If you want to expand upon some of the fun of Pocket Paragons and get your comic book hero on, then you should join the Sentinels of the Multiverse. It’s up to you and your friends to protect the world from certain doom in this cooperative card game. Some scenarios are all glory and gusto, but others are a bit more horrifying because some of those comics and comic book characters are outright dark. So I thought I’d review this game here on Haunted MTL for November.

Sentinels of the Multiverse hails from Greater Than Games and brings all of the comic book action right to your game table. Sure, this means that you could have the goody-goods battling the baddies old school superpower versus superpower to the end. But it wouldn’t be a good story series if there weren’t some twists and turns while flying by the seat of your pants. As any good comic book hero will tell you after all, you’ve got to keep your avid readers and fans awaiting the next issue with bated breath…

Essentially you and your friends are teamed up as superheroes trying to save the world from one of the many villains in one of the crazy environments. Ever since we started playing this game, I’ve pretty much always been Fanatic, the angel, but there are a lot of characters to choose from with a lot of superpowers. Different heroes balance one another in different ways, some providing more mystical support, others tanking it up, and others being more quick on the draw of the cards or battle-focused. Every one of them is unique with different strengths and weaknesses.

As you duke it out with the villain and their minions, relics and following, you also have to deal with environmental hazards, ongoing effects and your team’s decisions. Everything is card-based with hero and villain characters and environments each having their own deck. Different cards grant different powers bringing both benefits and drawbacks. Card-based actions dish out the damage and whittle away at the baddies. Turn order remains consistent with the villain(s) going first, then the heroes in whatever order they choose, and finally the environment.

The game play really does mimic the comic book feel of battle well. You are literally fighting to the finish, with cards. The villains each pose different and interesting challenges and can totally own your ass if you are ill-prepared, or are part of the wrong team for that particular battle, or if the environment screws you over; you know, just because it can. And even when you defeat the baddies, you may not actually meet win criteria which just leaves the question open of what really happened to them and will they come back, as so many arch-nemeses do. It becomes a story for another time, continuing the saga…

I’m giving Sentinels of the Multiverse 4.0 Cthulus. It’s a fun game, the art is superb, and it is very well designed, even down to how it fits in the box. You really do feel like you are a superhero from a long-standing series of comic books, and this is further enhanced by the flavor text on the cards themselves. (4 / 5)

But no matter how much my friends and I try to keep from overthinking it or getting caught up in planning, the game runs long. Sometimes the win conditions are very specific and are buried at the bottom of the villain deck so it can be a bit of a slogfest to get there. Sometimes different card combinations render a lot of actions ineffective in one or more directions simultaneously, so that you feel like you’re just slapping your kid brother back and forth in the rear seat of your parent’s ride without actually doing much of anything to one another. And sometimes the game will kick your ass in slow motion, nickeling-and-diming you to death over hours of playtime. But nonetheless, it’s still fun.

There are a lot of versions of this game and a lot of expansions. The version we own combined some of these variations together as part of a Kickstarter awhile back, but the newer versions have much the same flavor from what I can tell.