Christopher announces Sentinels Tactics!

Based on their belt, the FV still exist. The fact no one else other than Legacy and Wraith are present makes me question as to whether or not some of the other members have been replaced.

Legacy is clearly wearing two rings. Thoughts on that?

One is on his middle finger. The other his ring finger. Did he get married? To Wraith?!

I just thought one was the Legacy ring and the other was the wedding band.

Also to toss in, the background is probably Insula Primalis, so Dawn is going to be playable. Now comes the question, do main villain work as a team or do they have their respective minions? So someone playing as Dawn would have all those citizens, while someone as Baron Blade will have an army of Blade Battilion.

Another thing I had noticed, both Legacy and Wraith's costumes have gray sides on their costumes. So I guess the FV had now started wearing matching uniforms. 

Either that or it's a subtle "T" (for tactics)

Sounds like Sentinels-flavoured Heroclix without the clix. Therefore I'll contain my excitement until I hear why this game is unique...

While I think playing with the standard SotM heroes/villains will be fun, I'm hoping there will be lots of new characters to play so that it doesn't feel like we're playing a SotM game just with minis.  If I want an evening with Bunker, Legacy, and Wraith, I already know where to go to get that.

We will probably see new and old faces alike. Maybe even new people in old mantles

Can definitely understand containing excitement. My spouse isn't as interested in a tactical board game as I am. In fact, she'll probably never play this, but she loves playing SotM. 

I'm very interested in playing this, though.

I'm sort of hoping that sometime in the far future, we'll see 3rd edition Sentinels, which takes place after Sentinels Tactics in the storyline.

we coud have new decks for existing heroes (to reflect their changed circumstances, new technologies, and such), new heroes, villains, etc.

Who wouldn't want to Play Young Legacy as the leader of the F5, with her own deck, alongside AZ (with a new deck), Bunker (new deck), and Wraith (new deck) and Tachyon (new deck) against some new threat...or an old villain with a bag of new tricks.  Voss bringing a fleet to destroy the earth instead of conquering it.  Citizen Dawn's resurgence, or Citizen Dusk popping up with an army to depose her.   Baron Blade's minions forming a union to sell their services to any other villain.  An older matriarch who can control more than birds.  Plague rat and his legion of infected.

I'm definitely looking forward to Sentinel Tactics, but I'm looking forward to the continuation of the story even more.  

I'm happy for another thing to playtest! Amirite?!

I'm hoping that it'll be at PAX prime, since I definitely want to try it.  I'm wondering if each character has cards that they can play (that are unique to them), or if they all have standard actions that they can do (that are modified/enhanced by by rules unique to their character)

Mostly because it would be AWESOME to have:

Legacy be able to fly great distances, ignoring the terrain

Wraith be able to lurk around the perimeter, taking out enemies one by one

AZ to ice down areas to make them impassable or create jagged spikes of ice

Tachyon be able to move anywhere, all the time

Bunker have all sorts of combat options

Expatriette be able to create a fields of fire for approaching enemy targets and snipe from far away.

Tempest be able to effect the landcape in large areas., but they are dangerous to heroes as well (after all, flash floods and storms are kind of wild)

All your ideas are awesome. Simply awesome

I certainly wouldn't, I would rather have new heroes rather than a new deck that has only a few changes to an existing deck. I feel promo cards already do a good enough job of doing that.

Good luck to him ever getting out of whatever place NightMist bound him in.

Good luck to him ever getting out of whatever place NightMist bound him in.

See, when I say "new deck" I actually mean changing everything.  Sentinels Tactics takes place after the current arc- so years.  Then this (entirely theoretical 3rd edition) would take place after the TACTICS arc.  So even more years. We know SoTM is ending its current incanration after a few more expansions...but theres no reason why it couldn't come back with SOME of the same heroes and LOTS of new ones in a NEW story arc that carries SOTM even farther.  As 3rd edition it could take EE rules and change them/expand them.  Maybe it would be compatible, maybe not.  who knows! 

I'm not talking about changing one or two cards and giving current ones a wording polish.  heres an example of what I'm talking about:

Wraith: She's not wearing a mask in Tactics, so maybe her home environment has changed.  Maybe she's no longer keeping her identity secret...or maybe something happened to Montgomery industries or the world thinks that Maia Montgomery has died.  she'd have ALL new equipment to reflect advances in tech.  She'd have clandestine informants from years on the streets.  She'd have caches of resources stowed away.  Maybe she doesn't have her trust fund anymore.  Maybe she's got a few loyal people that can keep her supplied with information.  you could change EVERY SINGLE CARD with new mechanics and abilities to reflect a Wraith who's been on the streets for years, and operating as part of a team for a long time.

Bunker: With new technology, you could build a suit with nano-assemblers and hard-light controls.  Maybe a telepresence rig.  Maybe he can call in fire support from remote drones, or link up with satellites for surveillance.  You could change everything about his deck, while still revolving around modes and cutting-edge weaponry.  You could build an entire deck around regulating power levels and the offensive output vs defensive capabiliites.

AZ- maybe he's figured out how to live without the suit.  Maybe he absorbs the heat and channels/processes it somehow.  Maybe he uses implanted biotech augmentations run by an AI implant to regulate his temperature. What if there is conflict between his augmentations?  What if the AI tried to take control?  think about the possibilites of being able to not just "freeze" stuff with "cold" but be able to influence the potential energy in matter by reducing its temperature- sure, cold is a part of it...but Frost was a Physicist!  he could take his powers in all sorts of directions!

Young Legacy- Her deck could eb all about someone who was NEW at being a leader.  who was grieving about the death of her father, but bearing up under the responsibility.  It could eb about someone who made rash decisions, throwing herself into the fray without thinking it all the way through.

Sentinel Tactics is a tactical combat game that uses a hex grid map to represent terrain.

Oooh, maybe we can make our own homemade maps for custom scenarios?  I made an online version of Heroclix back in the day, and the most fun part was coming up with new and interesting maps for the fights.  I might need to open a new Tactics-flavored section of spiffworld.com sometime in the near future. :)

I'm good with tactical board games. I mean I prefer games with cubes/meeples in general, but tactical games, light wargames, stuff like that I'll definitely play.

Guess I just want to know what this game's USP is, i.e. why I should want to play it rather than my friend's (unnecessarily large) collection of Heroclix. I'm not enough of a fangirl just want this just because it's Sentinels... ;)

Heresy, I know.

While I love tactical style games, my wife (primary SOTM playing partner) is not too keen, so I'll have to wait on this.  The mini's will probably be a must buy just for using with the card game, though.

Me neither. I'd take a new character with a new deck over an old character with a new deck any day of the week.

AZ with a new deck wouldn't be AZ, so he might as well be a new character as far as I'm concerned. So what's the point?

I'm trying to dig up some more info about this and have come up with only a little so far.  Christopher's post says that Tactics uses the TacDice system created by Living World Games.  There's no info about the TacDice system on their site, but that system is what's used in the Schlock Mercenary: Capital Offensive game.  On the Schlock BGG page, I see a few normal-looking dice, lots of tokens, simple character sheets for the characters, some criminally simple map tiles, and a few decks of cards.  There's no reason to think that they'll be identical, but here's a PDF of the Schock Mercenary rules, so we can get an idea of how this designer implements the TacDice system.  I haven't looked through it yet, but will over lunch.

Sentinels is unique in terms of board games in that it has a story arc and that its heroes change and evolve over time.  For me (and I respect that not everyone feels this way) having some old characters return with new mechanics and new decks would be a way of continuing their stories and acknowledging that there have been new developments.  I'm certainly not advocating that every single existing (and future) Sentinels character be redone.  But it would be awesome to have new iterations with new mechanics.  I think you could definitely make a new deck and even change around the mechanics without compromising the "feel" of some of the heroes.  To directly address the matter of AZ:

What makes him AZ? Is it the damage type?  The fact that he's miserable? the mechanic that revolvess around specific equipment pieces?  the mathiness?  Maybe its the way he uses his own HP to deal damage.

I really do think that you could make an entirely new deck that incorporated some of these existing ingredients and some new ones to creat an AZ that still felt like AZ, just older, and changed by his experiences.  

I'm not loving what I'm reading in the rulebook for that other game that uses the TacDice system.  I know Tactics won't be exactly the same as Schlock Mercenary, but the basic movement and combat system are probably very similar.  In Schlock Mercenary:

1) You roll dice to see how far you can move, which I don't love.  That means that how far you can move is random turn-to-turn, which makes actual tactical choices more difficult.

2) When you roll dice for movement (or for how many command actions you can take on a turn), you'll either use the highest of the die results, the lowest, or the middlest (median) result, depending on the situation or your powers, or whatever.  This seems to be a core part of the TacDice system, but it doesn't actually seem to be a particularly clever or good system.  It's just a different one.

3) For combat, each attack lists the number of dice you roll, and has an auto-miss number(s).  The example they give is for a Laser Gun that rolls 3d and has auto-miss numbers of 1 and 3.  That means that if any of the die come up 1 or 3, you'll toss those die out from your results.  What a random rule.

4) After you've tossed out your auto-miss dice, you then check for line-of-sight (I think I'd want to have done this before bothering to roll), and then you have to toss out any of your remaining dice that are less than the range to your target (i.e. if they're 3 spaces away, you'll toss out any 1s or 2s you rolled.  Since you already tossed out the 1s and 3s due to auto-misses, you will now only have 4s or above left, if anything).

5) The defender then gets to roll some defense dice, with each one eliminating an attack die that matches it or is less than it.

6) If there's anything left over, it's applied as a hit on the target.

Here's an example from the rulebook:

Example I Schlock shoots at a Drone and rolls 5 dice at Range 2. Schlock gets a 1,1,2,3,3. The 3s are AutoMisses and are removed in Attack Step D. The 1s fail to make Range and are removed in Attack Step E. This leaves Schlock with a single Attack Die of 2. The Drone’s Defense Attribute is 2. The Drone rolls 2 Defense Dice and gets a 1 and a 4. The Drone’s player uses his Defense Die that shows a 4 to eliminate Schlock’s Attack Die of 2. Schlock has no remaining Attack Dice.   Example II Had Schlock been at Range 1, he would have hit with a 1,1, and 2. The Drone’s Defense Die of 4 would eliminate the 2, and the Defense Die of 1 would have eliminated one of Schlock’s dice that showed a 1. This would have left Schlock with a single Attack Die of 1.

I have to say, it doesn't sound like a good system at all. :(

Based on that, it sounds like it's what I feared - rolling buckets of dice and checking LOS all the time. I'm not a big fan of too much dice-iness in tactical games, personally.

And it sounds far too much like a generic wargame. I'm yet to be convinced.

I actually am interested to see how this system works with Sentinels.

I am fond of rolling dice, and I like systems that weight instead of add to rolls, so I like the high/low/middle as it gives some randomness but with percentages directed by the character you have.

I can see what they are going for with the attack rolls, you can set up an attacks range, accuracy and power with that system, I wouldn't say random, as good use of it would give more of a different feel to the attacks then more simple systems.

Again, I'm a huge dice rolling fan.  I love RPG's but I hate D20 systems, I love anythig with a bell curve, and this game seems to cut the middle, a system that allows for variety and stat leaning without dumping huge amounts of rules on you.

Done well it could do to a tactical dice roller what Sentinels did to strategy card games, give you an easy to follow system that has a lot more complexity than you first see.

I'm very curious, and optomistic that it will be a fun and fast tactics game.  It would be a shame if it falls flat.

Don;t get me wrong, I love dice. And I love rolling them. But too much randomness takes away a lot of the tactics, which probably isn't so good for a tactical game.

I could pretty much echo Phantaskippy. Ill wait to reserve judgment of the dice system until we see how they chose to implement it. 

We will have to se how much randomness there is.

For movement the more dice you roll the heavier the high/mid/low will weight the results, so a high move character that rolled four dice and took the highest would move farther more reliably than one who rolled three and took the middle.

The attack rolling interests me, esp. the auto-miss results.  The way it seems, for a shotgun you would make the auto-misses higher numbers, making it very effective at short range, not so much at longer ranges and with more suceptibility to armor reducing the damage.  For a rifle, you would want lower numbers, making it not gain as much from shorter range, yet not losing the higher numbers with more punch to get past armor.

I fully understand the dice rolling ruining strategy in games, I'm a big fan of Diplomacy but I won't play RISK because it is all about dice rolls, and screwing up all game can be reversed with a really good stretch of rolls.

The best system is one that gives you a bell-curve on your results, but those tend to be incredibly heavy on system time, this seems to be pretty fast, but with out the really random roll 1d6 and move of a game like Last Night on Earth (which I love, but it is random as heck).

I'm really hoping it works, a fast and fun but well weighted dice game system, well if I found one of those I guess I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name.

You guys, quit judging the game already! You barely know anything about it! With what GtG has done so far, couldn't you at least have a LITTLE faith that they MIGHT know what they're doing?

Since Sentinel:Tactics has been announced and a pre-release version will be demo'd at GenCon in mere days, I think it is safe for me to talk about it. I had the great fortune to have a chance to try a brief introduction of it tonight. I'm writing a little bit to brag that I got to play, but mostly to share my enthusiasm.

I liked it! A lot! Part of the love is getting to use the characters I know and love. I was controlling Bunker and got to make decisions about when was the right time to go into Turret Mode and which of his guns made the most sense given where I was compared to who I was trying to hit.

I liked the mechanics: Fun rolling dice; Enough decisions to enjoy having an effect on what was going on, but enough randomness to not feel compelled to map out intricate details of multiple moves in the future. Enough of a bell curve that the general likelihood of what should happen for an attack could be intuited, but with a reasonable chance that something spectacularly good or bad would happen.

What I saw of the attack resolution is much as Spiff described it. The numbers that fail on an attack, btw, have an effect on how well the attack works at different ranges. I don't have enough playtime yet to judge whether or not that affect is sensible generally, much less for specific attacks, but I had a positive feeling about it.

That's all good info.  I'll take the word of someone who's played it (him) over a guy who doesn't know what he's talking about (me) any day.

Still interested, I hope to hear more soon and frequently!

We're planning to try to play it at Gen Con, if possible, so I'll be able to give you my assessment, my spouse's, and potentially that of friends who will be with us.

Hopefully other folks will also get a chance and can share, also!

Thanks Arenson9, that sounds like what I was hoping for.

Cursed Gen-Con that I am unable to attend.

I'm very excited for this game now.

Any prospective timeline for release?  Or do I need to somehow steal the demo from Gen-Con and then destroy Gen-Con so the pre-order of Vengeance will go up.

I need minions, and maybe something large and round to crash into a convention center.

I've got some experimental growth hormone, if you're interested...

What I really want to know from anyone who plays Tactics is how thematic it is. Tactical combat is all very well and good, but a big part of what makes Sentinels Sentinels is that it oozes with theme.

Well that makes me feel a bit better, knowing arenson likes it. I really do hope it's good, which is probably why I'm so critical. A bad Sentinels game would be bad, right? ;)

Andy, the Schlock game uses a grid map, but I think I read that Tactics will use hexes (?) What did the prototype you played have?

Hexes

Personally, I think the Tactics game has even more theme to it than the card game. When you're playing the Tactics game, there's no random card draws - you have access to all the hero's abilities and can choose which you want to implement each round. Each hero can have 2 "powers" active at any time and you can swap one out each turn.

Heroes get a certain number of actions to use, with options to do more that are character-based. For example, Tachyon can Push the Limits, which lets her take damage to take additional actions.

There are a variety of scenarios, with boards constructed out of specific sets of hex boards. (Each large hex has 19 smaller hexes.) Each scenario has a specific layout using specific hex boards. Right now, we're demoing Bunkers Battle School, which is heroes versus heroes. Saturday will be demos with Kevin and Luther, the designers of the game, playing a villain against the heroes, so all the heroes will be working together against the villain. There's elevations to deal with and wooded spaces, both of which impact the game.

There's definitely some streamlining needed, cleaning up and balancing of powers, etc. Personally I'm enjoying it. Each of the heroes takes some work understanding how they're best played, but that's not surprising as there are a lot of interactions between a hero's powers, let alone between the various heroes.

Sounds a bit like Heroscape, with a more in-depth dice/ability system and a Sentinels flavor; particularly with the way the hexes interact. I would love building custom arenas with my heroscape pieces...

So to those who have played at gen con or where ever, are the Freedom Five the only heroes you've been able to play? I mainly want to bring the FV vs Prime Wardens fight to light, and also because other than AZ I don't have much interest in the Freedom Five.

Right now, it's Freedom Five and Ra.

"Ra and the Freedom Five!"

There's a band for ya.

http://youtu.be/Xb760GoBfgA

Very quick 5 minute demo

Thanks for that, good to see the cards and explanation.

I'm looking forward to it.  Can't wait to see villains flood the field with Minions and the heroes have to fight through.  The game looks like a winner to me.

FYI: The icons will be changed to be more SotM-related; right now, they're focusing on gameplay before worrying about asthetics.

Today's games were heroes versus villains, so folks got to see what it's like to go up against Dawn and Blade. Great stuff - it's a very different game than hero-versus-hero!

I haven't seen Blade, myself, so maybe someone else can confirm, but I know both Dawn and Omnitron have their respective minions.

And they are an incredibly painful challenge!