Champions Card Game

[Armitage]

For years, I've had thoughts about a Champions card game rattling around in my head.

 

The ideas usually bounce between two design models.

 

1.  All players draw cards from a single generic deck, with some cards activating the use of special abilities listed on a larger character card, similar to the old professional wrestling card game Wrasslin'.

This has the drawback of losing some flavor.  Sapphire's player just plays a Use Power card and declares that she's using the Bright Bolt on her character card.  On the other hand, if pen-and-paper characters are converted using consistent rules, which are made available to the players, they could potentially stage battles between any characters in the game.

 

2. Each character has their own unique deck of cards.

This reduces customizability and limits the characters that can be played, but makes the game play different for each character.  Sapphire's player plays an actual Bright Bolt or Stun-Bolt card.  There's also the added sales from expansion decks...

 

 

I've never played it, but I've heard that Sentinels of the Multiverse (which uses the second model) is a very good game.  Obviously, the fact that the Champions Universe IP is currently owned by Cryptic would complicate things, but I would love to see a collaboration betweem DOJ and Greater Than Games to create a Champions card game using the Sentinels rules.  Maybe it could even be a multi-dimension crossover event, like Reality Storm with Silver Age Sentinels.

Start with Hero and Villain decks for the Champions and the iconic villains; Mechanon, Dr. Destroyer, Slug, Takofanes, Ogre, Grond, Pulsar, Armadillo, etc.  There's an expansion that allows villain teams, so you could have Eurostar, the Ultimates, or the Crowns of Krim.  There could be Environment decks for Millenium City, Vibora Bay, Monster Island, Stronghold, Lemuria, Destruga, Mechanon's Base, etc.

 

 

The Monster Island sourcebook was written in a style that emulated the Champions MMORPG to test what impact the computer game had on pen-and-paper sales.  It turned out to be almost none.  It seems to me that there would be a lot more crossover between card games and RPGs.  A card game could help to attract new players more than the computer game did.

[Greywind]

I'd suggest tracking down someone with or a copy of Sentinels of the Multiverse and giving it a try. Or, you can get it electronically from Handelabra Games for Android, Kindle, iPad, Steam, etc.

Greater Than Games is looking to do an RPG based off their multiverse setting. They are looking at doing it in-house rather than look at existing systems.

[Lucius]

I'd suggest tracking down someone with or a copy of Sentinels of the Multiverse and giving it a try. Or, you can get it electronically from Handelabra Games for Android, Kindle, iPad, Steam, etc.

 

Greater Than Games is looking to do an RPG based off their multiverse setting. They are looking at doing it in-house rather than look at existing systems.

 

That's unfortunate. I like Sentinels of the Multiverse and would love to see those characters done as Hero characters.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary notes that besides the hero decks and villain decks, there is also an environment deck

[Greywind]

I've been working on that between other projects.

[Altair]

So, the cats I've been playing with are super big into Sentinels - I think it's glorious and lovely. I don't really play it, because card games tend not to be that much fun for me, but I adore the thing, it's just full of character. For anybody who likes superheroes or (inclusive or) card games, I cannot recommend it enough.

 

In the quasi-setting we've been playing around with in our Hero games, the Sentinels are the first generation of supers, and showed up in the 60's. I have Haka statted up on 600 points; one of the PCs is his niece, so I thought I might as well do so