Tag-Team Rules:
When selecting teams select 1 extra character per team (3 characters each for 2v2). When a character is incapped, instead of standing up they are removed and the extra character enters at a designated spot (each team should have their own). The incapped Character will go in the next time a character on your team is incapped.
I like this for getting out of the knocked down, stand up flow of the game, and for getting different combinations of heroes on the field. This can work with most of the game modes listed below, as well as just a tag-team skirmish. I often do 5 characters each for 3v3 matches.
Team Elimination:
In this version incapped Champions are removed from the board while the remaining Champions resume the fight. After only one team is standing that team scores 1 point for each remaining Champion from their team, and then the other team respawns in any edge spaces. Play to a certain number of points or a certain number of fights.
I usually use a circle map for this, and the losing team respawns all at once. This mode works best when 2 players want to face off with multiple Champions each. Losing team always goes first, starting with their Champion who would go after the last opponent who acted.
Last Team Standing:
One of my favorites. Draft your teams, as many champions as you desire. Pick your starting team and stack your other champions face down in order.
When your champion is incapped on their next turn draw the next champion’s card and that champion enters the game from a designated area. Play continues until one side is all out of champions in their deck and the ones in play are incapped.
This is great for 4 players, as the incapped champion’s player can set up their next Champ while the others take their turns, it is also great for learning the different characters.
Kings of the Harmless Volcano:
Basically king of the mountain, First thing you do before power-up occurs is record a point if your champion is active and standing on the orange part of the Volcano. If you are incapped you would not score a point because you weren’t active at the time.
Any player may move an adjacent incapped opponent 1d6 spaces from the their hex as an action.
Circle set-up, play to a specific number of points, and KO Ra on sight. (I find some matches are better when each Champion has a banned card, because Tornado.)
Monorail Robbery:
You need a genuine bonafide Monorail for this one, and the Monorail rules. Select teams (I like 2v2). One team guards the Monorail, one team is trying to rob the monorail.
How it works: For this game special rules are in place. You cannot attack the monorail from range, or even adjacency. Only players standing on the Monorail may attack it, Any attack may be used but that attack only hits the monorail space the champion is standing on. Area attacks may be used to attack defending champions, but those attacks will not affect the Monorail.
Keep track of how many rounds the monorail survives, and if it makes it around the track 5 times the defending team wins.
Then switch sides, same teams and try again, whichever team defends best wins. (or attacks best wins, same result)
Capture the Flag:
Select teams, set up map in a rectangular fashion (2 map pieces wide, as close as you can come)
Put a shard marker in the center of the furthest map piece on each side and select teams. The goal is to have the opposing Shard and your own shard on your starting Map piece, the first team to do that wins.
Shard Rules Offense: Pick up takes one action, Shard Toss is active. Shard Carriers ignore any Powers in play and may not take any action aside from move, Aim and Shard Toss. A character carrying a shard loses mobility and their move action cannot be unlimited.
For Example: Tachyon picks up a shard, her move is no longer unlimited, and she can’t use Pushing the Limits, she cannot dodge, sprint or make attacks. Her Synaptic Interruption will not occur, nor would Baron’s redistributor or Wraith’s slip into shadows.
Shard Rules Defense: An incapped carrier drops a shard as per the scenario rules. If your shard is dropped a Champion may use an action to attempt to send the shard back to its origin space, or may pick it up and carry it. Defensive carriers have the same restrictions as Offensive carriers. To send a shard back to it’s origin roll 3d6, if at least two numbers match send it home, otherwise the sending fails.
Pylon Control: (courtesy of kitmehsu)
Arrange at least 5 tiles as you wish and place 5 pylon tokens in the center hex of 5 separate tiles.
Add two additional tiles on opposite sides of the previous tiles and place a scenario marker in the center of each, and flip one of the tokens.
Each teams characters start adjacent to their scenario marker.
Objective
At the end of the third round and each round after, the team who controls the most pylons scores. The team who first reaches X points wins.
Special rules
Incapped characters are removed from the board. On that character's next power-up phase, they are placed adjacent to their starting marker. They may alternatively place the character adjacent to any pylon their team controls as long as their is not an opposing character in the same tile as the pylon.
Any additional points of damage beyond what it takes to incap reduces their movement during their first surge phase after they stand up by 1 per point of damage.
Scenario powers
All characters gain acess to the following scenario powers:
Pylon hijack
(Action) When adjacent to a Pylon roll X dice and count 5s and 6s as successes. For each success, either remove an opposing scenario token from the pylon or place one of your tokens if the pylon is neutral. X = 3 - number of foes within radius 1 of the targeted pylon.
Edit: added Pylon control 8/17/14
Great work. I played a skirmish last night with my son and I wish I had thought of the tag-team style. That would have let us sample all the heroes. Next time!
Once I finally get some time to sit down and play the game I'll definitely be trying some of these
Crush your enemies, drive them before you, and laminate their women! - Guise, Prime Wardens #31
Here's a alt skirmish that I came up with.
Pylon control
Arrange at least 5 tiles as you wish and place 5 pylon tokens in the center hex of 5 separate tiles.
Add two additional tiles on opposite sides of the previous tiles and place a scenario marker in the center of each, and flip one of the tokens.
Each teams characters start adjacent to their scenario marker.
Objective
After the first 2 rounds, at the end of the round, the team who controls the most pylons scores. The team who first reaches X points wins.
Special rules
Incap characters are removed from the board. When the character stands up, they are placed adjacent to their starting marker. They may alternatively place the character adjacent to any pylon their team controls as long as their is not an opposing character in the same tile as the pylon.
Any additional points of damage beyond what it takes to incap reduces their movement during their first surge phase after they stand up by 1 per point of damage.
Scenario powers
All characters gain acess to the following scenario powers:
Pylon hijack
Roll X dice and count 5s and 6s as successes. Each success can either remove an opposing scenario token from a pylon within radius 1 or place one of your teams scenario tokens on a neutral pylon within radius 1. X = 3 - number of foes within radius 1 of the targeted pylon.
Looks good. I'll hopefully be working on creating a template soon for Tactics cards like I've done with SotM. Hardest part will be the background, but it looks like 4 layers with a gradient, then another layer on top for the crumpled paper texture.
One reason I can hardly wait for them to open up the store for Tactics stuff. I'm gonna try to get a 2nd set of tiles so that I can create symmetrical maps for special skirmishes such as capture the flag. Maybe some extra dice too, love the look of these dice.
Card Templates
Champions Online: Koga_Wolfe
Really like that one, was thinking of how to make a point control skirmish, and that nailed it. I'm going to add it to the original post.
Skippy and kitmehsu: would either of you mind if I prettied these up and posted them on my Tactics site, giving you guys credit for the ideas? I've seen lots of people who are a little confused by skirmishes right out of the box, and I think it could really help to give people a little direction for ways to make their first skirmishes be really fun. I think a guide listing recipes for different types of "battlegrounds" so people could jump right in would be just the ticket.
Spiff's SotM site: www.spiffworld.com/sotm
I've no issues what so ever, If I didn't want other people to see it, posting it on the forums would have been some poor planning on my part.
That would be cool. Really cool.
Awesome. I'll start working on it tonight.
Spiff's SotM site: www.spiffworld.com/sotm
One thing I would mention if you make a page like that is what type of skirmish games will be used for official tournaments.
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
-Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
I tried the pylon control one last night, 5 pylons 3v3, it was awesome. I would love to see some of these game modes make it into a tournament.
Let me ask a couple of questions to make sure I understand everything well:
1) Tag-Team seems pretty simple. I understand that one.
2) Team Elimination - every time a character (I'm assuming Champion just means character) is incapped, they're removed (no standing back up) and the fight continues. Once everyone on a particular team has been removed, the surviving team scores one point for every surviving character, and then the defeated team respawns all at once in any edge space, at which point the fight continues.
I would worry that this would lead to swingy fights where one team gets a numbers advantage and so tromps the other team, at which point the other team all respawn at once and tromp the damaged original team, rinse and repeat. That doesn't happen?
Assuming the fight goes to a certain number of points, what's a good number to suggest in the guide?
3) Last Team Standing - "draft your teams, as many champions as you desire", but then "pick your starting team and stack your other champions face down in order". So, you draft a team but only some of them become your starting team, with the others face-down? How many should be in your starting team? How many should you have in your stack?
Then, when a character is incapped, the next character on your stack spawns in the game and the fight continues. So, this is kind of like tag-team in that you're bringing in a fresh character when one is incapped, but it's different in that characters don't come back into the game once they've been incapped, i.e. you have a bench of characters, and once you're through your bench, you're done. Do I have that right?
4) King of the Mountain - mostly understandable except for the bit about "any player may move an adjacent incapped opponent 1d6 spaces from their hex as an action". Is that just because a character who is standing on the mountain and who gets incapped will just stand up on the mountain again, and this is a way to toss the corpse away so they have to fight their way back up?
Does "KO Ra on sight" mean that Ra shouldn't be allowed in this battleground because his Tornado power is too powerful?
5) Capture the Flag - understandable.
6) Pylon Control - what's a good number of points to suggest as the amount needed to win?
Spiff's SotM site: www.spiffworld.com/sotm
I haven't actually gotten a chance for a play with others on the pylon control skirmish, but I imagine that around 4-5 is a good starting area, as that means it will take around 6 to 11 rounds to finish, possibly longer if some rounds end in ties. Points are mainly a way to control game length in the set up, with 3 for a pretty quick game, to 6 or7 for a longer struggle. I'd also aim for lower points the more players in the game as rounds become longer with the more players involved.
2. badly worded, both teams respawn at the edges like a fresh start. The team that lost goes first, starting with the hero after the last hero on the winning team to take a turn.
So like, AZ Thermal->Cooling blast downs Legacy and Legacy's team is done. AZ's team scores a point for that fight, and they go back to their corners to respawn. The first turn of the new round is the character after AZ.
Would work the same if AZ took his turn then Legacy went to attack him but was incapped by an Impaling Structure. Since AZ was the last winning team character to have a turn the first turn of the new fight would go to the Character after AZ.
Keep original order.
3. Total number of characters on each team determines the length. It works like Tag team but no tagging back in, you just grab the next character on the pile. So for a 2v2 game you could go 5 characters on each team, but only 2 of the 5 start the fight, the others are ordered and stacked, then when an incap occurs that new character will step into the game when the incapped character's turn comes up. When you run out of reserves on your team you get no respawns.
For a really long fight you could go 7 on each team with one character unused (or add in the reaper and go 8 each) you would draft characters, choose your starters, and order your reserves.
4. That is the idea, so say Bunker can't stand back up, put turret mode in play and crush everyone.
6. I have a few suggestions: I would set the number of pylons to 3 for 2v2, otherwise Tachyon and Baron Blade with his teleport are way too strong.
As for points I would consider a second scoring option of each round points=the difference in points held, so 3-2 would be 1 point, 4-1 would be 3 points. It wouldn't happen often but it could.
I would make the following rule as well: If you end your turn within range 2 of an enemy controlled pylon you lose 1 health. This will help stop Unity from running swift bot to an enemy pylon and turning her into turret or Stealth bot to stop enemies from taking it, it would lose a health that round and the next it would die.
As for # of points, 5 was fun, but potentially long as it could take 11 rounds. Ours didn't take that long, 5-2 was the final, and the last one was a 3 point round. Operative is a beast with 3 actions and kusarigama to pull you back. We are going to use tag rules next time.
I only had time to start the doc off with Standard Skirmishes (to give more meat to generic skirmishes, since the lack of info in the rulebook seems to have confused some people) and Tag Team. Take a look and let me know what you think. I'll add the other modes as I get time.
http://www.spiffworld.com/tactics/
Spiff's SotM site: www.spiffworld.com/sotm
I got through some more variants tonight. The doc now contains everything except Monorail Robbery and Pylon Control. I'll add those soon as well.
Spiff's SotM site: www.spiffworld.com/sotm
I'm trying to finish the doc but can't figure out the answer to this question because I've already mooshed all my base/Uprising stuff together - I know the monorail tracks came with the base game. Did the monorail token itself come with the base game, or did that come with Uprising? Did the Monorail Train scenario card come with the base game or the expac?
Spiff's SotM site: www.spiffworld.com/sotm
Monorail was entirely in the base set, uprising just was the first one to use it in a scenario.
I've finished the doc and posted it to my site (www.spiffworld.com/tactics). Phantaskippy and kitmehsu - it's not a bad idea if you guys wanted to take a look at it to make sure I didn't misrepresent your ideas as I was fleshing them out and adding details.
I'm stoked to try these modes myself.
Spiff's SotM site: www.spiffworld.com/sotm
A rules I've had to institute for any game where characters spawn at a set point:
Characters within radius 2 of their initial spawn point do not trigger Hazard spaces.
This would not apply to controlled Pylons in the Pylon match, but their starting Tile would be immune to hazard spaces.
My quote on Tag-Team rules is a little misleading with the rules as written, since the rules say to set one aside, and my quote says 5 characters, 3 active.
I'd cut that last part of my quote out.
Don't know if you want to add this in or not, but we played a game of Pylon Control with a circle setup and 3 teams. 3 equi-distant tiles were the starting hexes, every other tile had a pylon, it was pretty crazy but it required us to have tokens from another game for the three teams.
We did it Tag style, each of us with 3 characters and 2 in play. It got crazy, but was a ton of fun.
Question here, you mention having teams of up to 6 characters each under pylon control, how is this feasible since their are only 10 turn markers in the game?
Hellifiknow. I'll change it to 5. Good catch.
Spiff's SotM site: www.spiffworld.com/sotm
These look like really fun skirmish ideas! Thanks for the ideas and thanks to Spiff for collecting them in an easily findable place.
Hi. My name's Andy. Feel free to call me Andy, since, ya know, that's my name. (he/him/his)
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