the sort of cause-and-effect that actually makes things happen. Dealers sell drugs; cops go after them; people get killed. There are surprises and events that you didn't see coming, but they're not tricks or plot devices. The story can surprise you because life can surprise you.

The people who made The Wire did their research, too. The show feels real because the writers did more than just have a couple police on set. I have a cop friend who is also watching The Wire, and from the stories he tells me, I have absolutely no problem believing that the writers for The Wire have an exceptionally deep understanding of how actual police work.

For one thing, The Wire doesn't pretend that all cops are superheroes. It willingly acknowledges that lots of police are less than stellar human beings. Many cops are ladder-climbing political whores. Many more are just power-tripping bullies. And a bunch, a pretty fair-sized number, are damned serious about protecting and serving, and they're hamstrung by the fact that they are all government employees.

The Wire never shrinks from blatantly indicting what are otherwise sacred cows. Corrupt black politicians who trade on their race to keep them rich and in power. Police commissioners who are more concerned with looking good on paper than with stopping crime. Incompetent detectives who are only riding their desks until retirement. Reporters who will stop at nothing to get a good story - even if it means making it up themselves. I could keep going, but I might end up spoiling something.

However, just because some of the characters are assholes doesn't mean they're villains. The top brass might be fudging crime stats, but if they are, it's because the mayor's office is putting too much pressure on them. They might be decent guys who have to do what it takes to make ends meet. The detectives might have once been gung-ho crimefighters, but now they're jaded and exhausted by a system that lets complete outsiders tell them how to do their jobs (and often prevents them from doing it at all). Even the drug dealers, the guys we assume should be the bad guys, are often quite sympathetic. They're selling heroin because it's the only thing they know how to do.

Now, I've told you how well The Wire reflects real life, but that isn't enough to make a show this amazing. To make a series as powerful and brilliant as The Wire requires more than knowledge of how things really work. To be this good, the characters and the story have to be enthralling. And they are. Which at this point is probably redundant.

The trap into which most TV writers fall is a need to make the show more interesting than real life. The hero doesn't just get in a gun fight; he blasts away at four assassins and then leaps off a pier to save a drowning infant. Cops dive to the ground just as the car bombs fill the screen with brilliant orange explosions. Dramatic last-minute rescues and perfect one-liners are the mainstay of television cops - but they're just as make-believe as Lord of the Rings.

Real life is fascinating. I could tell you about how my grandfather was one of four pilots from an entire carrier who survived an air battle against the Japanese, how he floated in the Pacific for hours after giving his lift vest to a fellow sailor. Or I could tell you stories about how my old man called in artillery on the Viet Cong, or how he was badly wounded months later. Hell, I could tell you my own stories, about being in the middle of a bush war in Uganda or how my first girlfriend and I saw a man die. Real like does not need to be tricked-up to be interesting, and the writers of The Wire know that.

The Wire does more than just show us a believable story in a realistic setting. It goes the extra mile and makes it amazing. It makes you care about the people, the kids whose parents are drug addicts and the cops with the drinking problems. It punches you in the stomach and then holds your hair back while you puke. It shows us people - real, believable, natural people - and it makes you love them, even when you hate them.

And as if that wasn't enough, it makes you think. It makes you wonder what we could do differently. It makes you want to get involved. It makes you want to take up arms against a sea of troubles (although not in a Shakespearean-suicidal-tendencies kind of way). It makes you care, not just about the fictional characters you see on your screen, but about actual junkies and homeless people and embattled cops. It makes you want to find out more, and it makes you want to be more than a spectator in your own story.

I just finished the show last night, and I am equal parts glad to have seen it through to the end, and sad that there is no more to watch. It was moving and powerful and brilliant, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and always thoroughly enjoyable. I know I'm enjoying the afterglow right now, so my opinion could be colored by the recency of the experience, but I can't think of any television show I've ever seen than was as good as the Wire. From now on, every show I enjoy will have me saying, 'it was good, but it wasn't The Wire.'

I owe a special 'thank you' to readers who commented on my Copper review for turning me on to this amazing show. Hopefully someone will read this and say, 'man, I really need to watch that,' and then I will have paid it forward.

I recently conducted an extensive interview with the creators of Mage Wars to find out a little history behind the game. They told me that the game idea came from a 14-year-old boy who was looking through Playboy magazines and wondering what the girls would look like with magic undergarments and gnarly monsters. That horny teen mentioned to his father, who was a nerd, that he wished he could play a game where half-naked women fought awesome monsters and shot stuff with lightning. His dad, who was also horny, thought this sounded like a magnificent idea, and so they created Mage Wars.

That is not true. I did not interview the creators of Mage Wars. I talked with one of their marketing guys at a convention, but we mostly just talked about beer. I don't know if the randy teenage nerd story is real, but I kind of doubt it. Though if you look at the art in Mage Wars, it totally could be.

Mage Wars might not have the most original title ever, or even a particularly original game idea. Spellcasters dueling in an arena is only slightly less innovative than a game about zombies. But what it does have is the best implementation of the mage-off I've ever played. And considering how many wizard-on-wizard games are out there, that's saying something.

The best way to sum up the game play in Mage Wars is that it's like Magic: The Gathering and Summoner Wars met in a bar, and Summoner Wars got Magic knocked up, but then Magic drank during the entire pregnancy and went into labor early, but the baby was fine anyway and didn't get fetal alcohol syndrome or anything, and went on to go to an Ivy League school and never meet its real father. You have a lot of card play and deckbuilding, and you also have cards as miniatures moving around on a big grid. And those two things are like Magic and Summoner Wars.

However, once you get past the initial similarities, Mage Wars is definitely its own game. For one thing, the longest game of Magic I ever played was still over in 40 minutes, and if you finish Mage Wars that fast, one of you is very bad at the game - or someone is cheating. Mage Wars has a lot more game than the other two combined, and while I definitely enjoy both love-child parents, Mage Wars is deeper than either of its predecessors.

Instead of a deck, Mage Wars give you a spellbook. This is still a whole bunch of cards, but you keep them in a little card folder, and every turn you prepare two spells. You pick those spells, so you never go, 'dammit, I just can't get the cards I need,' unless you're a moron. However, this also means that it slows down a little bit, because if you can't decide what spells to ready that turn, you just sit scratching your chin whiskers for five minutes while the other player silently fumes.

And instead of giving you just a few smart options to do on your turn, Mage Wars practically lets you do whatever you want. You can summon gorgons and demons to do your fighting for you, or you can gear up and send your mage right into the fray. You can throw up magical walls of fire, hurl mind-bending delay tactics, or seed the field with diabolical traps. There are so many options that choosing your actions for any given turn can be an agonizing decision. And then when your opponent turns your heaviest hitter to stone and you strands him in a cloud of poison gas that eats at his rocky innards and you didn't prepare a dispel, you also have the options to curse loudly and flip the table (unless it's my table, because my table is really, really heavy. You would both have to cooperate to flip my table).

Planning and strategy and clever tactics play into every step of the game. Charging too fast might be the wrong move at one point and the best possible play at another. You might decide to stick with ranged attacks and wind up allowing your opponent to bring out too much strength on his own, or you could devote effort to close-up brawls and wind up mired in defensive safeguards. It's not easy to see what the best plan would be until your enemy blasts you with a lightning bolt and turns your healers into meat pies.

I love Mage Wars. I've played several times now, and every time, I find some new trick or cool combo or neat ability. I can't wait for expansions, and I intend to pick up the supplemental card decks so I can build more custom spellbooks. I'll play any time I've got two hours and a willing opponent. But I should definitely offer some warnings, in case you're thinking about buying Mage Wars.

This is not anything like a light game. There are 44 pages of rules, and you'll be referring to them the entire time you're playing. If Mage Wars was any less European, it would come with firearms and hookers. It could take you three hours to finish your first game, and if you're not a quick study, you'll have to play a couple times before you know what you're doing. In other words, this is not a game for pussies. Casual nerds need not apply.

On the other hand, if you like a game with meat on it - and not like a slice of sandwich meat, but that giant turkey leg you can get at the renaissance faire - you want Mage Wars. If you want a game that will make your head spin with all the stuff you can do on your turn, you want Mage Wars. If you want a game where all the dudes wear head-to-toe armor and the chicks show up in Victoria's Secret, you want Mage Wars.

Basically, if you're a serious nerd who likes awesome games, you want Mage Wars.

Summary

2 players (more if you're feeling frosty)

Pros:
Deep and smart
Lots of planning and strategizing
Smart tactical plays are critical

Cons:
Heavier than an unwanted fruitcake
Rabid feminists may be offended (I am not, as I actually like naked women)

 So you need a monster of a two-player game that you can use to murder an entire afternoon? Here you go:

https://arcanewonders.com/arcanewonders/games/mage-wars-core-set-detail

If you're not a huge comics nerd (and I swear, I'm not… well, not any more), you may have missed Y: The Last Man. It's not a superhero book. In fact, there's almost nothing super about it. Some of the people are total bad-ass hard-ons, but for the most part, it's a story of regular people in irregular times.

In the first issue of this incredible series, every living creature on the planet bearing a Y chromosome dies at the same time. They're talking, walking, flying planes, holding press releases, fighting battles - and BAM, every single male of any species pukes blood and drops dead. Men and pigs and cows and horses, all simultaneously toast.

Except Yorick and his pet monkey.

That's the premise of this incredible book, but it's not entirely what the book is about. Like the best science fiction, Y: The Last Man uses an impossible situation to discuss issues that resonate with readers living in a completely normal world. Gender roles are the most obvious starting point, but the story expands to touch on depression and religion, nationalism and crime, power and greed. This is a thought-provoking, intelligent tale that proves beyond any doubt that comic books can be incredible, if we just quit trying to put gunfighters in brightly colored spandex.

As soon as Yorick discovers that he's the last surviving male on the planet, he sets out from Boston to find the love of his life, who is unfortunately in Australia on a research grant. That's a bit of a commute for a guy who can't just jump on a plane, due largely to the fact that there are not really very many planes running any more. Most of the pilots were dudes, and the women who are left are not trying to get American Airlines back to JFK International.

The result is a sort of buddy movie crossed with a road movie crossed with a comic book. A few fascinating characters emerge as the story unfolds. We meet Agent 355, the assassin-spy assigned to protect Yorick on his travels. We meet Dr. Mann, whose work with cloning may unlock the secret to saving the world. There's Alter, the Israeli leader who intends to capture Yorick and make her country the only nation to survive the apocalypse. And Hero, Yorick's sister, is a troubled woman attempting to cope with the dark deeds she commits when she allows herself to fall prey to her doubt and despair.

The characters in Y: The Last Man are, by necessity, mostly females. After all, if there were more than one male character, the title would be all wrong. But even male readers can identify with the living, breathing survivors of a world-changing catastrophe. We can see ourselves in the drug-smuggling ship's captain, the tough congresswoman, or the small-town survivors who make the best of a tough situation.

And the story doesn't just show us villains or heroes. Like the best stories, sometimes the bad guys are completely likable, and sometimes the good guys are total douchebags. Hell, for most of the characters, there is no good or bad. There's just people doing what people do. And this realistic approach to a fantastic situation makes the story believable and compelling and impossible to put down.

The best part about reviewing Y: The Last Man is that the story is done. It ran for about five years before wrapping it all up. The result is sixty comics that tell an incredible tale. You can buy it in ten collected editions, but those are only in print, and these days, the only way I buy comics is on Comixology. If you want it that way, you can only get the issues one at a time, but that's actually better, because this way you can see all the amazing work that was done on the covers.

I don't read many comic books any more. Most of the comics being made today are about superheroes, and I'm done with superheroes. They don't make any sense, their timelines are completely screwed, and they keep trotting out the same tired characters rather than letting them die off and making new ones. I have exceptionally high standards when it comes to comics (except for Darkbrain - their comics are horrible, but the porn is hilarious), and so when I find one that's worth reading twice, I like to crow about it. If you haven't read Y: The Last Man, you're in for a treat. And if you have, go back and read it again. It's that good.

Time is short tonight, so I'm going to tell you about a game that's short. Mostly because it's easier to write about short games, being as there's only so much you can say.

The game is called Gauntlets of Fools, and it's 20 minutes of laughing and getting stomped by terrifically dangerous monsters. You need at least three people to play this madcap romp, but to really experience the wackiness, you'll want more than that. So basically, if you're at a party and everyone is half-trashed, and someone goes, 'HEY! We should play a game!' and they are much louder than is really necessary because they are a wee bit soused, you can say, 'I know just the thing!'

In Gauntlet of Fools, each player is going to pick a dungeon delver to venture into the dungeon and delve. The dungeon will kill each of you - it's a guarantee. The only question is, when the last of you falls prey to traps and monsters, who will have the most money? It's a stupid question, if you ask me, because money is a moot point if you're all dead, but that may be why the game is not called Gauntlet of Reasonable People.

The trick to start off is that some combinations of hero and gear are going to be terrifically super-powered, and others are going to be downright weak as watered-down beer. So the first guy takes the ninja with the throwing stars, and the next guy says, 'yeah, I'll take the ninja with the throwing stars, only I'll blindfold him,' and then he gives the ninja a penalty. Then the next guy says, 'no, I will take the ninja, and I'll tie one hand behind his back,' and the ninja gets another penalty. This continues until all the heroes are taken, and theoretically, this should result in a moderately even distribution of heroes, because the accountant with the cheese wheel is roughly as deadly as the ninja with the throwing stars, blindfolded, one hand behind his back, hopping on one leg, after having skipped breakfast.

Then you go into the dungeon, and at this point, monsters start popping out and beating the crap out of all of you. Some of you might kill the monsters, and then you will get paid. Others will instead be mercilessly beaten and fed to sea monkeys. You will roll an awful lot of dice, and if enough of you have been drinking, someone at the table will have absolutely no idea what's happening. That's OK, really, because you don't actually need to have a firm grasp on what you're doing to play Gauntlet of Fools. It's also not called Gauntlet of Teetotalers.

Eventually, every last one of you will be dead. Not literally, of course, unless you get alcohol poisoning. That actually happened to a girl I knew in college. Well, I didn't know her first hand. I heard about it from a friend. Thinking back, I don't think he knew the girl, either. In fact, I would bet that it didn't actually happen at all, though I suppose theoretically it could.

Anyway, you're all dead, and now you count up your money (or you let someone more sober than yourself count your money). The one who got the most loot wins, but in a game this short and silly, everyone who played and had any fun at all is the winner. It's a silly, shallow game that's fun enough that we played it several times in a row, and I will definitely keep it handy for my next drunken binge party. It could be called Gauntlet of Party People, but it's not. It's Gauntlet of Fools, which is probably a catchier name, anyway.

Summary

3-8 players

Pros:
Fun and fast
Light and silly
Will probably lead to some laughing


Cons:
Not a whole lot of game, but it's fun anyway

If you want to learn more about Gauntlet of Fools, then good luck, because outside of a random scattering of game reviews, I can't figure out where you can get a copy. It looks like you can preorder it somewhere. Maybe.

I actually had a really long anti-Christmas rant written already. I was going to complain about how Christmas is too commercialized, like I was some kind of wise man pointing out what everyone in the freaking civilized world already knows. But then I realized that I don't have a single useful thing to say that everyone hasn't heard a hundred times since Thanksgiving, and I decided to go another way and tell you why I had a good night.

Amazon has this cool service called Prime, the main feature of which is fast, free shipping all the time. But a lesser known side-benefit of this service is that you get access to a huge range of streaming video, and it's all free. So tonight, while trying to invent a reason to hang out with my family, I turned on the idiot box and started looking through free movies we could watch. At least that way, we would all be in the same room, and nobody would be hurling profanities (or at least the profanity would all come from the people on the television).

Then I noticed the funniest thing - a video called 'Crackling Fire.' This was not an action movie about a firefighter in Iraq. It was not a romance movie full of passion and drama. It was exactly what it said it was - a one-hour video of somebody's fireplace. I am not making this up. Someone filmed their fireplace for an hour and sold the video online.

I turned it on as a lark. I was laughing, wondering aloud what kind of moronic doofberry would pay for a video of a fireplace. I was only turning it on to mock the very idea - but something incredible happened.

My seventeen-year old son was transfixed. He ran around and turned off all the lights except the Christmas tree, then sat on the floor and proceeded to watch the fire burn. Or rather, the video of some other man's fireplace. And my daughter, who is a jaded sixteen-year-old who rarely has time to spend with any of us lower life forms, laid down on the floor to watch.

I was dumbstruck. This was insane! Who wants to watch a fireplace on television? Why not just film a fishtank for an hour? (And yes, I know that people do that. It's also lame.) I picked up the remote, intending to turn off this stupidity that had already gone too far, and everyone else in the family shouted me down. Knowing when I'm beat, and figuring it couldn't last too long, I left it on to listen to the crackling fire. On television.

I was wrong about it not lasting. It lasted the whole hour. We watched that stupid fire for a full hour, during which time we did something we hardly every do any more - we talked. We laughed and joked and enjoyed each other's company, and it blew my mind. I can't get all four of us around a table to play a game any more, but an electronic fireplace in a darkened room, and we're suddenly Little House On The Prairie.

That hour was one of the best Christmas memories I'll have. My kids (who watch Sons of Anarchy and play Assassin's Creed) asked me to tell them some of the stories I used to tell when they were young. Hell, I couldn't even remember these stories, and they were giddy as they recalled me telling them tales of The Shadow or Tarzan or Scrappy the Squirrel.

(Scrappy is an original creation, one my children used to love. In these stories, Scrappy goes to visit his two friends, John and Judy. Only I always messed up the names, and then my kids would correct me. 'Scrappy was off to see Ralph and Lydia-' 'No, Dad, John and Judy!' Then some dick would mess with the kids, and Scrappy would sort it out by throwing acorns at the bad guy. Scrappy was a bad-ass with an acorn, so the tales usually ended with the villain in intensive care after Scrappy embedded an acorn in his eyesocket and then the bully had permanent brain damage and spent the rest of his days crapping into a colostomy bag. God, no wonder my kids swear.)

I don't get Christmas spirit, or rather if I do, my Christmas spirit comes in a glass bottle and is usually at least 43% alcohol by volume. But I swear, that one ridiculous video of a popping fireplace has given me a better Christmas than I've had in years, and it wasn't even Christmas. I still insist that the idea of watching a fireplace on TV is a sad commentary on how much electronics have replaced actual experiences, but I also know that I'm going to be hunting for more fireplace movies, because while the fire was fake, the family was real. For that hour, my daughter wasn't hiding in her room texting her friends about how stupid her parents are. My son wasn't holed up somewhere listening to Social Distortion and reading magazines about knives. My wife wasn't frustrated with the mess in the house (which is caused largely by the kids, who for some reason walk in the house, drop their bags and coats, and then walk directly to their rooms and leave their crap in the living room). We were a family, and even better, we all wanted to be a family.

Fair warning, though - that crackling fire video has the weirdest thing. At about minute 42, some crazy classical music plays for a few minutes. We used it to tell a ghost story about haunted fireplace movies, but next time, I will look for a video that does not include random musical interludes. Because I want my family time again, and this time, I don't want to be interrupted by unexplained Tchaikovsky.

I tend to get Running Man and Total Recall confused. Both are dystopic-future sci-fi flicks with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and both have wacky cool tech like exploding neck collars or Martian terraformers. I don't have any trouble remembering which movie has the hooker with three boobs, though.

The new Total Recall doesn't help any. Aside from a few overlapping details (for instance, the triple-nipple streetwalker is in the new one, too), the old Arnold movie and the new Colin Farrell version are really not very similar at all. The names are largely similar - friend Harry, wife Lori, old flame Melina, bad guy Cohaagan - and the plots bear a passing resemblance to each other. Overall, however, these are not the same movie.

For one thing, Colin Farrell is a much better actor than Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm a big fan of the miniature Austrian giant, but when it comes to acting chops, let's face it, he's really not very good. Colin Farrell, by comparison, is actually believable as something other than an immigrant who gets a lot of exercise.

Also, the women in the new one are hotter. The old one featured Sharon Stone and some dame who vanished from my memory as soon as the credits rolled, but the new one has Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel, who are two of the three sexiest women in movies today (the third being Megan Fox). I could watch Kate Beckinsale pressure-clean a dog kennel and it would be hot. Running around in her drawers and doing wild acrobat stunts just makes her that much better. Add in Jessica Biel as a gun-toting resistance fighter, and this is a movie designed for men who want to see killer dames doing violence and looking tasty.

The visuals in the new Total Recall are staggering, too. There's a car chase on elevated freeways where the cars are magnetized to stay hovering in the air on the bottom side of the road. There are ridiculously cool high-tech disguises. There's an elevator that goes from Australia to Britain, and it drops into zero-G as it races past the planet's core. Holographs and super-guns and robot assassins make the new Total Recall a science-fiction nerdgasm. Also, club music in the future is just dubstep.

What's missing, however, is the thought-provoking element that made Philip K Dick one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time (and it's missing from both movies). Sure, there are fantastic gun battles and daring rooftop chases, but the depth of Dick's genius goes unrealized. Compared to Bladerunner, which actually did a remarkable job of conveying the ideas Philip K Dick brought to his fiction, both Total Recall movies are almost mindless.

This part is actually kind of a shame. Philip K Dick embodied the best parts of science fiction, by using fantastic situations to get us thinking. His fiction presented futuristic ideas that related to us now. Moral gray areas were his specialty, and while his stories had villains and heroes, it wasn't always easy to tell which guy was the good guy and which was the bad guy.

Also missing is the crisp writing that makes us fall in love with stuff like Firefly and Star Wars. The characters in Total Recall are not so much three-dimensional people as they are vehicles that carry us from one action scene to the next. There's no cocky smuggler peeling off one-liners, no sharp-tongued woman who irritates the hero as he falls in love with her. The dialog carries the plot, but not much more. I had a great time watching Total Recall, but it's not destined to become a classic because the characters don't come alive. Even with a cast full of people I love to watch, the real stars of Total Recall are the explosions.

The new Total Recall is a cut-and-dried action flick with some good, old-fashioned violence and thrilling movie magic. The bad guys are very bad, the good guys are heroic, and the gunfights are splashy and exciting. I'm totally fine with that, because I love to see stuff explode, but if you were hoping for depth, you're going to be disappointed.

On the other hand, if you want to see gorgeous women, awesome future-tech and bad-ass action sequences, Total Recall is right on the money. It's a ridiculously fun movie, and a great way to just turn off your brain and enjoy a Saturday evening.

The battle had raged for hours. Unity, The Fanatic, Tempest and Absolute Zero had finally found Citizen Dawn and her super-powered followers in the primal jungles of the forgotten land, and the casualties were steep on both sides. Unity had fallen to a pack of blood-hungry velociraptors and Tempest was badly burned by a volcanic river of lava. But now Dawn was badly weakened, and her minions lay defeated all around her. The Fanatic bravely sacrificed herself to deal Dawn a devastating blow, leaving only Absolute Zero to go toe-to-toe with the charismatic leader and channeler of the sun's might.

Both remaining combatants tapped on their last reservoirs of strength, Dawn blasting away at Zero, and Zero in turn smashing at Dawn with icy blasts.

"Surrender!" yelled Absolute Zero, as Dawn stumbled away, careening out of their jungle battleground and onto an open field.

Citizen Dawn pulled herself to her full height, wiped the blood from her eyes, and screamed, "NEVER!!"

Then a T-Rex ate her.

This is what happened the last time I played Sentinels of the Multiverse. Seriously. A dinosaur ate the villain. It was AWESOME. The time before that, a bunch of slightly bored, overpowered heroes threw a beating on Omnitron, the self-aware robot terrorizing Megalopolis. None of those heroes got much more than scrapes and bruises, though. Omnitron was a wimp compared to Citizen Dawn.

These kinds of stories are why I love playing Sentinels of the Multiverse. Unexpected twists, massive superpowered assaults, energy blasts and alien invasions and defiant last stands. This is what you get when you play this game.

If you've been paying attention for a long time, you probably noticed that I already reviewed Sentinels once. I liked it then, but I also had complaints. Too much paper accounting was my biggest beef, but I also had problems keeping track of stuff like damage immunity and power-up punches. And then there was the problem where 20 decks of cards would slide around in the box and get all shuffled up unless you bagged each one separately, and that was a pain in the ass, too.

Well, apparently the guys at Greater Than Games heard me, because they issued a reprint of Sentinels of the Multiverse that fixed every single problem I had with the game. Now it comes with a pile of cardboard counters that will help you remember when you've got a damage bonus, when you're immune to fire damage, and how many hits are on the pterodactyl. These counters make a good game into a great game, by allowing you to just play without forcing you to keep an accounting ledger handy.

Not only that, but now the box has two rows of card slots and dividers, so you can organize the cards and even put bigger cards between the individual decks, making it easy to pull out just the heroes and villains you want, and leave the rest in the box.

(One tiny, tiny problem I have now, and it's the only complaint about the entire game - the card rows are too narrow. I mean, making the box big enough to hold card sleeves might be optional. Making the box big enough to hold the cards themselves - that's pretty much mandatory. But it hasn't been enough of a problem yet to cause me any serious concern, so I only mention the entire complaint within a set of parentheses.)

My original set of Sentinels of the Multiverse was lost in my house fire, so I can't tell you if the actual cards are different. I don't remember for sure that there was a scaling mechanic in the original, but I also don't seem to see as much of a problem playing with three or five heroes. Lots of cards do damage based on the number of heroes, and there are other factors that take into account how many good guys you can put on the table. The more difficult villains will be even more heinous with five heroes, and a little less dangerous with three. Still, having more heroes is going to be easier than fewer, but since the idea behind this game is the story you tell, I'm mostly going to discount any potential scaling issues.

Basically, Sentinels of the Multiverse has gone from a really damned good game to an exceptionally great one. For my money, it's the best superhero game you can buy. I can almost hear the cheesy lines, see the speech balloons full of villainous pontification, and feel the huge capital-letter hay-makers. I love this damned game, and I haven't even busted open the expansions yet.

Summary

2-5 players (may require some players to double up on heroes)

Pros:
Great stories and fun art
New additions to the reprint make it easier and faster to play
The best superhero game you can buy

Cons:
(Box is a little tight)

If you want a fantastic superhero cooperative game, you owe it to yourself to visit the Greater Than Games site and buy yourself a copy. You can thank me later.

(Except you may have to wait a little bit, they keep selling out.)

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/store