Sentinels of the Multiverse

Sentinels puts you and your friends against a villain and an environment, both drawn from a genuinely large pool of asymmetric decks, and the charm of it is real, every hero feels distinct, every villain has a personality on the card before you even read its ability text. I liked it more in shorter bursts than I expected to going in, small box, big variety, the kind of game where the setup effort is low enough that trying a new combo doesn’t feel like a commitment.

The problem, and it’s a persistent one, is start-of-turn and end-of-turn tracking. Damage effects stack, ongoing cards pile up, and keeping straight what triggers when starts to eat real time the deeper into a fight you get. I’m not talking about a single fiddly moment, I mean every single turn requires a mental checklist that grows as the game goes on, and more than once we lost track of an effect and had to backtrack. That’s the rules-to-payoff ratio breaking down in the worst way, not because any single rule is complicated but because there are too many small ones running concurrently for the actual decision space they produce.

When the matchup is good, hero and villain and environment clicking into something that tells its own little story, it’s a genuinely great time, and the coop scales down to a solo game surprisingly well, I’ve brought a couple of decks on trips and played in a hotel room more than once. But I’ve also had matchups that felt unbalanced enough in one direction or the other that no amount of good play changed the outcome, and when that happens the bookkeeping stops feeling worth it. It’s a good game with a real design cost attached, and whether that cost is worth paying depends entirely on how much patience your table has for tracking triggers instead of making choices.