| Sentinels of the Multi-Pass

***Warning, nerdy game design brain dump follows***

So Enoto and I had a small games day yesterday in WC and we played the hot new game, Sentinels of the Multiverse!  The players each play a pre-built superhero deck and fight against a single AI/Big Bad deck.  It was a lot of fun once we got into it.  I liked it so much I picked up a copy from Amazon today!

The success of the separate, static decks for the superheroes, but the wonky 1 - 2 player rules (should have 3 heroes, so with less that 3 players you need to play multiple hero decks), and my less than enthusiastic response to the artwork and theme, made me re-imagine a video game 'instance' as a card game where all the roles would need to be included, but could be scaled from 1 - 5 players.  I'm thinking Sentinels for the static decks and AI driven enemy deck, LotR for the concept of 'pulling' enemies (maybe with some threat mechanic to keep those enemies), and the Star Wars LCG for the deck customization that uses groups of cards, rather than single cards, for customization that would sort of emulate 'specs' or 'focus' of different roles, e.g. DPS crowd control, vs. ranged, vs, melee would all have a different potential bundle of cards to be added/removed depending on the style of play each player wanted.

So each role would need to be in play, but each character would have cards with numbers 1 -5 on them to show which should be included in the deck depending on the number of players.  If you have 1 player, all the 1 cards from all 5 roles would be added to one deck and then the one player would play all the roles at once.  Those cards would probably be the most straight forward, and possibly powerful cards from the different roles since playing 5 roles but with one turn to do so would require more 'bang for the buck' each turn.  If you are playing with 2 players, you just divvy the roles between the two players and have at it, etc.

I'm pretty sure there is some formula for creating the Sentinel character decks, so I'm going to spend some time deconstructing each one and trying to find what makes each tick and maybe better understand what keeps them relatively balanced.  Then I'll proceed to step 3, and the by the 4th step - PROFIT!

/brain dump over

*Whew*  Now that I've said that, you will never hear about it from me again because by the time I post this I will likely be tired and not have the energy or drive to follow-through.