Apocalypse now, strategy later.
Once again, Marvel Crisis Protocol is shoving its way into The Jimulthuan Quadrant campaign and I, Stylus, am keeping the rainbows shining.
In this chapter, the forces of Chaos (that's me) are getting pushed around on Bagot Prime - a stronghold world that we (briefly) were doing well to secure, but now it's gone a bit pear-shaped.
Doing the pushing are the Imperials (possibly the Inquisition, you can never tell), commanded by Kraken. Given their choice of affiliation, I wouldn't rule out Externimatus for this planet.
Asgard
I'm due a proper run-out with the Asgardians since I painted them earlier this year. Loki, Prince of Lies will be my leader, as I've faced him previously and he's an absolute nuisance (being able to chip away damage every time an opponent rolls a skull, and harvest power from all the other teammates in exchange for rerolls).
Beta Ray Bill looks like a solid performer, with a throw, damage reduction and the potential for a massive attack.
Thor, Prince of Asgard is also a really good brawler (and I couldn't afford the points for his more expensive version), while Valkyrie is the best 3 Threat in the affiliation (until I get the Warriors Three painted up).
Squad: Beta Ray Bill, Loki Prince of Lies, Thor Prince of Asgard, Valkyrie
Tactics: Odin's Blessing, Rainbow Bridge, Doomed Prophecy, Giant's Blood, Patch Up
Threat: 17
Servants of Apocalypse
Who haven't I tried out yet? That was my main question going into this game, and Apocalypse was the answer. He looks cool, I have no idea what he does or how he works, and I haven't even played MCP in about half a year. Should be a cinch!
Broadly, the big bad gives his minions extra powers (and an extra mechanic to power said powers, just to really crush my brain). He can use them all himself whenever he gets bored of his own massive damage hits. He's not especially fast or especially cunning, but he hits like a train. Likely to be a trouble magnet, I think!
Backing him up are three mutant horsies - Blob can throw out status stink boms, Sabretooth can get extra punchy and Sinister can teleport himself around a little extra.
Sinister can also clone other mutants... Stylus tells me it's very hard to achieve, but the temptation of bringing in an extra body late in the game is enough for me to shrug off his warnings. Doppel or nothing!
Squad: The Blob (Pestilence), Apocalypse, Sabretooth (War), Mr Sinister (Famine)
Tactics: The First One, Patch Up, Cloning Banks, Forced Extraction, Heavy Firepower
Threat: 17
Mission and deployment
Extract: Jailbreak Leads to Mass Mutant Escape!
Secure: Deadly Meteors Mutate Civilians
This should be an interesting set-up for two fighting teams. The Secure (blue) plays into that theme - a central line of three pay-to-flip objectives.
The Extract (red) however, seems to be the opposite - the objectives are as far apart as it gets, they refresh every round, so you have to return to them, and if you move within Range 5 of the edge, you drop the objective.
With all that in play, this could be a low-scoring game - which leaves plenty of time for punching each other!
I'm down with that!
Apocalypse sets up across the top: The Blob, Mr Sinister, Sabretooth and Apocalypse.
The Asgardians deploys along the bottom: Loki, Thor, Valkyrie and Beta Ray Bill.
Asgard takes Priority and we're off!
Round 1
In the first-round scramble for the centre-line, it's the Asgardians who come off the better. Beta Ray Bill takes the centre Secure and Valkyrie gets the right Secure (after first grabbing an Extract). Loki grabs another Extract and takes the left Secure (nicking it from The Blob, who had got there first).
The Servants of Apocalypse are preoccupied by My Sinister using Forced Extraction to take Genetic Samples from The Blob and Sabretooth (pinking them both in the process), then transferring all the goodies to his Cloning Banks at the end of the round.
Sabretooth can cope with being jabbed, his sample just grows back. And the Blob is nothing if not a big boy.
Pausing in his mad experiments, Mr Sinister heads for the right Secure (but doesn't get there) and Apocalypse goes down the middle. The Blob is the only one who remembered the objectives - he picks up an Extract on his way to grab the left Secure (which then gets stolen by Loki).
Sabretooth races up to avenge such cheeky behaviour, delivering a solid scram to Loki with his Claw Slash.
That just leaves Thor to whack Sabretooth with a Hammer Throw and inflict Shock on him.
With all the Secures and half the Extracts, the Asgardians take a big early lead, even if they have committed to a midline brawl.
Score - Asgard 5 : 1 Servants of Apocalypse
Round 2
Retaining priority, Loki goes first with his signature move of being annoying. Using the Clever Ploy aura attack, he hits three enemy characters at once: The Blob is forced to walk away (and he hates cardio); Sabretooth is dazed (my dice were rolling unforgivably hot at this stage) and even Apocalypse is damaged. Loki heads back to collect another Extract, smirking.
All the goodwill I had for him after the first season of his spinoff show is immediately used up.
Mr Sinister walks to the right Extract, walks Valkyrie away from it, then flips it, uncontested. He then lines up Beta Ray Bill and Valkyrie for a Genetic Splicing beam. Both attacks fail to do much damage (again with my dice rolls!), but he gains another Genetic Sample, which was the main aim.
Using For Asgard! Thor charges to the midline and fails to damage The Blob (my dice have cooled down now) and can't prevent The Blob from taking the Secure.
Valkyrie heads back to the rear Extract, pausing to lob a dumpster at Mr Sinister with her Asgardian Might. It does some damage, but I then realise she had no power left to pick up any objective, so maybe that wasn't the smartest move.
Apocalypse fires up his Biomorphic Arsenal and hammers Beta Ray Bill for massive amount of damage. I don't remember why I didn't use Odin's Blessing to reduce it - I'm going to assume I didn't have the power, because that would have been the perfect time. Either way, Beta Ray Bill is dazed.
With three VP apiece, the scores stay level - but the squads do not. In the subsequent power phase, from out of the Cloning Banks pops a freshly-minted Toad!
Score - Asgard 8 : 4 Servants of Apocalypse
Round 3
With plenty of power and something to prove, Beta Ray Bill goes first. Using his Godhunter attack to hammer Apocalypse into the ground.
The big man is dazed, much to all our surprise. One thing to note throughout the game is that the Asgardians have been using Loki's I Come Bearing Gifts to drip-feed him power, which he is then using with Oh My, What A Pity to inflict damage whenever an enemy rolls a skull. So chip damage is a very real (and probably a very annoying) thing.
In the scrimmage over the left Secure, Thor whiffs against The Blob (he does get the trigger to throw him - but, of course Nothing Can Move The Blob!), The Blob whiffs against Thor. Loki does little against Sabretooth and Sabretooth does little against both Thor and Loki.
Somebody go over there and take away their nerf hammers, would you?
Valkyrie is now faced with twice as many opponents. Undaunted, she charges in and hits first Mr Sinister, then Toad.
After dazing Apocalypse, I was aiming to damage both, but not to daze either of them, thus retaining priority. Valkyrie chips away at Mr Sinister, but overperforms against Toad and does enough to daze him! I then try and get clever (never a good idea) and rerolls a success into a failure with Loki's help.
This leaves Toad available, and with a lot of power, but what's the worst he could do? Well, quite a lot actually, as he hops around to scoop up on Extract and flip two Secures.
Valkyrie is going to have to do some serious explaining later on.
Thanks to their amphibian ally, the Servants of Apocalypse close the VP gap to almost level.
Score - Asgard 10 : 9 Servants of Apocalypse
Round 4
Sparing Toad last round was costly to me, but it allowed me to keep priority, so I'm sure it will all be worth it. Beta Ray Bill goes first again, and uses Godhunter on Apocalypse, hoping that history will repeat itself.
It does not, and Beta Ray Bill completely flubbs his attack. He consoles himself by stepping on Toad, who was lurking behind the kiosk, and dazing him.
Sabretooth goes full potato on Thor, hitting him with a Savage Predator, boosted by No Mercy, with a bonus Claw Slash as a finisher. Remarkably, the Prince of Asgard lives through this, albeit on a single wound, and so is immediately dazed by the next Claw Slash.
Loki upholds the family honour by using Mischiefs and Magicks to KO Sabertooth, before getting dazed himself by a Thunderous Splash from The Blob.
Finally, the nerf gloves (glerfs?) are off on this side of the board!
Mr Sinister chips away at Beta Ray Bill, refilling his Genetic Samples, then finds Valkyrie charging into him, loading up with Warrior of Legend to augment her Dragon Fang.
She fails to get the flurry attack, but lands a massive amount of damage that forces Mr Sinister to spend all his newly-acquired Genetic Samples to negate. She then hits him again with a simple Strike and dazes him.
Having bided his time, Apocalypse hits Beta Ray Bill with a Biomorphic Arsenal that KOs him.
Apocalypse then effortlessly flips the Secure back to his control, which the rest of his crew had also managed to do while the Asgardians were busy punching or getting punched. So while the gods score nothing, the mutants jump alarmingly into the lead.
Score - Asgard 10 : 13 Servants of Apocalypse
Round 5
One way of another, this will be the last round, so Thor uses a Doomed Prophecy that removes his physical defence but massively boosts his attack. With For Asgard! he charges into Apocalypse and delivers a KO in a single blow. What a hero.
With his second activation, he gives the same treatment to Toad, and completely whiffs, leaving him alive on a single wound and getting away with a Slippery move. What an idiot.
I use Rainbow Bridge to position Thor and Loki on two of the Extracts, flipping them back. But the need to score is less pressing than trying to stop the now-masterless Servants of Apocalypse from scoring 3VP.
Toad grabs his Extract, then hoppity-hops over to The Blob, who is standing ready to grab his own.
Valkyrie is unlikely to take down the reawakened Mr Sinister. Maybe I should have tried (it would have been the Asgardian way), but I settle for flipping the right Secure, grabbing an Extract and running towards the corner of the board. According to the crisis rules, Valkyrie is forced to drop the Extract, but at least it's kept away from Mr Sinister.
For his part Mr Sinister flips the right Secure back, then advances to the centre and sends Loki wandering aimlessly with Such Fun Little Playthings.
It costs Loki a move action to get back in play, but there is a winning play: take one wound off Toad with Mischiefs and Magicks and force another round. My luck finally runs out as Toad clings onto to his artificially-cloned life, leaving The Blob to pick up the winning Extract.
Score - Asgard 13 : 16 Servants of Apocalypse
Post-Apocalypse
Having played a fair bit of Marvel Crisis Protocol, I try and help along my opponents and avoid gotchas. So when I warned Kraken that Cloning Banks was a liability, and that any character generated would arrive too late to affect play, I was perfectly sincere. I was also, as can be observed, quite wrong.
That said, I've never been happier to see a narrative tactics card come off so perfectly. In a recent interview, the creatives at Atomic Mass Games said they'd deliberately put in tactics cards that would mean nothing to competitive players, but narrative players would love, and this one certainly paid off.
I’m quite a perverse player. Receieved wisdom often makes me double down on foolishness, but I was pretty convinced I could clone a toad with the head start from forced extraction. I didn’t expect it to tuen the game, though! Valkyrie must be kicking herself, if nobody else is doing it for her.
Mr Sinister seems to be enjoying his glow-up, and the rest of the team (not least the newly-arrived Toad) performed well. The only let-down was Apocalypse himself, but perhaps he was unfortunate to face an affiliation that likes taking down big monsters.
Yeah, I didn’t feel wildly impressed by him. Might mean I misused him? Maybe using his horsemen’s powers would have been a better bet, they would make him faster and nastier. I also rolled poorly for a few attacks, though, so maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on him.
For myself, I enjoyed the Asgardians, although I clearly need some more practice with them. There were a few occasions when I didn't use their movement possibilities to the full and, despite gaining twice as much power, they can run dry quickly. Loki in particular is very power hungry, with all his chip damage, so that's something to be aware of. I should also be bolder with them - there was far too much running to objectives and not enough smiting.
Still, it's given me ideas for future games and encouragement to paint the rest of the faction. For Asgard!
For the End Times!
No comments:
Post a Comment