My good friends Cari and Mason invited me over this afternoon to play board games with them. The opportunities to see them are quickly becoming ever more scarce, so I set aside all the things I need to do in preparation for my move this afternoon to head over. Our friend Tom also came to play with us. It turns out that Cari and Mason’s dastardly plans to thwart my feeble packing attempts were more advanced than I anticipated: not only did they give me yet another game, Sentinels of the Multiverse, as a going away present, they even cooked me dinner after I borrowed their car to pick up boxes from Home Depot!

I should mention that they did offer to ship the game for me as part of the present. They’re very nice people like that. And letting me borrow their car and cooking me dinner and looking after my cats numerous times when I’ve been out of town.

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a comic book themed cooperative card game in which each player plays a superhero character and tries to defeat a non-player villain in one of a handful of environments. Each superhero, villain, and environment has its own dedicated deck, so each time you play it’s a different game. I liked this game the two times we played through all the more knowing that the next time I play, it will be a whole new game again.

It’s a little surprising to me, upon reflection, that there aren’t more comic book/tabletop game crossovers, given the intersections of their communities. Mason and I are both in the middle of that intersection, he more on the comic book side than myself. Tom is a gamer, but not a comic book reader, so far as I know. Cari is neither, and the games we’ve played together over the last few months have been more games than Cari and Mason have played together in the entire history of their marriage prior, I’m told. She’s been very patient with our enthusiasm and geekery, and it’s been a real pleasure introducing her to my hobby.

Enjoyable quotes of the evening from a confused Cari: “Well I have this elemental subwave inducer”; and later, “I don’t quite understand how to use my elemental subwave inducer.” Like I said, she’s been very patient with us, and has even enjoyed herself. Kudos to her for jumping right in!

Sentinels of the Multiverse plays mostly pretty straight, insofar as you expect comic books to play straight. Unlike Red Dragon Inn, there’s little or no poking fun at the genre. I appreciate this, in retrospect, because it really feels very exciting as you’re playing, and there are even some neat moments when you feel like the battle is reaching its climactic conclusion, just like in your favorite comic book storyline.

We won the first game without any of the four of us being “incapacitated” (because no one ever really dies in comic books anyway), but the villain was easy anyhow. We were trounced however in the second game we played, and all three of us (Tom had departed for an “unmissable appointment”) were incapacitated in the same round after a lengthy, clumsy attempt at chipping away at the villain’s huge HP count.

This loss was mostly to be expected: it was only our second time out, and the villain we chose for our second game was one of the more difficult villains, which we knew because the rulebook, which in a nice touch of design looks on the outside like a comic book, rates the hero characters by complexity and the villains by difficulty. This was a nice feature, as were the bios of the heros and villains. We had fun reading the bios of our characters aloud before each game, and made sure to play new characters for our second game so we could read their bios.

But now it’s back to packing in the bittersweet process of leaving days like this behind for more with my friends and family in Southern California. To all my friends I’ve played games with, and especially to Cari and Mason (and not just for making me shrimp pasta dinner tonight), I’ll miss you all.

May your lives be filled with sixes and twenties.