Hello again fellow Champions! It is I Tommy of Titan, back with an article on a topic that probably isn’t given much thought. I’m talking about how the game scales and changes with the number of players you have. I’m not necessarily talking about how much health the villain starts with. I’m talking about more abstract concepts than that. Some of these changes impact almost all encounters, and others are more specific to the encounter itself. We are gonna go over a general breakdown of what these changes mean for the players, and how we can adjust our play to set us up better for victory.
One of the main changes that isn’t so obvious on the surface is the odds of pulling your obligation. During setup all the players will shuffle their obligations into the encounter deck, and when they come up as an encounter card it’s passed to the player to whom it belongs. Just moving from 1 to 2 players almost doubles your chances of seeing your own obligation, and the only reason it doesn’t double is because you’ve added that one other obligation to the deck to slightly adjust your chances. So if you go up to 3 players you’ve essentially tripled your chances and at 4, quadrupled. That’s pretty intense, and don’t even get me started on Heroic.
So what can we, as players, do to prepare for the inevitability of seeing these obligations? Well, for starters you can try and take advantage of cards that require you to be in Alter-ego. All the obligations up to this point in the game offer you a chance to flip to your Alter-ego. The main downside for being in Alter-ego is that it causes the villain to scheme, but since we are revealing encounter cards, we are way past that step. This can allow you to take advantage of your recovery, or character abilities like Steve Rogers’ ability, Living Legend. It can also add value to cards like Golden City, and other cards that don’t typically get used every round, due to it being an Alter-ego action.
Another aspect of the game that is changed significantly with more players is the amount of acceleration tokens you’ll end up placing. Obviously the game scales the health, and threat required for each scheme. It also often increases the amount of threat placed at the beginning of the villain phase. What doesn’t really get factored in is that with more players you will be revealing more boost cards, as well as more encounter cards. This means you are going to be burning through that deck much faster, and as a result, placing more acceleration tokens.
Unlike the first situation, there’s not much that can be done to combat this situation. The best thing you can do is be aware of it and factor it into your decisions in both play, and deck construction. Additional focus should be placed in threat management. One thing that will actually benefit the players in this situation is when an effect requires you to discard, or reveal cards from the top of the encounter deck triggers, it will fail when the deck runs out.
The last thing I want to talk about is actually something that works in the heroes favor. The ability to request actions during your teammates turns can really help your team succeed.
Communication is so important in multiplayer games and cards like Maria Hill can be really great when played during the first players turn. This really increases the value of Make the Call too, since it’s an action that can be requested. Cards like Avengers Mansion, are much better cards for multiplayer too. It will allow you, and your fellow heroes to bolster each other’s hands, and make sure everyone has the resources they need that round. It can also be used to load up one player for a monster turn.
These are just a few of the ways that the number of players in your game can impact how it goes. Hopefully keeping all this in mind can help keep you on the winning side of things. As always, if you are interested in more content please stay tuned here for more articles, as well as checking out The Side Scheme on FB, YouTube, Twitch, Patreon, and wherever you listen to Podcasts. I’m Tommy of Titan ominously drifting into the shadows.