Marvel Crisis Protocol tournament report: May-be Time For MCP 12May2024

A bumper crop of 6 Edinburgh folks piled onto a packed train to play another Marvel Crisis Protocol event at Common Ground Games in Stirling. We seem to have been playing quite a few alternate formats lately and this time (I think probably the last for a while) we were going to all be playing the same pair of randomly drawn Crisis Cards rather than having sets as part of the rosters.

I think that this format theoretically encourages teams that are in the middle of the scenario vs attrition spectrum, so I wasn’t expecting a slew of highly specialised teams like Web Warriors or Black Order. I’ve mentally committed to keeping going with Inhumans for ranked games just to see what my Longshanks score looks like at the end so I stuck with them again. The roster has been playing really nicely for me and, while plan A is definitely to fight everyone, I think that the splashes allow me to compete in a wider scenario game.

Characters (10)
* Black Bolt (5)
Beast (3)
Crystal (3)
Medusa (4)
Ms. Marvel (3)
Quicksilver (3)
* Captain America (Sam Wilson) (3)
* Crimson Dynamo (4)
Rhino (4)
Toad (2)

Team Tactics (10)
Brace for Impact (R)
Can I Borrow That?
Eyes on the Prize
Fall Back
Inhuman Royal Family
Mission Objective
Sacrifice (R)
Smash
Terrigenesis
This is a Robbery

Game 1: Gordon playing Hydra

Round one I’m up against Gordon, which is always a nice smiley way to begin any event. He wins priority so I pick the slightly higher threat level so I can fit in both Medusa and Rhino. Most of Gordon’s likely teams are heavy on size 2 characters so I put Beast in to leverage his throw, though I do slightly worry about the number of energy attacks that he might face. The basic plan is to bounce around with Beast, Medusa and Rhino to flip SWORD points as needed while Black Bolt stands somewhere and vaporises people.

Extraction: Paranoia Pummels Populace!
Secure: S.W.O.R.D. Establishes Base On Moon’s Blue Area
Threat: 16
My team: Black Bolt, Beast, Medusa, Rhino
My cards: Brace For Impact, Fall Back, Mission Objective, Sacrifice, This Is A Robbery
Gordon’s team: Baron Strucker, Arnim Zola, Baron Zemo, Task Master, Winter Soldier Operative
Gordon’s cards: Brace For Impact, I Am A Baron After All, Inevitable Betrayal, Scientific Method, Soldat Activated

Round 1: Pay-to-flip Secures are a bit annoying for Inhumans as the need for extra power to deal with them reduces the amount spare for round 1 jank. So I don’t really expect to do a great deal of clever stuff here but it’ll be key to get at least 2 of the SWORD bases to stop Black Bolt getting pushed away into irrelevance. Winter Soldier plays Soldat Activated. Zemo goes to the left, flipping the back left point and standing next to the Extract on that side. Rhino takes a power from Black Bolt, flips the near left point and attacks Zemo for no damage but uses the place to get the Extract over on that side. Taskmaster comes forward but doesn’t do anything at all with the scenario; I guess he’s just making sure that none of the rest of Gordon’s team will be hurt for picking up an Extract over on that side. Black Bolt saunters forward and zaps Zemo for minimal effect and Winter Soldier flips the back right Secure and picks up the far right Extract. Beast flips the last SWORD base to make sure we’re all equal there and Strucker comes into the middle and picks up an Extract. Medusa tickles him and throws him toward Black Bolt to set up for next turn (not to mention being far enough away from Winter Soldier that Soldat Activated won’t do anything), and finally Zola trundles slowly up to the middle. The score is 5 – 3 to Gordon.

Round 2: Time to start the fighting; I want to start dazing Gordon’s team and relieving them of their Extracts. Black Bolt dazes Baron Strucker and takes his Extract. This also handily wins me the spot prize for this game, which is to daze a leader with your leader; it turns out to be Clea so I give her away to another gamer as I already own her. Now if I’m a bit careful about my target priority here I can probably keep priority for next round too. Zemo comes over and flips my near right Secure then Charges into Black Bolt for a bit of nice damage. Rhino attacks Zemo, flips that point back, attacks him again and places near the further away Secure and flips that too and finally throws some terrain at him which draws out Brace For Impact. Winter Soldier puts Stun on Beast and gets dazed in return; Beast is also able to take the last SWORD base and pick up Winter Soldier’s token although this leaves him on one wound. Zola improbably fails to finish Beast and then Medusa dazes both him and Zemo and collects the final Extract. Finally Taskmaster goes into Beast and somehow Gordon’s awful run of dice continues and my blue furred scientist stays standing, albeit with just about every condition in the game on him. The score goes to 12 – 5 to me as I score every possible point and push Zola away into irrelevance.

Round 3: Gordon’s going to have to have a pretty epic round to stop me finishing this from here. I’m not at all worried about retaining priority for next round since there almost certainly won’t be one; instead I’m just going to KO as many of Gordon’s team as possible to reduce his options for scoring. Black Bolt repeats his trick from last round by KOing Baron Strucker – infighting amongst the nobility going very much in favour the king over the baron! Winter Soldier finally dazes Beast and then unloads his spender into Black Bolt. Medusa KOs Zemo and pushes Taskmaster away from the fray. Zola leaves Rhino on a single wound which pretty much sums up Gordon’s game; I could continue to fight with him but instead just walk Rhino away to (relative) safety. Taskmaster can’t finish a spite kill on Medusa and we wrap this up at 20 – 6.

That was fun game with Gordon and we had a lot of laughs as we played through. The narrative became around infighting in the nobility as Gordon’s barons took on the Inhuman royalty and it was quite entertaining to see that story play out. I flatter myself that I had a plan to win this game here but Gordon’s dice were just awful and that meant that I didn’t really have to work too hard to get over the line.

Game 2: Ryan playing X-Men

I’m really pleased to be able to play into Ryan’s X-Men again as the last time I diced him off the table so hard that there wasn’t even a game in it. I’m also kind of pleased to be playing X-Men on this particular combination of Crisis Cards as it negates a certain amount of their nonsense. I win priority this time and Ryan chooses that we play at 18 threat. I want to go quite wide here so I forgo my preferred 4-threat characters entirely in favour of Black Bolt, who I intend to use a goalie for the Researcher and a bunch of mobile 3-threats to worry about the Infinity Formula. Beast gets the nod again as his throw is going to be amazing in this match-up, even though there are entirely too many energy attackers for him to feel comfortable. Ryan clearly has the same thoughts and brings his own Beast.

Extraction: Research Station Attacked!
Secure: Infinity Formula Goes Missing!
Threat: 17
My team: Black Bolt, Beast, Crystal, Ms Marvel, Captain America (Sam Wilson)
My cards: Brace For Impact, Fall Back, Inhuman Royal Family, Sacrifice, Smash
Ryan’s team: Storm (leader), Beast, Cyclops, Magik, Rogue
Ryan’s cards: Indomitable, Journey Through Limbo, Pardon Me Sugah, Patch Up, To Me My X-Men

Round 1: The basic plan is to sit a couple of people quietly on the two nearest Infinity Formulas, send Beast and Black Bolt to stop Ryan running off with the Researcher and then get a cheeky charge from Captain America to push someone off the back left point and score it instead. Crystal, Storm and Ms Marvel make exactly the moves you would expect onto their respective Secures; Ms Marvel is careful to stay outside of range 4 from Storm (because that way I can Embiggen into range to hit her but she has to move to hit me). Rogue goes to stand on the Researcher and Black Bolt comes forward and fails to hurt her at all. Magik takes the final Secure and also deals no damage to Crystal, then Beast takes a power from Black Bolt and double moves onto the researcher and throws Rogue off it. Cyclops shoots Beast, and Captain America takes a power from him and charges into Magik, failing to push her but at least contesting the point. Finally Ryan’s Beast comes forward, can’t quite get in range to hop off Rogue (because Cyclops is standing in the way) and goes for a risky attack onto my Beast hoping for the Wild to get Ambush. I take it on Black Bolt with A King Serves His People just to keep him off the Researcher but Ryan doesn’t roll the Ambush anyway. The score is 4 – 1 to me and I move the Researcher over toward Black Bolt.

Round 2: It’s on Ryan now to do something clever to take me off the Researcher because if the status quo remains then I’ll just score this out in 4 turns. My plan to stop him doing that is to daze all his characters ; I’m not too worried about losing priority as none of his individual activations are likely to be catastrophic for me and anyway going last means that I can try to displace his team off points. Black Bolt starts us off by dazing Beast in a single action. There isn’t anyone else in range so he just shrugs his shoulders and shuffles over to back stop himself on a bin in case Cyclops wants to push him away. Now that his own Beast is dazed, Cyclops decides to let rip with a beam into my Beast and Black Bolt, the king takes both shots and ultimately no damage. This exchange turns out to be a sign of how it’s going to go for the rest of the game. Ms Marvel Embiggens and dazes Storm, then Rogue charges into Crystal, achieves very little and uses Mutant Absorption to remove all her power. In return Crystal Incinerates her and pushes Magik off the back point. Magik gently tickles Sam and Limbo Steps back onto the point, Beast hurts Rogue and throws her back into the centre and Captain America pushes Magik back off the point and throws a ricochet into Rogue – with 4 critical hits (of 4) in the initial roll to demonstrate how my dice have been on fire this game. We go to 9 – 1.

Round 3: The dice have been just embarrassingly good for me so it would be rude to change plan now. I want to prioritise KOing characters who are already dazed just to start reducing Ryan’s options for a comeback. Rogue charges into Beast and dazes him, then Black Bolt KOs Ryan’s Beast (again with a single shot!) and hurts Rogue. Storm gets her own back on Ms Marvel, one-shotting her to even the score between the two. Crystal finishes off Rogue and then Cyclops hurts her and Captain America, pushing them both off Secures. Captain America charges back onto the far left Infinity Formula and pushes Magik around; I choose not to Ricochet into Cyclops as a bad rolls could drop him to Quick Draw. Magik Limbo Steps back onto the point, puts some ineffective attacks into Captain America and then plays Journey Through Limbo to send him back toward Crystal. The score is now 11 – 2 to me.

Round 4: I think that I can probably get enough points to finish up this round considering that Ryan is down by two characters already, but honestly the way the dice have fallen it would take a miracle for him to come back into this turn. The plan is to daze or KO anyone else who I can manage, especially anyone who hasn’t activated so I can deny Ryan any further opportunity to claw this back. Ms Marvel starts us off by throwing something at Storm, then playing Smash to break a car and KOing Storm. Cyclops puts some decent damage into Beast but can’t quite finish him, and he also doesn’t end up on the Infinity Formula. Captain America Charges back toward Magik and dazes her, and everyone else jogs to score. We finish the game at 17 – 2.

That was perhaps the most ridiculously one-sided game of dice I’ve played… at least since last time I did this to Ryan! If you’re reading this Ryan, I’m so sorry. Full credit to him for taking it all in his stride; I suspect that I would have been a bit less serene. There probably isn’t much to be said about the game itself – I think I had a decent plan but with dice like that I would have beaten even the very best players.

Game 3: Alasdair playing Wakanda

After all this time I finally get to play against fellow blogger Alasdair, who writes excellent articles on Across The Bifrost. He wins priority and I choose the slightly higher threat as I think that I can get some work down by just going wider than the Wakandans and focusing on flipping points. On the other hand, I’m a bit worried that I end up with Black Bolt stuck on one side of the board with his atrocious mobility and the important stuff happening far away from him.

Extraction: Skrulls Infiltrate World Leadership
Secure: Mutant Madman Turns City Into Lethal Amusement Park
Threat: 20
My team: Black Bolt, Beast, Crystal, Ms Marvel, Rhino, Toad
My cards: Brace For Impact, Eyes On The Prize, Mission Objective, Terrigenesis, This Is A Robbery
Alasdair’s team: Black Panther (leader), M’Baku, Shuri, Amazing Spider-Man, Beta Ray Bill
Alasdair’s cards: Advanced R&D, Brace For Impact, Eyes On The Prize, Spirit Of Wakanda, Wakanda Forever

Round 1: I’m not really sure how best to approach this; the Spirit of Wakanda play turns on all of the cool powers for Alasdair’s team right out of the gate. I think I’m unlikely to make huge headway into attrition so the plan is to drop Shuri as soon as possible to limit Alasdair’s activation count, play the Secure game as much as possible and hope to hold onto Skrulls for as long as I can manage. Bill plays Eyes on the Prize, Advanced R&D to power up Shuri who then plays Spirit of Wakanda to get the engine running. Luckily he was positioned a touch too far left to collect the right Skrull in one go but he still gets it and flips the Trap. Toad takes the central Skrull and then heads over to my left, flipping the trap with a power taken from Ms Marvel. Spider-Man comes over to collect the far left Skrull and gently tickles Toad, then Crystal goes to the back left Trap and flips it. Black Panther picks up the final Skrull and heads over toward Crystal, then Alasdair uses his pass so Black Bolt rolls abysmally in an attack on Bill. Shuri moves onto the Trap, Beast takes a power from Black Bolt, then moves up and throws Bill toward me. M’Baku makes a pretty rubbish swing at Beast and finally Rhino fails to do any damage to Bill. This leaves him able to play Robbery but he wouldn’t have the power to pick up the fallen Skrull so I decide it isn’t worth it and instead he gets lucky and takes the final Trap. This gets me a second spot prize (score all four Secures at once) which turns out to be, rather fittingly, Black Panther. I have him too so I just pass him to another nearby gamer. The score is 5 – 3 to me.

Round 2: I need to keep Alasdair off some of these Traps and also somehow relieve his team of some Skrulls. Rhino is a lock for that but he’s also got to live through an activation from a heavy hitter first so that’s not a sure thing at all. M’Baku lets rip into Rhino, drawing out my Brace For Impact on the throw into Beast but he survives with a couple of wounds remaining. Beast is not so fortunate, and gets dazed by one of the free attacks. Rhino plays This Is A Robbery on Bill, throwing him into Shuri in the process, the dazes Shuri after also drawing out Alasdair’s Brace For Impact. I considered making my last attack into Bill instead and then using Stampede to get back to my lines but I was worried that Bill would just throw Rhino into my team over there so I prioritised Shuri. Bill predictably dazes Rhino and retakes his Skrull, then heads toward the left side of the board. Ms Marvel Embiggens and rolls nicely to daze Spider-Man – thinking back I think that her first attack left Spider-Man with one or two wounds left so I should have played Terrigenesis at this point which would have made my life a lot more comfortable. Up in the corner, Black Panther makes short work of Crystal and flips that Trap, taking us to 9 – 7 in my favour.

Round 3: I have a slight lead so I need to somehow eke that out for two more rounds. My left side is collapsing so I probably need to focus on getting the Skrulls over to the right where Black Bolt can do work to defend them. Alasdair starts with Wakanda Forever – Shuri pushes Black Bolt away so he can’t double tap, and M’Baku and Black Panther make fairly inconsequential attacks. M’Baku has no difficulty KOing Rhino which is not too surprising but definitely makes the rest of this much harder. Ms Marvel dazes Bill and puts some nice damage into Spider-Man and Black Panther KOs Crystal before Spider-Man gets his revenge on Ms Marvel. Beast annoyingly fails to hurt Shuri or get the Ambush trigger to get onto the point and throw her, but Black Bolt wakes up and KOs her. The score is an uncomfortably tight 12 -11, still with me slightly in the lead.

Round 4: This is going to be the last round so I need to make sure I score at least 4 points. I’m feeling good about 3 of them (Toad’s Skrull plus the points on the right) but I’ll need to get something done on the left. Alasdair spots this too, and Spider-Man KOs Ms Marvel. She actually rolled heroically to avoid damage entirely from a massive hit in his first activation so it was a bit annoying that the second attach was also huge and took her out in one go. Black Bolt dazes M’Baku and Bill picks up the final fallen Skrull. I move Beast out into the middle in case Alasdair gets tunnel vision and sends Black Panther out to fight him – I’m worried that he can position to block Toad off the top right Trap as the movement is going to be very close. Of course, Alasdair is too canny to fall for that and moves Black Panther to block landing spots for Toad. Luckily Toad has indeed got enough movement to make it to that Trap. He needs to roll two successes off three dice to flip it, which is roughly a 50% chance. If he makes it, I win, otherwise Alasdair wins. It’s quite fitting in some ways that such a tight game has come down to a coin flip – the dice land and it’s good for me so I take the win by 16 – 15.

Wow, thanks to Alasdair for an amazing, exciting, thought provoking and above all fun game. This is what I come to MCP for – back-and-forth swings in momentum, play and counter play, a continuous sequence of decision points that all impact the final result. I loved that the game was so close we effectively decided it on a 50-50 roll of the dice; if I’m being honest with myself I do love it slightly more that the fortune eventually favoured me! I made a few notable mistakes – the biggest miss was not playing Terrigenesis on Spider-Man in round 2 as 2VP would have made the last round a lot less stressful. I didn’t make good use of my tactics cards in general, and I should have spotted that I wouldn’t have the spare power available to use Eyes On The Prize; having Inhuman Royal Family for use later in the game would have been much more useful.

Game 4: Ross playing X-Men

The final game of the day is into Ross, who tells me that he’s pretty new to the game but is clearly also pretty good at it based on today’s performance so far. I win priority and Ross helpfully picks my preferred threat level of 19; my only swap out from my ‘normal’ team at this threat level for Demons Downtown is to bring in Quicksilver to steal a cheeky Hammer somewhere. Again, I’m lucky to be playing a very scenario-based team on a Crisis combination that will let me spend my time brutalising them all.

Extraction: Fear Grips World As ‘Worthy’ Terrorise Cities
Secure: Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due?
Threat: 19
My team: Black Bolt, Crystal, Medusa, Quicksilver, Crimson Dynamo
My cards: Brace For Impact, Can I Borrow That, Eyes On The Prize, Fall Back, Sacrifice
Ross’s team: Cyclops, Domino, Rogue, X-23, Amazing Spider-Man
Ross’s cards: Brace For Impact, First Class, Patch Up, Xavier’s Dream, X-Ceptional Healing

Round 1: I’m not particularly intending to score any of the Portals here, instead I’m going to take three Hammers and then try to do as much damage as I can. Ross plays First Class. Crystal plays Eyes On The Prize, takes a power from Black Bolt then picks up the left Hammer and retreats back toward my lines. Rogue collects the rear Hammer and parks herself in the middle. I’m quite tempted to go get the right Hammer with Quicksilver but I don’t have the power to do it and get away safely so instead Black Bolt just flies onto the building and shoots Rogue. Cyclops picks up the Hammer on the right, then Quicksilver uses Speedster to close the gap and hits him, paying the two power to relieve him of the Hammer with Can I Borrow That. Domino goes to the rear point, Spider-Man comes in a bit too cautiously on the left side and X-23 comes toward the middle too but hides sensibly behind the bus shelter. Medusa moves Dynamo onto the rear point then advances and pokes Rogue. Finally Dynamo takes the last Hammer, walks forward (I didn’t have enough opportunities to get him power to let him have the three he would need to pick up the Hammer and use Propulsion Thrusters) and zaps Rogue. The score is even at 3 – 3.

Round 2: That went quite according to plan, so now it’s time for the second part of the plan which is to daze a lot of X-Men. Crimson Dynamo unleashes two beam attacks to daze both Rogue and Domino, ending up with a second Hammer. X-23 attacks Quicksilver who pays for Can’t Catch Me; she follows and hits him but can’t land any damage. Crystal lights up Spider-Man but clearly it just makes him mad – he attacks her twice and Black Bolt takes both of them and ends up getting dazed for his trouble! Quicksilver just bounces off X-23 but Medusa gets her. I end the round giving a power from Medusa to Crimson Dynamo so he’ll have 4 power next turn, i.e. enough to pay for Disruption Field twice. The score is now 7 – 4 to me.

Round 3: Dropping Rogue and X-23 is my first priority as that’ll get them out of my hair for the whole game. Rogue goes first and puts some nice damage into Dynamo, but he doesn’t go down. He beams Domino and Cyclops and teleports back into range for me to use Sacrifice. Spider-Man can’t finish Dynamo, leaving him on one (as is traditional) after I Sacrifice the second swing onto Black Bolt. Crystal dazes Spider-Man, pushes X-23 away and adds some tasty damage onto Rogue – good work Crystal! X-23 comes back into the fray but somehow fails to deliver the last wound to Dynamo. Quicksilver hurts X-23 a little, then Domino pays to Patch Up Cyclops and he walks forward and, yet again, in unable to put that last wound into Crimson Dynamo. Medusa KOs X-23, hurts Rogue and throws the bus shelter into Cyclops who sensibly plays Brace For Impact. Ross decides to keep Domino back to score her point (probably a mistake but that is just his inexperience showing) so Black Bolt walks up to line up a very nice Whisper. The beam KOs Rogue and Domino, leaving Cyclops on one wound and with Stagger. The score is 12 – 4.

Round 4: We’ve been playing pretty slowly so this is going to be the last round but I think that I can wrap this up anyway here. Spider-Man does finally end the embarrassment and daze Crimson Dynamo, collecting his Hammers. Black Bolt easily dazes Cyclops, Medusa throws Spider-Man off the scoring points and I shuffle my team around to score points. We finish at 17 – 6.

That was a very nice game to finish up on, but it was really favouring me right from the start. The Crisis combination was exactly what my roster is comfortable playing, it was just what Ross’s X-Men didn’t want to see, plus Ross was quite inexperienced and (I think) not sure of how to approach this match-up. I probably could have had a smoother use of the Inhumans leadership in round 1 as it felt like I spent a lot of time for rather simple decisions but I’ll put that down to ‘game 4 brain failures’. Of course, I definitely acknowledge my good defence dice on Crimson Dynamo in round 3 but by that point I was ahead considerably on both attrition and score and I think I probably could have held on for the win even if Dynamo ad gone down earlier. I look forward to meeting Ross across the table again when he’s got a few more games under his belt as he seems very good at the game for having played so few match-ups.

Once the scores are counted up I’m in second place, behind Stu on the first tiebreaker (which is Strength of Schedule, as all events should be) and I’m more than happy with that result; you can’t do more than win your own games so I did all I could here. I managed to play all of my characters at least once which makes me extra happy. Special mention to Frazer who was just two wounds away from dropping Stu’s Hulk in the final game which would have taken him to a win and first overall – not bad for a guy who started the day saying he would be happy to just get a single win! Likewise commiserations to Gareth who spent the entire day suffering the kind of dice that most of my opponents had been lumbered with. Thanks to Gordon, Ryan, Alasdair and Ross for four fun games of MCP, and as always huge thanks to Allan for running these events and generally making the whole scene possible. I’ll be back!

Marvel Crisis Protocol team tournament report: Crisis In Caledonia 20Apr2024

We had a team event in Marvel Crisis Protocol last weekend, hosted by Allan and run out of Common Ground Games in Stirling. Akos, Frazer, Gareth and Joe joined me in Underpowered Scoundrels Form Mediocre Syndicate and we set out with the full expectation of coming in at the bottom of the pack.

The rules meant that only one of each character and Tactics Card could be used per team, and all of the Crisis Cards had to be used at least once before they could be duplicated. The Serious Business way to play this would be to work out the five strongest rosters, divide up the all of the best characters appropriately and then carefully work out who we would try to put into each match up with the other teams. We didn’t do any of that. Instead, we all just listed the teams that we wanted to play, and then went through and removed any duplicates. Our goal in the match-up process was to get entertaining match-ups where possible rather than trying to specifically arrange an overall team win. I stuck with Inhumans and removed a few of the tech pieces from my ‘main’ roster as they were needed elsewhere; otherwise our team was Brotherhood of Mutants (Akos), Asgard & Wakanda (Frazer), Avengers (Gareth) and finally Spider Foes & Criminal Syndicate (Joe).

Characters (10)
* Black Bolt (5)
Crystal (3)
Medusa (4)
Ms. Marvel (3)
Quicksilver (3)
* Crimson Dynamo (4)
Toad (2)
Beast (3)
* Spider-Man (Miles Morales) (3)
Spider-Woman (4)

Team Tactics (10)
Sacrifice (R)
Can I Borrow That?
Inhuman Royal Family
Terrigenesis
Smash
No Matter the Cost
Double Agent
Escort to Safety
Trip Up
Sucker

Secure Crisis
Gamma Wave Sweeps Across Midwest (E, 15)
Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due? (E, 19)
Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse (C, 19)

Extract Crisis
Research Station Attacked! (E, 15)
Alien Ship Crashes In Downtown! (C, 17)
Deadly Legacy Virus Cured? (C, 19)

Game 1: David playing Midnight Suns

In our first game we’re up against Absolute Weapon who are clearly taking things a bit more seriously than us. I end up playing into David with his Midnight Suns roster; he wins priority and chooses his own Secures. I go for the slightly lower threat level for the simple reason that I can make a team out of it nicely. Crimson Dynamo is there to make the likely triggers from David’s team a bit less likely while Medusa can put out a lot of consistent damage while moving my own pieces around in case they inevitably get displaced. David’s team is a lot less worried about the Stun from the Secures than I am so my plan is not to contest too hard in round 1 and work over Blade and Juggernaut, then I can hope to deal with Hulk in due course.

Extraction: Alien Ship Crashes In Downtown!
Secure: Mayor Fisk Vows To Find Missing Witnesses
Threat: 16
My team: Black Bolt, Medusa, Ms Marvel, Crimson Dynamo
My cards: Escort To Safety, Inhuman Royal Family, No Matter The Cost, Sacrifice, Smash
David’s team: Blade, Immortal Hulk, Juggernaut
David’s cards: Do You Know Who I Am?, One Below All, Patch Up, Siege Of Darkness, Smash

Round 1: I don’t want to put up anyone too quickly because David’s team will make short work of them. On the other hand, I can’t afford to let things get too far out of hand or I’ll run out of fighting time. Juggernaut collects the central Core and then Bumps onto the righthand objective. I should have collected the left Core with Ms Marvel at this point but I was really worried that Hulk would just drop her in one so instead Dynamo takes a power from Black Bolt, jumps forward and starts applying Shock to Juggernaut. David uses his Pass and Medusa uses Royal Decree to bring Black Bolt into the fray. Hulk takes the left Core and sites on the Secure over there. On the one hand, I guess I’m happy for him to be out of my hair, but on the other hand I can’t just give up three VPs a turn if David goes on the defensive. Ms Marvel and Blade both spend their activations walking to the right and finally Black Bolt rolls like a champion to daze Juggernaut which is pretty handy. The score is 3 – 0 to David.

Round 2: The priority here is to KO Juggernaut because if I can bring him down then the rest of my life gets easier. Juggernaut slightly helps me out with some weak attacks into Black Bolt but then throws Crimson Dynamo into him and the king away with Do You Know Who I Am to daze my leader. Medusa does at least daze Blade in return. Immortal Hulk uses Smash, his own jump and One Below All to get across the board and slap Ms Marvel and Crimson Dynamo around a bit. Ms Marvel tickles Juggernaut and Crimson Dynamo applies Shock to both of David’s big guys. The score now goes to 3 – 2, though Ms Marvel also dazes in the end phase because of the scenario effects.

Round 3: Black hurts Ms Marvel then plays a brutal Siege of Darkness turn to really pile on the damage. Crimson Dynamo continues to put damage onto the Midnight Suns and then Juggernaut has an amazing turn where he dazes Medusa and KOs Ms Marvel while also receiving a Patch Up from Blade. Black Bolt is forced to walk over and uses Whisper to do some very nice damage into both Juggernaut and Blade. Hulk dazes Dynamo and throws Black Bolt off the point and the score goes to a rather alarming 9 – 2, though at least Blade gets Koed from the scenario.

Round 4: At least I now have priority. I need to score a lot of point this turn, but I can probably get a clear turn as Black Bolt should be able to deal with both of David’s remaining characters. He starts with a Master Punch to throw Hulk into Juggernaut. I consider doing that again but there are too many failure cases (daze Hulk in one and don’t throw him, get the throw but don’t daze Juggernaut etc) so he uses No Matter The Cost for a Whisper that does the job. I make a big mistake though and don’t place Black Bolt on the point at this stage. Crimson Dynamo moves to stand on the left point with an Extract and Medusa goes to the right but doesn’t have the movement to also collect a token so there is one sitting on the ground still. The score goes to 9 – 8 to David.

Round 5: If Black Bolt can survive a round with Hulk I’m confident of a win here. Otherwise, it’s going to be very tight. Either way, there probably aren’t too many remaining decision points since I don’t have any useful way to displace him if Black Bolt goes down. Hulk goes into Black Bolt and drops him with the exact damage needed which is rather upsetting. Dynamo and Medusa run around scooping up the Cores and standing places that Hulk isn’t, and the score goes to 12 – 12.

Round 6: If Hulk can drop Medusa with a single attack (since he’ll have to walk and Gamma Leap to make the attack) then I’ll lose, otherwise I’ll win. David rolls the dice and does 6 damage off his 7 dice attack, and I roll zero blocks even with a reroll. Oh well. The score is 15 – 15.

Round 7: This is over now; if we just sit there then Crimson Dynamo will run out of wounds from the scenario damage long before Hulk does. But we don’t need to worry about that, as Hulk KOs him with a single swing giving David a well-deserved win.

Wow, what a close fun game. I was debating between Ms Marvel and Crystal for my team and I should definitely have gone with Crystal; her long move and conditions could have ben relevant in many cases. Ms Marvel could still have been impactful if I hadn’t deployed her in the worst possible place – she should have been pretty much in the centre so I could send her after either of the outside Extracts. I could also have just placed Black Bolt more sensibly in round 4 and been able to score us out in round 6 by getting Medusa to collect the final Core earlier. Still, I got lucky to drop Juggernaut in round 1 and I should really have been playing all of this 3 points down. Good work by David who punished my mistakes and had an actual plan here. The rest of the team largely fares as well as I did and we go down 4 – 1.

Game 2: Kai playing Avengers

This time we’re matched up with Brotherhood Without Manners, all regulars at our events and mainly based in Dundee. I get Kai, who I think that I haven’t played in a long time, and win priority to choose my Secures. With Demons and Hammers this is going to be all about murdering the other team so I go down that route as hard as possible with the only ‘soft’ option being Quicksilver who will hopefully steal someone’s Hammer at some stage and run away with it.

Extraction: Fear Grips World As ‘Worthy Terrorise Cities
Secure: Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due?
Threat: 19
My team: Black Bolt, Medusa, Ms Marvel, Quicksilver, Crimson Dynamo
My cards: Can I Borrow That, Escort To Safety, Inhuman Royal Family, Sacrifice, Smash
Kai’s team: Captain America (Steve Rogers), Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Ghost Rider, Winter Soldier
Kai’s cards: Avengers Assemble, Brace For Impact, Deal With The Devil, Second Wind, Stark Armoury

Round 1: This is a pretty simple plan – take the right Hammer with Ms Marvel, let steal the left Hammer with Quicksilver’s card and then fight everyone in the middle. The combination of Bodyguard and Got Your Back is likely to be quite annoying but I think I can play around it. Predictably, Ms Marvel does take the Hammer on the right and Iron Man goes on the left. Quicksilver takes some power from Black Bolt and uses Speedster to get up to Iron Man but then fails to do any damage and hence just leaves him sitting there perplexed but still holding the Hammer. Captain America takes the middle and Medusa moves Crimson Dynamo with Royal Decree having borrowed Black Bolt’s other power. Winter Soldier comes on to the back point and takes that Hammer, then points out that I left Medusa too far forward by shooting off half of her health. Black Bolt bounces uselessly off Captain America, Captain Marvel joins him in the middle and Crimson Dynamo beams the three of them to give out Shock all round. Finally Ghost Rider surprises me by not attacking Ms Marvel for her Hammer but instead dazes Medusa. The score is 4 – 3 to Kai.

Round 2: Apart from a few niggles, that went pretty much the way I wanted it. I want to spend this turn leveraging attrition as the scores aren’t likely to change hugely so I just need to stop Kai from getting hold of too many Hammers. Medusa starts us out by throwing Ghost Rider into Captain Marvel, drawing out Brace For Impact. She then dazes Captain America (who had used Bodyguard to take the attack for Winter Soldier) and the Got Your Back KOs her in a single shot. Well that is quite annoying. Captain Marvel goes into Binary Form but then largely bounces off Crimson Dynamo as he uses Disruption Field to keep the incoming damage down to a respectable amount. In return Dynamo dazes Winter Soldier, Propulsion Thrusters over to collect the fallen Hammer and finishes dazing Captain Marvel. Ghost Rider puts a lot of damage into Crimson Dynamo but he stays standing. Quicksilver then has the most remarkable turn I’ve ever seen. He hits Iron Man and uses Can I Borrow That? to steal his Hammer. He then rolls both triggers on his builder six times in a row to bounce back and forth between Ghost Rider and Iron Man, eventually dazing the latter. Ms Marvel and Black Bolt daze Ghost Rider and the score goes to 8 – 4 in my favour.

Round 3: I’m expecting a pretty big fight-back turn here from Kai but overall the game have swung to favour me. My plan is to focus down and KO characters to get back to parity with number and then just see the game out. Unfortunately that stellar round of attacks has somehow given away priority despite me already having lost Medusa. Captain Marvel goes into Binary Form again and dazes Crimson Dynamo, the Kai pays for Avengers Assemble on her, Captain America and Iron Man to move them into better spots. Black Bolt tries to swing at Ghost Rider but Captain America takes it so I throw him out of the way, pick up a fallen Hammer and then try again with a bit more success. Ghost Rider uses Hell On Wheels to make sure that Quicksilver can’t just run out of range and leaves him on a single wound before dropping Ms Marvel in a single go. Quicksilver has another good run of dice to KO Iron Man before Winter Soldier dazes him and uses Hydra Tactics to hop around and collect some Hammers. Captain America ends by throwing Black Bolt off the back point. The score evens up at 9 – 9.

Round 4: Now that I have priority back I can get to work polishing off Kai’s wounded team; Winter Soldier is the first target because I don’t want him doing Got Your Back with a pair of Hammers on him. Ms Marvel throws him into Ghost Rider, Embiggens, pays for Smash and then thumps him for the KO. She picks up those Hammer and KOs Ghost Rider; Kai could play Deal With The Devil here but decides that the two Captains are too important to sacrifice for this. Captain Marvel goes Binary again and dazes Black Bolt. Crimson Dynamo hops onto the middle and beams Kai’s team before Captain America pushes him off again. Quicksilver puts the last wound onto Captain Marvel and gratefully collects her Hammers. The score is now 14 – 10 to me.

Round 5: With just Captain America left, this is basically all over. He hurts Ms Marvel but can’t finish her off. I could probably KO Captain America in return but it seems needless so Ms Marvel throws him off the point and we score up. The final result is 21 – 10.

Many thanks to Kai for a very fun game. That probably featured the silliest dice I’ve seen in a long time with both Quicksilver and Winter Solder rolling absolutely stellar whenever they needed it. Kai probably could have focused more on having Captain America and Captain Marvel throw Crimson Dynamo into my team as they really hate that (especially without Brace For Impact in this format) and made more use of Ghost Rider down the middle where his immunity to Incinerate and his beam attack would have been really annoying to deal with. The games for the rest of the team have not favoured us though and we’re squeaked out 3 – 2.

Game 3: Simon playing Criminal Syndicate

So here we are, as foretold, at the bottom table. The match-up process puts me in with Simon who is returning to the scene after a while away having had another baby. I win priority which is helpful into Criminals as it should slow down the scoring by enough to fight everyone and we end up with a very satisfactory arrangement of Crises to play on. Since we’re at 19 again I just stick with basically the same team as last time with the exception of swapping out Quicksilver for Crystal.

Extraction: Deadly Legacy Virus Cured?
Secure: Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due?
Threat: 19
My team: Black Bolt, Crystal, Medusa, Ms Marvel, Crimson Dynamo
My cards: Escort To Safety, Inhuman Royal Family, No Matter The Cost, Sacrifice, Smash
Simon’s team: Kingpin, Bullseye, MODOK, Rhino, Shadowlands Daredevil
Simon’s cards: All According To Plan, Disarm, Indomitable, Shadow Organisation, This Is A Robbery

Round 1: The plan here is largely the same as the last game with Kai – don’t give up too much of a points lead and focus on attrition until I have enough of a lead that I can start to catch up on points again Ms Marvel takes the Extract on the right and Rhino picks up the one on the left. Medusa uses Royal Decree to bring Crimson Dynamo forward and picks up the final token. MODOK zaps Crimson Dynamo rather more effectively that I would have liked and Bows Medusa backwards, which is probably not too bad for me as it means at least that she won’t get Incinerate. Crystal puts Incinerate on Rhino but does no actual damage, Daredevil bounces similarly off Ms Marvel and Black Bolt continues this trend by failing to do a great deal of anything to MODOK. Kingpin comes into the middle and Crimson Dynamo shoots him and MODOK a little. The score is 3 – 2 to Simon.

Round 2: I’m not Incinerated and most of Simon’s team is, so it’s time to get to work. I need to daze a couple of Simon’s team here so that I can start to KO them next turn and Kingpin is the number one target. Simon plays a very good use of Shadow Organisation on Kingpin and MODOK which messes with my immediate plans to start punching people with Black Bolt so instead Crimson Dynamo jumps in to zap Bullseye and Kingpin, getting the daze on the latter. Over on the right Daredevil and the Ninjas make short work of Ms Marvel and then on the other side Crystal rolls rather heroically to daze Rhino. Bullseye finishes off Crimson Dynamo and Black Bolt walks into range of MODOK and fails to roll even a single success on a Master Punch. Simon could have used Indomitable but I need to draw it out at some point. I also made a big error placing Black Bolt at the rear Secure which got him Incinerated without even scoring. MODOK hurts him back in return and Medusa puts a few attacks into MODOK for similarly little effect. The score is 5 – 4 to Simon now.

Round 3: That could have gone better (mainly with Black Bolt) but otherwise I’m kind of on the same plan. Daredevil is the lowest priority while Kingpin and Rhino and the ones I need to actually deal with. Medusa gets targeted with Disarm which is going to make her turn rather anaemic and Kingpin lays into Crimson Dynamo leaving him on a single point of damage with Stagger. Black Bolt uses Master Punch on Kingpin to force out Indomitable and then fails to damage MODOK for the second attack in a row. Rhino comes in and uses This Is A Robbery on Medusa (KOing Crimson Dynamo in the process of the throw) and then dazes her from full health. I guess that saves me worrying about Disarm. Ms Marvel dazes Daredevil in return and Bullseye puts a couple of shots into Black Bolt before Crystal dazes him too. MODOK completes the turn by dazing Black Bolt and Bowing Crystal out of the way. The score goes to 7 – 6, still in Simon’s favour.

Round 4: I can probably drop Kingpin this turn which will make my life a bit easier but I need to get MODOK under control after Black Bolt’s complete failure to do anything to the big head. Simon plays All According To Plan and Kingpin hurls my leader off out of the way before tickling Medusa. Medusa has an epic turn, throwing Bullseye at MODOK to make sure that he’s in range for her spender, then KOing Kingpin and Bullseye and finally dazing MODOK. That’s how you do it, Black Bolt! Daredevil comes over to do his area attack on Black Bolt and Ms Marvel and I gamble with Sacrifice onto Black Bolt hoping that I can keep them both up as my leader has 8 health here. It doesn’t pay off and he goes down. I compound my error by not immediately using Ms Marvel so Rhino survives what Crystal has to offer and KOs Ms Marvel. We’re now at 8 – 7 to Simon.

Round 5: I’m running out of pieces to do work with here so I just need to start evening up the odds. Medusa throws the Ninjas into Rhino hoping for an unlucky defence roll but he survives on one. She does at least KO MODOK. Rhino dazes Crystal, Stampedes across the board and drops a casual five damage into Medusa; I can probably hold on for a win if she survives but Daredevil manages the last damage on her from afar. 11 – 7 to Simon.

Round 6: Well, if Crystal can somehow KO both of Simon’s characters here I’ll take an ill-deserved win but it seems unlikely. She moves across and Incinerates both of them, (KOing Rhino in the process) but can’t quite get enough damage on Daredevil to seal the deal. The game finishes at 13 – 8 to Simon.

Well done Simon for beating me very soundly. I played a couple of turns very poorly, especially in round 4 where I activated characters in the wrong order repeatedly and also took a (I think reasonable) gamble with Sacrifice that didn’t pay off. Black Bolt’s apparent complete inability to put even a single damage on MODOK cost me very dearly, and I compounded it by getting him Incinerated for no gain at all. There is definitely plenty to improve from where I played here, but nonetheless I had a lot of fun getting to face Simon across the table again. The rest of my team fares better and we take the round 3 – 2 to avoid the wooden spoon.

Overall that was a lot of fun and I don’t think that I would change our overall ‘fly casual’ strategy if we had out time again. The event fuelled my nihilism as even if all three of my games had the opposite results then our team results wouldn’t have changed at all. Thanks to David, Kai and Simon for three more fun games of MCP, to the rest of my team (Akos, Frazer, Gareth and Joe) for joining me and putting up with my poor match-up decisions all day and of course to Allan for running the whole thing. I shall return!

Marvel Crisis Protocol tournament report: Street Level Violence 14Apr2024

Last weekend I attended a Marvel Crisis Protocol event down in Protech Games (in Stockton) with a bit of a twist. The theme was ‘street level characters’ and so no-one with a threat higher than 4 could be taken in any rosters. This seemed like an interesting format – and anyway, I like to play games so it’s not exactly a hardship – so Joe and I piled into Allan’s car to head down to participate.

This format obviously effectively excludes any faction with a 5+ threat leader so I clearly wasn’t going to be going for leaderless Inhumans. In my opinion some factions are highly advantaged in this format, partly because their power pieces fit into it, and partly because their natural predators are not present. I was fully expecting to see big successes from Guardians, Wakanda and Web Warriors, and I also thought that X-Men were likely to be around in high numbers simply because they fit nicely into this format and they’re the new hotness after the release of Professor X et al. I did briefly consider playing Wakanda myself but decided that I wasn’t really excited to play them and just left them behind. Instead I took a Cabal roster led by the new Red Skull (Master of the World) by removing the high threat characters from a roster I’d been tinkering with as a chassis for Shadow King. That roster had rather been based around moving the other team and generally being a pain to work into, but as I removed pieces I realised that it had just become a roster of characters that I find entertaining. Mystique and Mysterio both being affiliated makes me very happy and in the end I just figured I would see how I got on without worrying too much about min-maxing a roster that I would only really use here.

Characters (10)
* Red Skull, Master of the World (4)
* Mystique (3)
Mysterio (3)
Crossbones, Merciless Merc (3)
Enchantress (4)
Skurge, The Executioner (3)
Bullseye (2)
Baron Zemo (3)
Rhino (4)
X-23 (3)

Team Tactics (10)
Dark Reign
Deception (R)
The Grand Illusion
Brace for Impact (R)
Meet My Executioner
Cosmic Obliteration
Mission Objective
I Am A Baron, After All
This is a Robbery
X-Ceptional Healing

Secure Crisis
Infinity Formula Goes Missing! (B, 17)
Super-Powered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate (F, 20)
Gamma Wave Sweeps Across Midwest (E, 15)

Extract Crisis
Struggle For The Cube Continues (F, 17)
Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan (F, 17)
The Montesi Formula Found (E, 18)

Game 1: Nigel playing Winter Guard

The first game puts me up with Nigel, also travelling to the North East for gaming though in his case from Stockport. We have met at least one other time but I haven’t had the pleasure of playing him until now. I’ve hardly ever played against Winter Guard in events but my record against them in casual play is pretty abysmal. I win the roll-off choose my Secures, though I probably wouldn’t have minded too much the other way round either. Since we’re basically going to be having a scrum in the middle of the board I go for both Mysterio and Crossbones; the two slowest characters in the game. Hopefully they won’t have to move too far!

Extraction: The Montesi Formula Found
Secure: Gamma Wave Sweeps Across Midwest
Threat: 18
My team: Red Skull Master of the World, Baron Zemo, Bullseye, Crossbones Merciless Merc, Mysterio, Mystique
My cards: Brace For Impact, Cosmic Obliteration, Dark Reign, Deception, The Grand Illusion
Nigel’s team: Crimson Dynamo, Black Widow, Ursa Major, Winter Soldier Operative, Logan The Wolverine
Nigel’s cards: Brace For Impact, Mission Objective, Patch Up, Sovereign Strike, X-Ceptional Healing

Round 1: I don’t have any safe extracts, but then again neither does Nigel. In the end I figure I’ll just send up Crossbones on the basis that he’s quite tough and collect the central book. Otherwise I want to pull back to my side of the board and ideally kidnap someone using Deception at a key moment. Crossbones collects the middle book, and Winter Soldier shoots him to no effect while collecting his own. Bullseye picks up the last book and settles himself on my home secure. Ursa Major waddles forward and Mystique uses Deception to move him into no-man’s-land on my side of the board, shooting him rather ineffectually for good measure. Black Widow comes in to contest the centre, and Mysterio fails to hurt Ursa Major at all. Crimson Dynamo puts shock on Crossbones and goes into the middle. Zemo and Red Skull both try to hurt Ursa Major but start what will be a day-long story of me using the Red Skull leadership but still failing to do any damage, thus removing what little power I had available. The score is 3 – 3.

Round 2: We’re committed to the brawl here so I need to minimise the impact that Black Widow and Winter Soldier can have, and then start to work over Nigel’s team that are in my reach. Crimson Dynamo puts Shock on Zemo then jumps to zep him again along with Mysterio and Red Skull. He finishes up by paying for Patch Up on Ursa Major which leaves him quite dry on power. Crossbones pays for Dark Reign on Crimson Dynamo in case I lose him early, then clears Shock and beams Black Widow and Winter Soldier (not ideal but there weren’t any neat lines going the other way) before Mysterio pays for The Grand Illusion. Logan smacks the hell out of Mystique but his beam is heavily blunted by The Grand Illusion. Red Skull bounces off Crimson Dynamo even with Dark Reign and teleports Logan out of my way before Ursa Major has a fairly ineffective turn into Mysterio. He and Mystique join up to daze Crimson Dynamo and Winter Soldier leaves Crossbones on one; Black Widow polishes him off and collects his book. Zemo goes into Winter Soldier but can’t do much damage. The score goes to 6 – 6.

Turn 3: The priority here is to drop Crimson Dynamo as he’s in a great position to stymie basically everything I want to do. I also need to relieve Black Widow and Winter Soldier of their books. Winter Soldier starts us out by using the book to beam Zemo and Crossbones. Despite being unable to explode Criticals or reroll, Nigel rolls a perfect 12 successes from 12 dice and I roll zero blocks on either character, losing them both in one go. Mysterio mildly inconveniences Crimson Dynamo before going down to Bleed (He was going down either way and I wanted to get more use out of him first). Crimson Dynamo dazes Mystique and Red Skull, leaving me with just Bullseye. There’s not a lot he’s going to do so I just have him pop a couple of damage into Crimson Dynamo to soften him up for next turn before Ursa Major dazes him. Nigel scores the maximum to take it to 13 – 6.

Turn 4: Wow, that was a pasting like I haven’t had in a while. I’ll be lucky to pull this back but basically the plan is the same as last turn – deal with Crimson Dynamo and try to get some of these books back. Red Skull finishes off Crimson Dynamo, then Winter Soldier one-shots Zemo. Mystique drops Ursa Major and collects his book, then Black Widow comes uses her book to beam both Mystique and Mysterio. Nigel rolls another perfect roll (so that’s 24 success from 24 so far) but I do at least make some blocks this time and they do survive. Bullseye finally dazes Winter Soldier, Logan puts some damage around my team but I get lucky and only Mystique gets Koed and then Mysterio goes to work on Logan, moving him away from the scoring points. The score goes to 15 – 9 to Nigel.

Turn 5: I’ll basically need a miracle here in that I need to stop Nigel scoring at all, so my priority has to be to daze Black Widow. Wolverine goes into Bullseye and Mysterio dazes him with Tricks and Traps on the place. Mysterio then rolls a ridiculous set of dice to one-shot Winter Soldier. Ironically I needed him to survive on one so I could get a move from Tricks and Traps to be in range of Black Widow, who happily legs it for the corner where I can’t get to her. We finish at 16 – 15 to Nigel.

Wow, that was a hell of a game. Nigel’s turn 3 (and his dice on the Montesi Formula books in general) just completely broke my back and I was in some ways quite pleased to get it back to being so close. In retrospect I could have made better use of Crossbones in turn 2; he should have attacked Crimson Dynamo instead of some fairly inconsequential damage on the two characters at the back. Hopefully we can meet across the table again!

Game 2: John playing Cabal

In general I prefer not to have mirror-matches as I enjoy the diversity of factions in the game, so it was inevitable that I would end up playing the only other Cabal player at the event! Fortunately John was playing a rather different roster from me which was much more focused on just killing everything in sight so it seemed unlikely that we’d face the spectre of playing the exact same teams into each other. John won the roll off and picked his Secures, and I went for the slightly higher threat mainly because we were already out of the running for the event and I wanted to play more of my toys.

Extraction: Struggle For The Cube Continues
Secure: Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due?
Threat: 19
My team: Red Skull Master of the World, Bullseye, Crossbones Merciless Merc, Enchantress, Mysterio, Mystique
My cards: Cosmic Obliteration, Dark Reign, Deception, Mission Objective, The Grand Illusion
John’s team: Red Skull Master of the World, Baron Mordo, Baron Zemo, Hood, Elektra, Nebula
John’s cards: Dark Reign, Hood’s Gang, I Am A Baron After All, Mission Objective, Vendetta

Round 1: Again neither of us have a safe central grab so my plan is to leave the centre and see how well John can play around Deception. I don’t particularly want to get involved in a brawl right in the middle so hopefully I can drag the main fight over to my side of the board where I can leverage Bullseye, who is definitely planning to sit on the back point all game. Hood and Bullseye take the left Cubes, then Mordo moves on the rear point and uses Master Of The Occult so he can be a battery for Red Skull later. My Red Skull takes the near right Cube and moves back to the middle. Elektra comes to the middle (but for some reason doesn’t take) the centre Cube after her Ninjas pick up the one on the back right. This leaves her in range for Enchantress to Siren’s Call her forward and into my clutches. John then makes a really clever play where he brings Red Skull forward and teleports Elektra back to safety using the power that Mordo just generated – I didn’t see that coming at all. Mystique mostly bounces off Red Skull and Zemo picks up the final Cube fragment. Nebula comes for Mystique but, as is tradition, leaves her on a single wound. The score is 5 – 3 to John.

Round 2: If I just leave this all to play out then I’ll eventually lose so I need to either leverage the attrition side of my game or start pushing people around. I have tools for both but in a Cabal vs Cabal match the only true choice is to fight. Red Skulls dazes Mystique easily and then teleports Crossbones far out of the fight. Mysterio moves Elektra away and then rolls quite nicely to finish off John’s Red Skull. Zemo charges in and almost takes out Enchantress in one go before retreating back to safety. I pretty much have to use her then and she makes me proud, dazing Nebula and Siren’s Calling Mordo further away. Hood comes in but can’t finish off Enchantress as his attacks are stuck on her best defence type. My Red Skull teleports into the action and dazes Hood, collecting his Cube in the process. The Ninjas hand their Cube to Zemo (they would have died to the Cube damage at the end of the turn anyway) and Elektra dazes my Red Skull and picks up both of his tokens. Bullseye drops her in turn but can’t get her Cubes back; this tempts Mordo to come in for them but he gets dazed by a timely Tricks and Traps from Mysterio. Crossbones saunters back into the fight and picks up a bunch of these Cubes that are just lying around on the ground. John stays in the lead at 7 – 6.

Round 3: Not having priority here is going to be a problem because a lot of my characters are looking extremely fragile. If I can keep Mysterio up until my turn I can put out The Grand Illusion which will catch almost the entire game and between that and Dark Reign I might be able to get enough of an attrition lead that I can just ride this out to the end. Mordo pays for Dark Reign on Red Skull, then boosts Hood’s attack roll – the resulting Empowered Dark Lightning KOs Red Skull and dazes Enchantress and Bullseye. The latter does manage to Mission Objective one Extract over to Mystique, who then pays for Dark Reign on Elektra while Mysterio puts up The Grand Illusion. Crossbones lets rip with some epic attacks, KOing Hood and Elektra and leaving Mordo clinging on; he also moves onto the central objective with Hit and Run and collects a Cube so not a bad activation at all. Mystique follows up by KOing the other Red Skull. In the meantime Nebula fails to do much of anything to Crossbones or Mystique. Mysterio KOs Mordo and puts a little damage into Nebula. Zemo plays his card, zooms up and dazes Crossbones before KOing Mystique which is rather impressive. The score goes to 10 – 6 in John’s favour.

Round 4: I might be way down on points but I’m way up on attrition and I have priority at last. Enchantress collects all three cubes lying at her feet, Siren’s Calls Nebula next to Zemo for a neat beam and then zaps them both, KOing the former and leaving Zemo on one wound. He hurts Enchantress and KOs Bullseye out of spite, then Crossbones KOs him to end the game. The score remains at 10 – 6 but I get the win.

Thanks John for a really fun game. It was entertaining to play a game where we were both aiming for murder but went really wide, and I learned a few interesting tricks from watching John use Red Skull. Ultimately the dice favoured me, but I was able to leverage my beams to get more damage out than John’s team. Plus I got very fortunate on the turn I played The Grand Illusion as it felt like John rolled a lot of Critical results. The game felt like ‘good clean MCP’ without much in the way of jank and instead everyone just fighting each other.

Game 3: Tony playing Wakanda

For this game I finally got to play against legendary Element TO Tony Moore packing Wakanda. I was not surprised to see a lot of Wakanda rosters around – they’re really strong even in an open format never mind in this ‘street level’ version of the game. I win priority and choose my Secures and Tony chooses the higher threat. The game on this set up is basically going to be about who can get the central objective and leg it over to their chosen side quickest, as that will split the other team and force them to chase. I pick Rhino because his mobility and his card will help with the plan in general, and he also loves the extra power from Infinity Formula. I also put down X-23 mainly just to get her a run out; she could have been Skurge just as easily.

Extraction: Deadly Legacy Virus Cured?
Secure: Infinity Formula Goes Missing!
Threat: 19
My team: Red Skull Master of the World, Baron Zemo, Bullseye, Mystique, Rhino, X-23
My cards: Brace For Impact, Dark Reign, Deception, This Is A Robbery, X-Ceptional Healing
Tony’s team: M’Baku (leader), Black Panther, Killmonger, Shuri, Gamora
Tony’s cards: Advanced R&D, Jabari Chieftain, Spirit Of Wakanda, Usurp The Throne, Wakanda Forever

Round 1: Tony’s deployment makes it clear that he’s planning to largely refuse my left side, so I should do the same in return. Ideally I want to take at least two of the Extracts and then retreat over to my left side. I start out with Bullseye, as he can sometimes get away from early pressure with Parting Shot and also because he ended up deployed over there early. Gamora plays Advanced R&D so Shuri can play Spirit Of Wakanda and turbocharge Tony’s whole team. Zemo takes the central Cure and Killmonger helpfully bounces off Bullseye (though I also wouldn’t have minded getting a mild beating so he could get out of further danger). X-23 picks up the final cure over on the left. M’Baku comes for Zemo and hurts him so Mystique comes up and uses Deception to displace him somewhere I could attack him. Shuri pushes Zemo then Red Skull gives M’Baku a mild Shock in return and teleports Zemo further away – seeing John do that in our previous game made me think of that move. Black Panther crosses almost the entire board and plays Wakanda Forever, annoyingly getting the damage through to daze Zemo. M’Baku also drops Bullseye from this free attack. Rhino bounces ineffectively off Black Panther and the score is an enormous 2 – 1 in favour of Tony.

Round 2: There are two tokens on the ground so I guess I’ll be picking up whichever one Tony doesn’t grab and then running to my left. Black Panther collects the one on the left and legs it back toward his team. Bullseye picks up the one he’d been holding before and then moves considerably more slowly towards the left. M’Baku throws some terrain into Bullseye which I rather reluctantly Brace, then hits him and Bullseye uses Parting Shot to get further away. X-23 ‘passes’ my turn by just walking up to the top left Secure. Gamora drops Bullseye and then Mystique pays for Dark Reign on her and puts a fairly disappointing volley into her. Killmonger leaves Mystique on a single wound, then Red Skull teleports himself over, finishes off dazing Gamora (and collects her token) then teleports Killmonger away again and moves back toward my left. The score is 5 – 4 to Tony.

Round 3: The plan here basically remains the same – get two of the Extracts over to my left side and hope that the Wakandans have to over extend trying to get them back. This plan immediately goes awry when Gamora drops both Red Skull and Mystique with a single attack (in fairness, Mystique only had one wound remaining but I was a bit annoyed to see Red Skull drop yet again to a 6 dice attack from full health), collects the fallen token and runs away. I pass and Tony makes (in my opinion) an error in attacking Rhino with Shuri, powering him up nicely and giving me two Aggressive moves across the board. He KOs Gamora using This Is A Robbery to pick off her last wound, which still felt worth it, and then runs and Stampedes away. Killmonger goes after him but will only get a single attack, albeit powered up by Jabari Chieftain and Usurp The Throne – luckily the dice don’t go insane for once and he only picks off 4 damage leaving my big chap alive. M’Baku finishes him off throwing Rhino into X-23 for good measure and she helpfully rolls zero blocks and obliges me to play X-Ceptional Healing. Zemo dazes Killmonger and Black Panther crosses the entire board yet again and dazes X-23 after she fails to roll any blocks one more time. The score is 7 – 6 with Tony in the lead.

Round 4: I’m very rapidly running out of pieces here as Tony is just deleting my team whenever he makes an attack roll. On the other hand, both M’Baku and Black Panther are quite badly mauled and I can probably bring them both down this turn to swing the attrition more in my favour. Rhino starts out by dazing both of the Wakandan leaders between his attacks and throws, the collects the fall Extract. Killmonger continues his rather uninspiring run by failing to finish off X-23 and she puts some nice damage back into him. Tony uses his pass so Zemo finishes off Killmonger to my very great relief. Shuri crosses the board to bring in some reroll support and Red Skull hurts her and teleports her away. The score goes to 11 – 7 to me.

Round 5: There is going to be a mighty hit back here and I’m likely to lose at least Rhino, but overall my plan is to run away with all the tokens and try to see the game out. M’Baku goes absolutely wild, KOing all three of Red Skull, Rhino and X-23 in a single activation; this isn’t helped by my failure to roll even a single successful block on any of the defence or dodge rolls. Zemo fails to hurt Black Panther and retreats to the back left point; in retrospect I wonder if he would have been better just crossing the board to the right side instead. Black Panther collects the tokens lying on the floor and goes after Zemo but can’t KO him. Shuri and Mystique move to sit on the right side points. The score is now 15 – 11 to me.

Round 6: I need to keep Zemo alive and basically that is it. He runs as fast as his little legs will carry him away from Black Panther. Everyone else shuffles their feet and finally the king comes to get the baron. Zemo has three wounds remaining so I need to block at least one of the Pounce damage, and my dodge rolls this game have been uninspiring to say the least. Luckily the dice favour Zemo this time and he survives on one, sealing the game at 16 – 14.

Wow, that could have been the tightest game I’ve ever played. Tony is a great opponent and I really enjoyed finally being able to play into him. I think if I were to have my time again I would have not even contested the token on the right and instead used Bullseye to pick up the central one; that might have kept him or Zemo in the game for longer at the start of the match and given me a chance to do some more damage to Tony’s team in the early rounds. Overall this was the perfect game in that every move felt relevant and either of us could have taken the win right up to literally the final dice rolls.

Game 4: Chris playing Web Warriors

I have to admit that I expected there to be a lot more Web Warriors around but I think that Chris was the only one in the end. Luckily for me we got my Secures (and my priority) and even more luckily we ended up with the one that Webs like least. I was quite tempted to just use both of the slow people again but decided that I’d spend a good chunk of the game repositioning myself so chose to play Baron Zemo over Crossbones.

Extraction: Paranoia Pummels Populace!
Secure: Gamma Wave Sweeps Across Midwest
Threat: 15
My team: Red Skull Master of the World, Baron Zemo, Bullseye, Mysterio, Mystique
My cards: Brace For Impact, Cosmic Obliteration, Dark Reign, Deception, The Grand Illusion
Chris’s team: Spider-Man (Miles Morales), Black Cat, Ghost Spider, Spectacular Spider-Man, Lizard
Chris’s cards: All Webbed Up, Aunt May’s Wheat Cakes, Brace For Impact, Escort To Safety, The Cat And The Spider

Round 1: I want to try to get two of the Paranoia tokens here and hopefully use Mystique to Deception one of the Web Warriors into my core for an early attrition lead. Bullseye starts us out by taking the token on the right and then Black Cat uses The Cat And The Spider to grab one of the central ones and retreat. Zemo goes to the left and Lizard picks up the final token in the middle. Mystique uses Deception to pull him so Ghost Spider moves to give an option on Life Saver for Lizard. Red Skull teleports the big scientist to the back of my lines and safely away from his friends and eventually Mysterio leaves him on a single wound where the Gamma damage will finish him off. The score is 5 – 3 to Chris.

Round 2: My priority this turn is to deal with Lizard and avoid giving up too much else. Red Skull starts us out by failing to do any damage at all to Lizard, and also loses himself a power because he used his own leadership but didn’t gain anything from the attack. SSM dazes Bullseye and picks up his token and then Mysterio does just a single point of damage to Lizard. In return Lizard halves Mysterio’s health and throws him away and I follow-up with Mystique also failing to do any damage to Lizard, so that’s 6 attack actions for a net gain of zero damage because Healing Factor removed the one that Mysterio managed. Spider-Man uses Web Swing and offs Zemo in a single attack and Ghost Spider pushes and pulls Red Skull and Mystique around while also playing Aunt May’s Wheat Cakes to remove the incidental damage from the scenario on Chris’s affiliated models. The score is 11 – 5 now.

Round 3: Well, that was a pretty awful turn for me. I guess the initial plan is the same (deal with Lizard) but now I also need to somehow score a lot of points and stop the best scenario team in the game from seeing this out. Mysterio does finally polish off Lizard after the big guy stops rolling 3 blocks for every attack, then SSM one-shots Bullseye with his builder. Zemo gets revenge on Spider-Man by charging past to block Life Saver and dazing him. Black Cat effectively passes her turn again as she’s quite happy and safe where she is. Mystique fails to do any damage to Ghost Spider and then in return Ghost Spider rolls just as badly on Zemo. Red Skull does finally daze Ghost Spider but can’t hurt SSM. The score goes to 14 – 9.

Round 4: I don’t actually think it’s even possible for me to stop Chris winning this round so I decide to just go for as much damage as I can put out. SSM pays for All Webbed Up and Spider-Man KOs Baron Zemo easily. Mystique puts Dark Reign on Ghost Spider and Red Skull puts out Incinerate with Cosmic Obliteration then uses his spender in the hope of getting some extra attacks and dealing some damage to the Webs team but even with full re-rolls I can’t get the trigger so although at least Ghost Spider goes down that’s all I can do. SSM takes down Mystique from full health in one go and Mysterio can’t finish off Spider-Man even through the Incinerate, though it wasn’t really affecting anything anyway. We finish up at 19 – 12 to Chris.

Thanks to Chris for a fun game and I hope that we can try this again at some point where I put up a better show. I had the wrong approach right from the start going for the edge Paranoia tokens as the combination of Gamma Shelters meant that it was doing a load of needless damage to both Bullseye and Zemo. On the other hand, the dice basically made it so it didn’t actually matter much anyway. Chris played a solid game without notable errors and I’m only sorry that I didn’t really push him hard to do something cool. One aspect of my play that I was quite pleased about was playing around Life Saver and Escort To Safety. It’s not really easy to write about positioning for that stuff but Chris didn’t get to use either of them all game… on the other hand, I never did enough damage to anyone to actually matter.

When the scores are in I’m 11th of 28 which is quite good for a 2 – 2 result. Both of my losses were quite winnable, but in fairness both of my wins were quite losable too so overall that’s a pretty fair representation of how I played. Next up is a team tournament where I’m back to Inhumans, albeit with some roster changes to fit that format. Thanks to Nigel, John, Tony and Chris for four very fun games of MCP, and of course to Anth for doing all the hard work to run this whole show.

Marvel Crisis Protocol tournament report: Magnificent March! 23Mar2024

This month’s Marvel Crisis Protocol tournament was a bumper event with 34 players coming from across Scotland and the north of England to roll dice and push dollies. It’s a sign of the strength of the community that we can get that kind of turnout for a regular event without it even having to be some kind of special, and particularly a testament to Allan’s hard work to get us to this point. Unscientifically, I think that must make MCP one of the bigger tournament scenes in Scotland – perhaps only behind the behemoth that is GW’s game stable. Akos kindly gave Gareth and me a ride to Common Ground Games in Stirling.

I’ve been tinkering with a few options for rosters but chose to stick with Inhumans, partly because I find them engaging and fun, partly because their playstyle is good for my strengths and mainly because I’m going to play them for a team event in April and it would be awkward to change now and force everyone else to mess with their own rosters. I think that this is exactly the same roster I played in the February event; I guess if it’s not broken I shouldn’t fix it.

Characters (10)
* Black Bolt (5)
Crystal (3)
Medusa (4)
Ms. Marvel (3)
Quicksilver (3)
* Crimson Dynamo (4)
Toad (2)
* Captain America (Sam Wilson) (3)
Rhino (4)
Beast (3)

Team Tactics (10)
Brace for Impact (R)
Sacrifice (R)
Can I Borrow That?
Eyes on the Prize
Fall Back
Inhuman Royal Family
Mission Objective
Terrigenesis
Smash
This is a Robbery

Secure Crisis
Gamma Wave Sweeps Across Midwest (E, 15)
Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due? (E, 19)
Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse (C, 19)

Extract Crisis
Research Station Attacked! (E, 15)
Alien Ship Crashes In Downtown! (C, 17)
Deadly Legacy Virus Cured? (C, 19)

Game 1: Euan playing Spider Foes

I’ve seen Euan at loads of these events but somehow I think that we’ve never actually managed to get a game. I win priority and pick my Secures since I don’t fancy any of Euan’s at all; he chooses the slightly lower threat value. I decide to go with Crystal in this matchup even though it’s too easy for Euan to get rid of the conditions she hands out using Doc Ock’s leadership; I figure that being fast and annoying might be enough for her to shine; in retrospect I think that Ms Marvel might have been a better option. Captain America gets a nod as he’s fast and can push small people around, although actually that’s just limited to Doc Ock himself as it turns out. I also add in Rhino as he loves the Black Bolt leadership to get rolling in round one while also being an amazing battery to share power to others in later rounds. I’m also planning to be annoying with This Is A Robbery.

Extraction: Skrulls Infiltrate World Leadership
Secure: Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse
Threat: 19
My team: Black Bolt, Crystal, Medusa, Captain America, Rhino
My cards: Brace For Impact, Eyes On The Prize, Sacrifice, Terrigenesis, This Is A Robbery
Euan’s team: Doc Ock Sinister Scientist, Lizard, Rhino, Crimson Dynamo, Ultron Metal Tyrant
Euan’s cards: Age Of Ultron, Brace For Impact, Sinister Traps, This Is A Robbery, X-Ceptional Healing

Round 1: Euan plays Sinister Traps on my near Skrull. My plan is to make a safe steal on the right and then force Euan to either ‘waste’ Rhino’s activation by sitting on that point anyway or move further than he wants to join the scrum in the middle where I intend to use him as a Master Punch bowling ball. Captain America plays Eyes On The Prize, takes a power from Black Bolt then retreats to relative safety. Doc Ock takes the left Skrull and Crystal bounces off him effectively after giving a power to Medusa. She uses Royal Decree to move Rhino forward, triggering the Sinister Trap but backstopping him from being pushed anywhere too offensive while also giving him a bit of spare power. I had to land someone on it, so it might as well be my tankiest character. Medusa also moves up to collect another Skrull and Crimson Dynamo moves in to pick up the last one. Black Bolt tickles him ineffectively before Ultron smacks an uncomfortable number of wounds into Medusa. My Rhino bounces off Crimson Dynamo twice before playing This Is A Robbery to hoof him out of my face, though sadly his failure to hurt Dynamo with his attacks means that I didn’t have enough power to actually pick up the Skrull so the score goes to 3 – 2 to me. We also realised at the end of the round that we’d completely forgotten to roll and find out if our characters got moved by the Skrulls.

Round 2: I’m locked into opening with Medusa here as otherwise I’m pretty sure that Ultron dazes her. If I can pick up a third Skrull, specifically the one lying at Rhino’s feet, then I can start to collapse toward one flank or the other and make Euan fight me with a reduced team. Medusa opens us up with some amazing rolls, throwing Lizard into Crimson Dynamo to daze the latter, then pushing away both Ultron and Lizard and dazing Lizard to boot. Good work, your highness! The Drones hurt Captain America and Ultron throws Rhino into Black Bolt with his Spender, dazing Medusa in the process with Explosive Force. Black Bolt manages to throw Ultron off the point but otherwise achieves very little. Doc Ock dazes Crystal and jumps through the Portal. I’m not sure why he did this as it meant that the Skrull went on the deck so Euan – if you’re reading maybe you can remind me what you had in mind here please? Captain America decides that he doesn’t like the look of Rhino and switches to the left side, doing precisely nothing with his shield on the way. Euan’s Rhino begins a hilarious run of bad luck with the Portals, failing two jumps in a row and ending up further away from my team that he started before slogging back in the direction of the rest of the fight. My Rhino hurts Doc Ock but can’t daze him. The score is 6 – 5 to me.

Round 3: I’ve been lucky with Rhino staying out of the fight but I need to start dazing some of Euan’s characters here. In particular I want to get rid of Crimson Dynamo and Lizard as they’ve already been dazed. Attacking Ultron is likely to be a waste of time but I might have no choice but to fight him if he gets parked somewhere awkward. Ultron gets us underway by KOing Medusa. I use Rhino who mostly just inconveniences Crimson Dynamo but Crystal does get to play Terrigenesis and daze Doc Ock which is a very handy couple of VPs to have. Lizard collects the Skrull on the far left and Sam tries to huck him off with Redwing Assault but fails to do any damage; Crystal will later on just randomly KO him out of nowhere! In the meantime, Crimson Dynamo applies Shock to my Rhino (and somewhere in here I remember about Ornery and Rhino starts swimming in power). Then Euan’s Rhino fails the Portal roll again and eventually pokes mine, pokes Crystal and plays This Is A Robbery; to add insult to injury Captain America blocks all the incoming damage from having Crystal thrown at him. The score moves to 10 -7 in my favour.

Round 4: We’re about even on attrition but I’m doing just fine on the score so my plan is to continue to work over Euan’s team and reduce his options for scoring; I need to remove at least one of Crimson Dynamo, Doc Ock or Rhino before they rampage through my team. Black Bolt uses Whisper but frustratingly can only manage 1 damage between Ultron and Crimson Dynamo; he follows it up with a Master Punch that does at least drop Crimson Dynamo but Ultron survives the collision on one. I guess I can’t complain too much about that after Captain America’s dodge roll last turn. Ultron dazes my Rhino by throwing him into Black Bolt. Captain America goes for a Redwing Assault into Doc Ock and fails to do damage again (I just needed one damage to get the throw!) but does at least plink the final damage into Ultron; in retrospect I saw red a bit here and would have been better off leaving him where he was and dazing him next turn. Doc Ock does take Captain America’s final point of damage after his extraordinary run of luck deserts him at last; Crystal is able to collect the fallen Skrull and Incinerates Rhino. Rhino fails another tow jumps through Portals and then can’t do substantial damage to Crystal either. We go up to 11 – 8 to me after a rather bloody round of fighting.

Round 5: Unless Ultron has an insane activation (and he needs to move to score at all) I think I can finish this out simply by running away with Captain America and Crystal if needed. But I do have priority so it would be rude not to get in about the Spider Foes first. Rhino throws some terrain at Doc Ock to KO him, then Stampedes and rolls an absolutely insane spike to one-shot Rhino. He rather sheepishly walks to sore the right point after that, I wasn’t expecting to get another go with him! Ultron gets revenge, KOing both Black Bolt and Crystal before Captain America runs for the corner with a Skrull safely in his grasp. The score is 15 – 9 so we call it there. Euan has no way to catch Captain America so I would definitely get over the line before he could score up to 16 himself, especially with only two characters of his own in play.

What a brutal game! We both clearly came loaded for bear and we got exactly what we were looking for. It was a pleasure to finally get a game into Euan and I hope for many more. I got pretty lucky in some parts, especially with Medusa going crazy at the start of round 2 and Captain America somehow surviving at the end of round 3. But overall I think that I was quite happy with my positioning, and I was able to make sure that Ultron had to choose between scoring points or fighting me which I think is his biggest weakness.

Game 2: Liam playing Cabal

Suddenly it’s really serious! Liam is the best player in Scotland, and one of the best in the entire world; at the time of writing he’s in the semi-final of a global TTS championship. He’s also my personal nemesis at this game and I’ve never beaten him yet… although I have enjoyed my numerous failed attempts. He wins priority and chooses his Secures but actually this doesn’t matter too much as we have somewhat similar sets of Crises anyway; indeed I’m quite happy to go last and at least get one move after Thanos rearranges half of the board. My picks are my ‘standard 19 threat’ team for this Crisis combination but I do think that they match up well into Liam’s team. In particular Medusa is quite annoying for the Cabal team to deal with as they work heavily with rerolls. This game is unlikely to be about scoring, so unless I can collect two of the Extracts and retreat to camp around my back point and see out a lead, I think that this one is going to be very bloody. That said, I also can’t allow Liam to just run off with the Extracts either as he would be very pleased to have me waste actions chasing him while he picks off my team. Also it seems that in all the excitement I forgot to take a pre-game picture.

Extraction: Deadly Legacy Virus Cured?
Secure: Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due?
Threat: 19
My team: Black Bolt, Crystal, Medusa, Ms Marvel, Crimson Dynamo
My cards: Brace For Impact, Fall Back, Inhuman Royal Family, Sacrifice, Smash
Liam’s team: Red Skull Master Of The World, Bullseye, Baron Zemo, Nebula, Thanos (Mind and Space gems)
Liam’s cards: Cosmic Obliteration, Dark Reign, Fall Back, I Am A Baron After All, Recalibration Matrix

Round 1: I want to play cautiously as Liam will be able to use Thanos to reel in any character that I put even slightly far forward. On the other hand, I do have to take part in the game so I can’t just sit back and let him have everything. Since I’m not expecting score to be a major factor here, I decide that I won’t make any big effort to sit on the Secures so that I at least won’t get Incinerate. Bullseye takes the right Extract and Ms Marvel goes on the left. Red Skull just sits on the back point, comfortable in the knowledge that I’m not likely to get near him anytime soon! Crystal throws an attack at Bullseye who uses Parting Shot to retreat to safety; this was expected but occasionally Crystal can land an outsize punch. Thanos uses his various reposition tools to bring Ms Marvel across to Liam’s side of the board as expected; Nebula later dazes her and Zemo collects the Extract. Over on my side, Black Bolt hands power to Crimson Dynamo and Medusa across the round and just moves up for next round, Crimson Dynamo puts Shock on Thanos which should make my life a bit easier and Medusa picks up the final Extract. We are at 3 – 2 to Liam.

Round 2: I’m almost certain to lose Ms Marvel here, probably to Zemo, so I need to make sure that I’m not falling too far behind on attrition. Depending on order of activation I can probably take out two of Bullseye, Nebula and Zemo (although I think he’ll probably retreat to safety before I can get to him) which does carry the risk of the improved Death’s Decree but I need to get them at some point. Zemo plays I Am A Baron, After All then KOs Ms Marvel with Master Swordsman and help from Death’s Decree; he also tickles Crimson Dynamo before retreating. Black Bolt pays for Inhuman Royal Family (hurrah, I actually remembered to play it!) and hurts Thanos quite heavily. Thanos plays Fall Back to avoid the risk that Black Bolt drops him so early and so the king dazes Nebula instead. Red Skull hurts Crimson Dynamo and gives him a taste of his own medicine – Shock! Crystal dazes Bullseye and collects his token. Liam passes so Crimson Dynamo puts a bit of damage into Red Skull, and returns the favour by giving him Shock too. Thanos uses the Mind Gem to move Crimson Dynamo away, Cosmic Portals Black Bolt into range and starts punching him. Medusa pushes Red Skull off the point and throws Thanos into Zemo. The score goes to 5 – 4 to me.

Round 3: That last turn went quite well but I’m going to get bodied by Nebula followed by Zemo assisted by Death’s Decree, and Dark Reign in the latter case. I’m going to have give some ground here and hope that making Liam use walk actions to come after me will spread his team out a bit. Nebula goes into first Medusa then Black Bolt but leaves both alive, albeit with Stun. I get to make an activation I hadn’t expected as Black Bolt puts a Master Punch into Thanos, dazing Zemo with the throw. I decide that I’m losing him anyway this turn (and I don’t mind too much getting Black Bolt dazed) and follow this up with a builder into Thanos. I roll well and Liam rolls poorly so he uses Recalibration Matrix but it doesn’t get much better and Thanos is dazed. This is huge as it means that I don’t have to worry about Cosmic Portal any more, although obviously Death’s Decree is still going to be a huge concern. Red Skull plays Cosmic Obliteration to clear his conditions and gives Hex to Medusa and Incinerate to Black Bolt; he dazes Medusa and collects her token. Crystal and Bullseye trade shots on the right and Crimson Dynamo dazes Red Skull. In retrospect I wonder if I’d have been better off going after Nebula with him. We go to 7 – 4 to me.

Round 4: I need to deal with Zemo and Nebula once the former has had his way with me. Hopefully I can get the drop on Bullseye with Crystal too, though she’s badly hurt and I risk losing her to Parting Shot if I’m not careful. Zemo pays for Dark Reign and makes short work of Black Bolt; he then collects both fallen tokens. Medusa decides to finish off Red Skull (yes, even though I just wrote that Nebula was a priority) and it does at least work and helpfully takes that horrific leadership off the table. Nebula dazes Crystal and Bullseye collects her token. Crimson Dynamo come back into the fight and chips a couple of wounds off Thanos. Thanos moves Dynamo away with his spender and Mind Gem. Liam takes the lead at 8 – 7.

Round 5: At least I have priority now, and Black Bolt is well placed to deal with Zemo who absolutely needs to die. Barring a huge roll from Nebula (and she’s too far away from Thanos for Death’s Decree) I should get to activate all my heroes this turn. Black Bolt hits Zemo with Master Punch and he helpfully rolls very badly on defence so the throw into terrain is enough to KO him. I made a mistake in doing the throw first as it meant that Black Bolt was too far away to pick up any of the tokens. Instead he just zaps a bunch of damage into Thanos. Thanos goes next, pushing Black Bolt away into irrelevance and collecting those two Extracts while moving to score the back Secure. Crystal has one of those turns where the dice just work and she KOs both Nebula and Bullseye. There is only Thanos left now so Crimson Dynamo puts a couple more damage into him, then Medusa uses Royal Decree to move into range and KOs the Mad Titan. The game ends at 8 – 8 but with a win for me due to a table wipe.

Wow, what a game. I was helped enormously by my dice which were probably a bit better than average and especially by Liam’s defence dice which were truly awful. Still, my record against Liam is now won: 1 lost: 1000 so I will take whatever I can get under the circumstances. I made some significant target choice errors, notably letting Nebula have way more activations than I should have done and I played needlessly recklessly by targeting Red Skull in round 4. I thought at the time that this low score would really hinder my chances overall but actually the first tiebreaker is Strength Of Schedule so it probably wasn’t relevant.

Game 3: Allan playing X-Men

Allan’s moved onto playing X-Men after a month-long reign of terror with Dark Dimension but I think that he’s still feeling his way around this roster. That said, Allan is a strong player and I’ll have to be careful not to just let him score all the points and win before I get rolling. Fortunately I win Priority and choose to use my Secures so I don’t have to worry about X-Men pay-to-flip nonsense; he chooses the slightly hight threat value. I decide to just go with the same team as I used against Euan in game one, and for largely the same reasons. With two long movers, Eyes On The Prize and the Inhumans leadership I’m well positioned to have a safe grab on one side of the board and then fight whoever Allan chooses on the other side. Captain America is much happier here with more than just a single size 2 character to push around!

Extraction: Paranoia Pummels Populace!
Secure: Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse
Threat: 19
My team: Black Bolt, Crystal, Medusa, Captain America, Rhino
My cards: Brace For Impact, Eyes On The Prize, Inhuman Royal Family, Sacrifice, This Is A Robbery
Allan’s team: Cyclops, Bishop, Colossus, Jean Grey, Toad
Allan’s cards: Brace For Impact, First Class, Patch Up, To Me My X-Men, Xavier’s Dream

Round 1: Allan is playing a ‘fair’ game of MCP, and I’m not because I can steal one of his Extracts with Rhino. So my plan is to safely take the left Extract with Captain America, then use Crystal to attack Cyclops when he inevitably collects the one on the right. The position of that sign (which, to be clear, is not see-through because of the way that terrain works in this game) means that he’ll have to expose himself to my attacks if he wants it. Then I’ll just steal a central token with Rhino and cackle all the way to a round one lead. Captain America plays Eyes On The Prize, takes a power from Black Bolt then steals the left Extract and comes back to safety. Toad takes one of the central tokens to my great surprise, so Crystal gratefully picks up the one on the right while Black Bolt hands another power to Medusa. Colossus strides into the centre and gets the last Extract before Black Bolt comes up and one-shots Toad. Ouch! Cyclops just double walks to the middle so Medusa uses Royal Decree on Rhino then sashays forward and collects the token that Toad dropped after taking another of her king’s power. Bishop walks up to stand on the left Secure. Rhino gets stuck into Colossus, leaving him on a single wound after I use This Is A Robbery and Allan uses both Brace For Impact and Xavier’s Dream. Cyclops plays To Me My X-Men to move Jean forward, then she double walks to the centre and throws Medusa off the point. The score is 5 – 1 to me.

Round 2: Well that went better than I could possibly have dreamed. I guess I just want to keep on working over Allan’s team since I’m already holding all of the Extracts. Medusa starts us off by hitting Jean. She triggers the Flurry which Colossus tanks, then throws Colossus into Jean to daze both of them. Her final attack leaves Toad on one wound; he uses Slippery to get to safety. Cyclops zaps a few wounds off Crystal and Captain America Charges on to the left Secure, KOing Toad (I wasn’t keeping Priority anyway so I might as well make this good) and hurting Bishop a little. Bishop pumps a couple of shots into Captain America, Incinerating him and throwing him, so Rhino dazes Bishop too. Crystal pushes Cyclops off the right Secure. The score goes to 13 – 1 to me.

Round 3: Hmm, this is basically over already; I could pretty much just run for the corners and still win before Allan caught me up. But where is the fun in that? Bishop starts us off with a fully powered up Return With Interest on Captain America and Rhino but Allan’s rolls continue to be awful and he achieves nothing substantial. Medusa KOs Jean, finishing her off by throwing Colossus into her again. The big metal chap slaps some tasty damage into Black Bolt. Over on the right, Crystal plays a dangerous game with Cyclops who pays for Quick Draw on all three attacks and finally I roll low and she goes down to the return damage; still, he’s slow, on one wound and not on the Secure so I’m not too worried. Not only that, but since he only has one wound he can’t even pick up the Extract. Allan makes an extremely cool play where Cyclops hops through the Portals, gets patched up for one (!) by Colossus, generates a bit of power, hops back through the Portal and picks up the Extract. In any normal game we would have just called it there but at this point I was still thinking that score differential would be a relevant tie breaker and want to rack up the best score I can manage. So Captain America and Rhino team up to drop Bishop and Black Bolt hops through the Portal to daze Cyclops and pick up the final Extract again, scoring us out at 21 – 1.

That was probably the most ridiculous game of MCP I’ve ever played. Allan’s always been a very variable player, clinically beating top players in one game and then making catastrophic misplays the next, and so I guess I should be glad that I got the latter kind of game. There’s probably not much to be learned from my side (except that I was needlessly greedy with Crystal, but the game was already over by then anyway) as Allan just kindly walked into my attacks and didn’t do very much to mitigate them. That his dice were totally rancid just rubbed salt into his wounds. Sorry Allan!

Game 4: Stephen playing Brotherhood Of Mutants

I’m delighted to find myself playing Stephen in the last game as he criminally underrates himself and so going 3 – 0 up to this point might finally remind him how good he is. I’m also pleased because we’re good friends and I know that this will be a chill game despite nominally being a high-pressure finals. To give an example of what I mean, Stephen initially revealed an unaffiliated roster which was obviously not his intention so he went back and swapped a character; later in the game he let me change a decision I’d made even after rolling dice on another unrelated action. Stephen wins Priority and chooses his Extractions but we’re quite similar on Crises so I think it probably doesn’t matter too much. One of the flaws of this roster is not being able to go down to 3-wide at 15 threat, but the upside is that at least I’ll be able to move a character after Hulk rearranges the whole board state each turn. I think that we’re pretty much locked into just fighting here so I need to drop at least one of Stephen’s characters as soon as possible just to limit his options. Probably this’ll be Pyro as he has to come into my range if he wants to be relevant. Then I’m intending to pile conditions on the other two and just pour on the damage.

Extraction: Research Station Attacked!
Secure: Gamma Wave Sweeps Across Midwest
Threat: 15
My team: Black Bolt, Crystal, Ms Marvel, Crimson Dynamo
My cards: Brace For Impact, Fall Back, Inhuman Royal Family, Sacrifice, Smash
Stephen’s team: Magneto, Pyro, Hulk
Stephen’s cards: Asteroid M, Indomitable, Inspiring Monologue, Magnetic Refraction, Pyrotechnics

Round 1: I’m going to get last activation so unless Stephen is suicidally aggressive I should be able to at least draw in the centre and avoid going down on points. We start off with cautious advances on both sides, and Stephen uses a pass. I have to commit Crimson Dynamo if I’m going to use him so he takes a power off Crystal, moves into the middle and zaps both Magneto and Pyro. He doesn’t manage to Shock either of them but Pyro is quite badly hurt which should make my life a bit easier next round. Hulk comes in and hurts Crimson Dynamo (sadly Disruption Field didn’t do enough to keep the throw off line) and hurls him into Crystal who has no power to pay for Brace and helpfully blocks nothing. Black Bolt comes forward and pays for Master Punch (taking a power off Crystal on the way, since now she has more than she’ll ever need) which throws Hulk out of the Gamma area. The score is 4 – 1 to me. I move the Researcher just off to the side so that Stephen will have to commit heavily if he wants it, but not so close to my edge that one turn would get it into ‘extra scoring’ distance.

Round 2: I expect that Pyro will come for me this turn as he’s on just one wound left so I need to deal with him. Hulk will probably go last to push me off as much stuff as possible. To my great surprise, Stephen goes with Hulk first. He gets the daze on Crimson Dynamo – I’d manage to leave him just out of bodyguard range from Black Bolt – but it takes all his actions to do it; I also Brace a throw somewhere here. Magneto puts out Magnetic Refraction, of course. Black Bolt dazes Pyro but rolls zero successes on his Master Punch so I can’t displace Hulk. Stephen takes advantage of the pass and so Crystal zaps some conditions and damage into Hulk. Magneto moves forward and pushes Ms Marvel away; she moves back and hurts him a bit and he also has to pay for Indomitable to avoid being throw away. The score goes to 7 – 2.

Round 3: Number one priority is to deal with Pyro. If I can get rid of Magneto too that would be even better; once Pyro is out of the way any displacement on Magento is like a Stagger. Stephen goes first with Hulk again. He pays for a Hulk Smash on Crimson Dynamo who gratefully plays Sacrifice so that one-wound Crystal can be pasted by it; he does still take a fair bit of damage from the second attack though. Crimson Dynamo boosts back into the fray, applying Shock to Stephen’s whole team and generating enough power that he’ll be KOed long before he stops being able to pay for Disruption field. Magneto goes for him but, thanks to Shock, isn’t able to finish off the big Russian. Ms Marvel KOs Pyro by throwing Magneto into him and Black Bolt Master Punches to send Hulk off the point again; I think I could have thrown him into Magneto but preferred to score and make him waste some power getting back into the game. The score is now 11 – 2 to me.

Round 4: Now that I have Pyro out of the way, my two plans are to displace Magneto wherever possible and to make a concerted effort to drop Hulk. Magneto drops Crimson Dynamo at last with a throw, then dazes Black Bolt. Ms Marvel Embiggens just for the movement, then fails to do much to Hulk. In retrospect I wonder if a better play was to just walk and throw Magneto, though he was well protected by his constructs to stop exactly that plan. The big green guy dazes her easily in return after throwing her at Crystal (who again blocks zero) but he can’t finish the latter and she lights him up for the KO. The score is 11 – 3 to me.

Round 5: This is over unless Magneto has an insane turn. He doesn’t, and then Black Bolt dazes him. Everyone rushes to score points before he wakes up and we finish it at 17 – 3.

That was a fun game, and far closer than the scoreline might suggest. There were a couple of moments where doing one more damage here or there would have dazed one of my characters early and caused a big swing. I think that Stephen was a bit too pessimistic about how quickly I would be able to deal with Hulk and would have been better off saving him for later in the round. Pyro basically never got to do anything substantial and my view is that he would have been a far better option for an early activation. Putting Incinerate or Root on my team would have been huge. I did really like the way that Stephen used Magneto’s constructs to stop me displacing him; hopefully it’s evident from the photos.

Once all the scores are in, I managed to get first overall. All of my opponents had excellent records too which obviously meant that my Strength of Schedule was good. If we’d have had time for another round I would have had the pleasure of a match-up with my old friend James who has travelled up, but that game will have to wait for another time now. Many thanks to Euan, Liam, Allan and Stephen for four great games of MCP, and again to Allan for masterminding the whole tournament scene and community in Scotland. I’ve got a couple of slightly unusual MCP events lined up for April and I’m already looking forward to them.

Marvel Crisis Protocol tournament report: Fabulous February! 03Feb2024

It’s my first Marvel Crisis Protocol event of 2024! Akos kindly drove Gareth, Joe and me over to Common Ground Games in Stirling so we could all throw dice for a day of playing with our dollies doing intense competitive tactical thinking. Joe is a newcomer to MCP but has been a long time friend in wargaming and very long term readers might remember him from when I played a lot of Malifaux. The MCP community here is in great shape with 28 players showing up for just a random February event with nothing particular on the line.

For this event I wanted to try out the Inhumans as I’d just received them for my birthday. The affiliation has been a bit of a joke throughout most of MCP as Black Bolt was considered rather underpowered and he was a bit of an anchor weighing the faction down; however the recent balance update has changed this with some very minor but welcome tweaks to the King of the Inhumans and I think that they’re very playable now. Black Bolt himself doesn’t do very much fancy, he just attacks things, so my plans were to try to force brawls wherever possible. Supplementing this plan I splashed in Crimson Dynamo who is just the most obvious choice for fighting on C and E maps and his kit is really designed to help keep the attrition one-sided. My other out-of-affiliation picks were intended to cover my weaknesses in other scenarios, either spread out Secures or fast scoring Extracts. Rhino is a strong choice for chasing down fleeing extract carriers, and I put in Captain America (Sam Wilson) not only to threaten to Airlift my fighting pieces around but also because his speed allows him to rotate very well on D maps. Both of them get a lot of value out of the Inhumans leadership being able to grant them an extra power in round one and this can really help kickstart their game.

Characters (10)
* Black Bolt (5)
Crystal (3)
Medusa (4)
Ms. Marvel (3)
Quicksilver (3)
* Crimson Dynamo (4)
Toad (2)
* Captain America (Sam Wilson) (3)
Rhino (4)
Beast (3)

Team Tactics (10)
Brace for Impact (R)
Sacrifice (R)
Can I Borrow That?
Eyes on the Prize
Fall Back
Inhuman Royal Family
Mission Objective
Terrigenesis
Smash
This is a Robbery

Secure Crisis
Gamma Wave Sweeps Across Midwest (E, 15)
Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due? (E, 19)
Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse (C, 19)

Extract Crisis
Research Station Attacked! (E, 15)
Alien Ship Crashes In Downtown! (C, 17)
Deadly Legacy Virus Cured? (C, 19)

Game 1: Joe playing Criminal Syndicate

There is actually feature in Longshanks (the tournament pairing system) where you can set someone as your friend so you won’t play them in round one, but as you can see I forgot to do that for Joe! I always love playing against Joe in any game but this should be a bit of a mismatch as I’ve played loads of MCP and this is his third game ever. I win priority and pick my Secures as I would rather play on my slow-scoring ones than the wider ones that favour Kingpin. There is a cheeky play on Spider-Infected or Cubes that Inhumans can do with Quicksilver and priority so I decide to have a bit of fun with that.

Extraction: Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan
Secure: Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse
Threat: 17
My team: Black Bolt, Medusa, Ms Marvel, Quicksilver, Toad
My cards: Brace For Impact, Inhuman Royal Family, Sacrifice, Smash, Terrigenesis
Joe’s team: Kingpin, Bullseye, Elektra, Rhino, Lizard
Joe’s cards: Advanced R&D, All According To Plan, Brace For Impact, This Is A Robbery, X-Ceptional Healing

Round 1: I can be quite naughty here with Quicksilver and collect one of Joe’s home Spider-Infected before he gets much of a chance to do anything about it, so I could end up on 4 Spider-Infected. On the other hand, I suspect that I’ll struggle to hold any of the Secures so I’m just playing to keep in the game until I can work over some of Kingpin’s team. Toad takes the centre Spider-Infected and hags back to be relatively safe from reprisal and Black Bolt passes a power to Quicksilver. Bullseye collects the far right Spider-Infected. Quicksilver activates, takes Black Bolt’s other power and then races off down the board with his Speedster power, collects the back left Spider-Infected and then launches himself back toward my lines. Lizard sits in the middle and Ms Marvel just punches Bullseye and picks up the near right Spider-Infected. Black Bolt bounces off Lizard, Medusa collects the final Spider-Infected and moves to the left Secure and everyone else just strolls up to the middle; Elektra taking a swing at Medusa in the process. We finish the round at 4 – 4.

Round 2: Everyone except Quicksilver gets moved by the Spider-Infected. I suspect that I’m going to go down on points here as I’m definitely going to give up at least one Spider-Infected to Rhino so my plan is to put my efforts into attrition and give myself a chance to start competing on the Secure. Black Bolt hurts Rhino in the hope that I get very lucky and down him before he goes, but of course leaves him on one wound. Rhino uses This Is A Robbery on Toad and I brace the throw into Black Bolt; Toad survives on a single wound. Toad does manage the last wound on Rhino and collects his Spider-Infected again, before running away from all the scary Criminals in the centre. Medusa survives attacks from Elektra with just one wound remaining (yes, that is three turns of attacking and three characters left on a single wound) so I pretty much have to go with her, throwing the scary ninja lady away and fortuitously not dazing to Martial Prowess. Kingpin throws Black Bolt into Toad and the latter miraculously manages to block all the damage and eventually Lizard is forced to take care of him. Quicksilver clears off the Hand Ninjas on the left while Bullseye and Ms Marvel trudge back into the right side point and trade slaps. We go to 8 – 8.

Round 3: I’m quite happy holding onto three of the Spider-Infected but I need to start dazing the Criminals faster so Joe can’t just sit them on the Secures and score us out. Medusa, still on a single wound, dazes Elektra on the left and Bullseye goes wild on the right, dazing Ms Marvel with a single attack. Black Bolt leaves Rhino on a single wound for the second time in a row, and the big chap dazes Medusa (who admittedly has lived a rather charmed life up to now); Quicksilver dodges away from the second attack with his Can’t Catch Me power. Toad comes across and dazes Bullseye on the right and in the centre Kingpin and Lizard gang up to daze Black Bolt. Finally Quicksilver finishes of Rhino and puts me in a much more comfortable position. We go to 11 – 10 in my favour.

Round 4: Joe plays All According To Plan and then the Spider-Infected move everyone, turning the board state into total chaos. Now that most of the Criminals are on their injured side it makes it a bit more practical for me to actually score the Secure; I only need 5 points to see this out here and I think that I can probably do that if I’m careful to protect my Extract carriers. Elektra continues the theme of the game by leaving Medusa on a single wound yet again, and she gets KOed in return; probably I shouldn’t have activated her here but I wanted to make sure that she got an activation and, crucially, that I’d be able to go last with Black Bolt or Ms Marvel for a bit of displacement. Bullseye attacks Toad who takes the opportunity to Slippery out of range of a second attack. Kingpin hurts Black Bolt and Staggers him, then Ms Marvel finally Embiggens and finishes of Bullseye. Lizard moves over to the left and drops Medusa with a throw and finally Black Bolt uses Master Punch to launch Kingpin off the centre and take that spot instead. We wrap this game up at 16 – 12 in my favour.

What a great showing from Joe. I worried that the gulf in experience might have made that a bit of a non-game but his overall skill at wargaming really shone through here; I’m looking forward to seeing how well he does when he’s got a few more games under his belt. I got a bit lucky a few times with Medusa surviving on a single wound, but I guess maybe the same was true of Rhino. Overall it was quite pleasing that the game played out largely as I had expected, i.e. with me hanging on at the start while Kingpin’s leadership was relevant and then gradually things swung in my favour as attrition came to me. I did miss a couple of opportunities to play Terrigenesis so that’s definitely something for me to look out for.

Game 2: Ryan playing X-Men

It’s been a while since I played Ryan so I was really looking forward to this. I was expecting to see pay-to-flip Secures here (which I think Inhumans don’t like much as it taxes their round one power economy) but was pleased to see that this wasn’t the case. As it happened, Ryan clearly decided that he didn’t mind a big fight in the middle and went for his Extracts after winning priority which suited me just fine. I picked 19 threat as I can put down a very nice fighting team at that level – basically the four most attack oriented Inhumans plus Crimson Dynamo to just generally be a pain in the neck on the Secure shape. I was a bit worried that Ryan would have a plan to steal all the Extracts and then just back off and force me to over extend, but since my plan was just to keep the score within touching distance and spend my time attacking all the X-Men anyway I felt that this was manageable. Credit to Ryan for pointing out to me that the Paranoia tokens aren’t actually Civilians and allowing me to swap out Terrigenesis for a card that actually does something.

Extraction: Paranoia Pummels Populace!
Secure: Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due?
Threat: 19
My team: Black Bolt, Crystal, Medusa, Ms Marvel, Crimson Dynamo
My cards: Brace For Impact, Eyes On The Prize, Inhuman Royal Family, Sacrifice, Smash
Ryan’s team: Cyclops, Magik, Psylocke, Rogue, Wolverine
Ryan’s cards: Children Of The Atom, Indomitable, Journey Through Limbo, To Me My X-Men, X-Ceptional Healing

Round 1: This game is going to be a fight of my own making, so I need to just make sure that I can stay even on the Extracts and then get on with using Crimson Dynamo to blunt the X-Men attack while I have my team beat them all senseless. Psylocke starts us off by collecting the Extract on the right and I realise that I wasted a card in Eyes on the Prize because I only had Crystal as a safe grab. Ms Marvel takes the left side Extract and takes cover behind the car while Black Bolt gives Medusa a power to start my power train going. Magik can’t manage to stick any damage on Ms Marvel , which is excellent as it also stops Rogue jumping me with Cyclops’ leadership. Over on the right, I move Crystal in toward the centre just to delay a bit more and take a random potshot at Psylocke, figuring that I can maybe do a bit of damage or push her away; she ends up getting dazed. Ironically this is one of the few things that I find frustrating about MCP – the dice pools are quite small so every now and then you get a completely insane outcome. Cyclops moves up to the rear Portal and uses To Me My X-Men to bring Rogue and Wolverine forward a little. Medusa uses Royal Decree to move Crimson Dynamo and then collects a central Extract. Wolverine comes forward but bounces off Crimson Dynamo then Black Bolt advance and hurts Wolverine. Rogue repays the dice from earlier by one-shotting Ms Marvel, then Crimson Dynamo finishes off Wolverine and hurts Cyclops. The score is 5 – 3 to me.

Round 2: I need to lock in an attrition advantage here by KOing either Psylocke or Wolverine. I think I’ll have to let Wolverine have at least one attack as he has X-Ceptional Healing online and the chance of taking him down before he activates are close to zero; I don’t want to risk leaving him with a bunch of damage on him to make him even more dangerous. Cyclops hurts Crimson Dynamo and Medusa; I use Disruption Field to avoid the triggers for further attacks. Ms Marvel uses Smash and hurts Rogue, so the mutant gets stuck into Medusa. I take the first swing on Black Bolt with A King Serves His People but Medusa is still left with one wound left. She dazes Rogue and pushes Wolverine away. He comes back in and attacks Crimson Dynamo, I Sacrifice the first attack onto Medusa (dazing her) and bodyguard the second onto Black Bolt. Now it’s time to deal with him, but for some reason I decide to activate Crystal first; sadly my notes don’t explain why I thought that this would be a good idea. However, it pays of as I roll insane dice again and drop Psylocke so Crystal rather sheepishly moves to collect the fallen Extract. Magik picks up the Extract that Rogue had held at the start of the turn and hurts Ms Marvel. Black Bolt does two sets of Master Punch into Wolverine (I wanted to have two separate sources of damage so minimise the effect of X-Ceptional Healing), drawing out Indomitable somewhere in the process too. Crimson Dynamo finishes him off and moves back to score for me. The score is now 11 – 5 in my favour.

Round 3: This has gone much better than I expected due to the largesse of my dice so I have no plans to change course now. This is a very winnable game this round if I’m sensible about order of activation, though I’m not going to get a shot with Black Bolt if Ryan knows what he’s doing. Rogue does indeed immediately daze the King of the Inhumans and puts some tasty damage into Ms Marvel too. She retaliates by using all her tricks – throwing Rogue into Magik, Embiggening and dazing the Sorcerer Supreme and hurting Rogue a bit more. Cyclops plays Children Of The Atom to remove Shock then starts zapping Crystal but can’t quite finish her or Ms Marvel, then Medusa dazes him and KOs Rogue. We finish up at 18 – 5 to me.

Thanks to Ryan for a fun game and for being a gentleman while the dice were doing him dirty. The basic game plan went well for me in the sense that I was expecting a scrum in the middle which I could then leverage my better fighting potential to win. Crystal’s attacks into Psylocke just made the whole thing pretty much irrelevant; poor Betsy only got to activate once to move up into the middle. My choice of cards was a bit careless. Even once Ryan had pointed out to me about Terrigenesis not working on this Crisis, I just wasted a slot with Eyes On The Prize. If I’d played either Quicksilver or Beast instead of Ms Marvel it could have worked out, so I need to be aware of that. Hopefully we can play again soon and our choices can matter more than our dice rolls.

Game 3: Alasdair playing Asgard

Now I’m in the shark tank, Alasdair is a very strong player and I know that I’m in for a tough game. He wins priority and chooses his Extracts so I again go for the nice 19 threat option. I swapped out Ms Marvel for Beast as I think that he’s a better option for Skrulls specifically (though he definitely wants nothing to do with Ultron!) and also allows me to threaten a safe grab on either side of the board with Eyes On The Prize in combination with the Inhumans leadership.

Extraction: Skrulls Infiltrate World Leadership
Secure: Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due?
Threat: 19
My team: Black Bolt, Beast, Crystal, Medusa, Crimson Dynamo
My cards: Brace For Impact, Eyes On The Prize, Inhuman Royal Family, Sacrifice, Terrigenesis
Alasdair’s team: Thor, Hela, Skurge, Ultron Metal Tyrant, Wong
Alasdair’s cards: Age Of Ultron, Inspiring Monologue, Odin’s Blessing, Patch Up, Skuttlebutt On Me

Round 1: I’m genuinely not sure how to deal with this match-up. The Asgardians can deal with the Incinerate due to Thor’s leadership and have good resistance to normal attrition due to Hela and Ultron having ‘don’t die now’ abilities. I decide to just get what work done I can on attrition and try not let myself fall too far behind on the scenario. Skurge takes the left Skrull and gets pushed off to irrelevance for a turn. Beast plays Eyes On The Prize, takes a power from Black Bolt and takes the right Skrull, ending up back on my side of the board nicely. Ultron just sits in the middle and picks up a Skrull; I could have done with him getting moved by it! Medusa uses Royal Decree to move Crimson Dynamo forward and gently tickles Ultron, pushing him off the point at least. Wong does Wong things at the back and Crystal attacks Ultron. Hela comes into the middle for the last Skrull and Black Bolt shoots her for not much effect. Thor sits at the back and gives Crimson Dynamo Shock and the return beams fail to roll any wilds at all, nor do any damage. The score is 5 – 2 to Alasdair.

Round 2: I’m committed to the fight now, and I need to hurt Ultron and Hela if I’m going to relieve them of their Skrulls. Hela does some tasty damage to Crystal who fights her right back. She ends up on one health remaining and I remember to play Terrigenesis this time, dazing the God of Death and gaining me a couple of VPs for breathing space. Her actually holding the Skrull doesn’t last long as the Drones finish Crystal off and Black Bolt takes some big damage from Ultron after bodyguarding some shots off Medusa. I decide to take the fight to the Asgardians, throwing Black Bolt into the fray with Master Punch for no damage at all on Ultron or Thor. Wong fails to do the last point of damage on Black Bolt, saving him that particular humiliation, then Crimson Dynamo rolls another 30 or so dice into beams and fails to roll any wilds or do any damage whatsoever. At least he’s well powered up now. Thor throws some terrain at Crimson Dynamo, who pays for Brace, then easily dazes Black Bolt. Beast kills the Drone but misses the wild on the first attack and then kills them on the second so there isn’t anywhere to place; that was a poor move anyway and I’d have been much better off walking over then throwing them away. Skurge comes back into the fray and Medusa dazes him, collecting a Skrull. We go to 7 – 7, which is remarkable as I didn’t feel that anything really landed well for me that turn.

Round 3: I think that I can drop Hela and Skurge this turn, so if I can avoid losing more that Crystal then I’ll feel a bit more comfortable about the rest of the game. Skurge starts us out by dazing Medusa then KOing Crystal with an attack plus a 10 dice Skuttlebutt; not the attrition start I was hoping for. In return, Crimson Dynamo gently caresses Hela and Skurge, applying Shock to neither of them; in return Thor dazes him and does give Shock to Black Bolt. The king uses Whisper (as an aside, doing this the turn after you flip is truly a lovely play experience) which dazes Ultron and does almost nothing to Thor. Wong spends an activation healing, then Beast dazes Hela who plays her ‘get out of jail free’ card and collects a fallen Skrull. The score is 11 – 10 to Alasdair.

Round 4: Well, I basically have the same game plan as last turn since I totally failed to achieve my objective there. Medusa does KO Skurge but fails to do one point of damage to Hela with her builder which annoyingly leaves her without enough power to pick up the Skrull lying at her feet. Luckily for me, Thor has similarly poor dice into Beast who pushes him away and finally KOs Hela. Ultron picks up a fallen Skrull and Black Bolt attacks Ultron but fails to roll any damage on his Master Punch for the third time in a row; at least it gets him back on the point. The score moves to 14 – 13 in my favour.

Round 5: This is going to be very tight; I think I can hang on as Alasdair only has two meaningful activations but both Thor and Ultron can do some crazy damage if the dice favour them. I only need to do enough damage here to play the scenario, which sadly means that Ultron has to go down as he’s still holding a Skrull. Ultron goes first and dazes Beast. Medusa manages to KO Ultron; he comes back with Age Of Ultron but there isn’t anywhere he can go where he both contests a Portal and isn’t within range 3 of Medusa so she throws him away. Thor KOs her in return (and sadly for me there is no Age Of Medusa card to save her), gives Stagger to Black Bolt and collects the fallen Skrull. Crucially he gets moves by it so I send him off the central Portal. We check the board state and nothing else is going to meaningfully change things so we wrap it up there and I’ve somehow managed to hold on at 18 – 16.

Wow, what a tight game! Alasdair is a highly skilled player and I really felt that I wasn’t getting any help from the dice this time. I made some poor moves, especially with Beast in round 2 but overall I was quite happy with the way things panned out. I think if I was to play this again I would probably pick Quicksilver over Crystal; her status conditions are a lot less relevant into Asgard and his triggers to bounce attacks around could be more effective than her doing one extra attack every now and then. Ms Marvel would also be worth of consideration as she has some pretty good control options too, and tends toward consistent damage once she gets powered up enough to Embiggen reliably.

Game 4: Allan playing Wakanda

With four undefeated players and two of them bringing Wakanda, I guess that this match-up was inevitable! It’s quite fun thematically as match-up between royal families. I always enjoy playing Allan, though he’s surely the most variable player in the entire game and equally capable of a 4 – 0 or 0 – 4 finish at any given event. I win priority and choose my Secures, though our Crises were not hugely different anyway; Allan chooses a very nice 19 threat again. I pick Quicksilver this time as I think that I can get good value out of his steal card in this set up. I also consider swapping Rhino in for Crimson Dynamo (or Medusa, I suppose) but decide that he’s probably one for a wider game than this and his mobility would be wasted on Intrusions.

Extraction: Fear Grips World As ‘Worthy’ Terrorise Cities
Secure: Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse
Threat: 19
My team: Black Bolt, Crystal, Medusa, Quicksilver, Crimson Dynamo
My cards: Brace For Impact, Can I Borrow That?, Eyes On The Prize, Inhuman Royal Family, Sacrifice
Allan’s team: M’Baku, Black Panther, Killmonger, Shuri, The Black Widow
Allan’s cards: Advanced R&D, Spirit of Wakanda, Usurp The Throne, Vertical Assistance, Wakanda Forever

Round 1: Allan starts us out by confirming that M’Baku’s leadership will be used. My plan here is to use Quicksilver to steal a Hammer off whoever Allan sends to the left and end up carrying three of them, thus hopefully leaving myself with a scenario edge even if (as I fully expect) I spend the game getting constantly pushed or thrown off Secures. Crystal plays Eyes On The Prize, takes a power from Black Bolt and then takes the right Hammer before retreating a little to safety. M’Baku plays Advanced R&D to enable the Spirit Of Wakanda on his team crowded in the middle then moves over to take the left Hammer. Quicksilver takes a power from Black Bolt, uses Speedster and makes two attacks into M’Baku and steals his Hammer on the second with Can I Borrow That?. Killmonger charges across and does some rather tasty damage into Quicksilver and Black Bolt walks forward and attacks in return. Black Widow plays Vertical Assistance on herself and shoots Black Bolt. Medusa takes the last Hammer, Royal Decrees Crimson Dynamo forward a bit and walks up. Black Panther Pounces, walks up and pushes Crimson Dynamo away again, so the big Russian comes forward and Shocks Widow. Shuri moves up and pushes Medusa off the centre then plays Wakanda Forever to push Crimson Dynamo away too. M’Baku and Killmonger both pay a power to join in but only Quicksilver is in range and he sensibly gets away with Can’t Catch Me. The score is 3 – 3.

Round 2: I want to lean heavily into attrition now that I’m holding the most Hammers so my plan is to just do as much damage as possible and live with losing priority. First order of business is Killmonger and Black Bolt makes short work of him, though sadly the follow-up attack into M’Baku (a much easier target on paper) whiffs completely. M’Baku goes after Quicksilver, fails to do enough damage to daze him and tries to finish the job with a throw which I Brace to be sure about it. Quicksilver clearly benefits a lot from the extra die on his builder attack and goes wild bouncing between M’Baku and Black Panther to daze the latter. I’ll never get another activation like that again! Medusa pushes Shuri off the middle and she comes back in, hops through the Portal and ends up on the left then pushes Black Bolt. Crimson Dynamo and Black Widow also go left and neither of them manage to achieve anything at all. I assume that they had a conversation in Russian, saying ‘shall we just let these crazy royals sort each other out and we’ll go party somewhere else?’ The score goes to 8 – 5 in my favour.

Round 3: I am now feeling pretty good about the tempo of the game. Allan’s team will get a good return turn as I’ve powered them up, and hopefully when I do the same in round 4 it’ll get me over the line. I’m pretty sure that I’ll lose either Quicksilver or Black Bolt before they activate (perhaps both if Allan rolls well) so I just need to be a bit careful about how I manage the rest of my team. I’m also sure that Usurp The Throne will be played here, so if it isn’t the first activation then my primary goal is to drop Killmonger before he gets to use it. Killmonger naturally plays Usurp The Throne but Allan gets greedy. The first attack is into Quicksilver who manages to survive, then the second one I play Sacrifice from Black Bolt to Quicksilver; the speedster does get dazed but I feel good about getting off the hook for that card. Black Bolt dazes M’Baku but his Master Punch into Black Panther does no damage (that’s four in row for those playing along at home). Crimson Dynamo continues his awful run of dice by failing to hurt either Shuri or Black Widow and Medusa KOs Killmonger. In the middle of all this Black Widow taps Crimson Dynamo a couple of times and Black Panther pushes Medusa around. Finally I decide that Crystal is more use in the fray so she comes across and hurts Black Panther. The score is now 11 – 8 to me.

Round 4: I’m despairing of ever doing anything to Black Widow by now but Black Panther is in danger and a good round from Black Bolt could also be enough to KO M’Baku. M’Baku starts us off with an excellent activation, dazing Crimson Dynamo (not much loss to be honest!) and KOing Quicksilver. He also throws Black Bolt away but after all that good work he lets himself down by missing two attempts at jumping through the Portals and ends up stuck on the left again. Black Bolt hurts Black Widow and M’Baku, then leaves Black Panther on just one wound. The Wakandan king dazes Crystal and takes her Hammer so Medusa KOs him in return, then legs it away with three Hammers in tow. I forgot to make a note of the score but I think it must have been 14 – 12 in my favour.

Round 5: I’m confident now as Medusa just has to live through the turn. I start out with Black Bolt as I think that he can clear out the only people who could reach Medusa. He does manage to drop M’Baku but his Master Punch into Black Widow fails for the fifth time in a row to do damage and so she survives when I only needed to do one damage. However, when we measure it out she’s too far away to make a shot into Medusa anyway (and it would be pretty unlikely to KO her from here) so we just talk out the rest of the game. The final score is called at 18 – 15 to me.

Another fun close game, which is the best kind of game. I think that I had pretty much the right idea here but Allan made a few mistakes that just tipped things my way. He spent Wakanda Forever rather cheaply in round one, and then wasted Usurp The Throne by getting greedy and attacking Quicksilver first but not doing enough to daze him. I might have been better leaving Crystal out on her own on the right for longer as she was quit happy scoring me a couple of points each round and when I did send her in it wasn’t particularly effective.

So once the scores come in I’m in second place, decided by the third tie-breaker – well done to Ross for a hard-earned victory over the whole event. I had a lot of fun playing Inhumans, especially as it’s been so rare to see them out in the wild, and I think I might stick with them for a little while. Thanks to Joe, Ryan, Alasdair and Allan for four fun games of MCP, and to Allan (again!) for masterminding the event and indeed the local scene. I’ll be back!

Marvel Crisis Protocol tournament report: Fantastic Festive Fiesta 16Dec2023

This weekend was my last Marvel Crisis Protocol event of 2023. I was meant to be joined by Gareth but he was sadly poorly on the day; fortunately I was able to share the train ride over to Common Ground Games in Stirling with Stephen. The event had a rather loose Christmas theming, with a Christmas tree in the centre of each board and an opportunity to win a spot prize present each round by doing some specific action first. I didn’t manage any of the spot prizes but I did enjoy throwing the Christmas tree into people, and I definitely appreciated this little fun aside for the event.

After passing up on X-Force for my previous tournament at Protech I decided to just go for it and use them this time. This was also partly to mix things up a bit as I was concerned that people might be a bit sick of having to see my Kingpin roster facing them across the table yet again. X-Force recently were the beneficiaries of targeted changes to several characters which I think makes them a far more interesting team to play now. I’ll mainly mention the splash characters. Nick Fury is mainly in the list to bring his Agents so that I can pick up an extra Senator in that mission for ‘free’ (though he could easily be Elektra or Shadowland Daredevil; I just preferred Fury here) and that’s relevant because I found that X-Force absolutely love the shooting gallery that Senators causes. Wong allows me to power up Wolverine for a round 1 rampage while also being a cheap activation I don’t mind just twiddling his thumbs on a rear Secure. Finally I had numerous choices for the tenth slot but ended up with Lizard – he’s tough, can use X-Ceptional Healing and at 3 threat fits very nicely into a number of my teams. Lizard could have been Captain America (Sam Wilson) but I found him to be too easy to daze in the spots where I needed him.

Characters (10)
* Cable (5)
Colossus (4)
Deadpool (3)
Domino (3)
Psylocke (4)
Wolverine (4)
X-23 (3)
Wong (2)
* Nick Fury (4)
Lizard (3)

Team Tactics (10)
Cat and Mouse
Pretty Sneaky, Sis
Brace for Impact (R)
Sacrifice (R)
Crimson Dawn
Face Me
Fastball Special!
Mission Objective
No Matter the Cost
X-Ceptional Healing

Secure Crisis
Deadly Meteors Mutate Civilians (I, 17)
Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse (C, 19)
Super-Powered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate (F, 20)

Extract Crisis
Alien Ship Crashes In Downtown! (C, 17)
Deadly Legacy Virus Cured? (C, 19)
Mutant Extremists Target U.S. Senators! (L, 19)

Game 1: Grant playing Avengers

This is going to be a very interesting match as Grant is an excellent player who is very much in contention to win the overall event, and is therefore quite a challenging opponent for my first game of the day. He wins priority and chooses his Extracts so at least my Secure will make sure that I can have a good brawl in the middle. One of the Avengers will definitely have to stand on the centreline so I pick Wong and Wolverine to go and be horrible to them. I take Psylocke as her ability to use Mystic attacks is likely to be key into the various Captain Americas that Grant could pick. Overall I want to hold two Hammers, dominate the middle and leave one Portal uncontested so I focus on the fighting and grind the Avengers down in attrition.

Extraction: Fear Grips World As ‘Worthy’ Terrorise Cities
Secure: Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse
Threat: 18
My team: Cable, Psylocke, Wolverine, X-23, Wong
My cards: Brace For Impact, Cat and Mouse, No Matter The Cost, Sacrifice, X-Ceptional Healing
Grant’s team: Captain America (Sam Wilson), Deadpool, Ms Marvel, Baron Zemo, Winter Soldier, X-23
Grant’s cards: Avengers Assemble, Brace For Impact, Disarm, No Matter The Cost, X-Ceptional Healing

Round 1: I set up so that Wolverine can threaten both the right and central Portal but my hope is that Grant will commit to the right and let me have my brawl in the middle. Cable plays Cat and Mouse to get onto the near Hammer. We start out taking the side Hammers with Ms Marvel and Psylocke. Winter Soldier surprises me by not just taking the far Hammer and setting up to threaten in round two but instead comes forward and takes a cheeky shot at Cable. Wong powers up Wolverine. Captain America comes forward and throws his shield to push Cable further away, so I Bodyslide him back onto the Hammer, walk into the middle and shoot Captain America. I seem to be swimming in power now so he throws some terrain at him too; this is a double-edged sword for me as dazing Captain America is obviously on my priority list but it would also allow Zemo to attack Cable which I don’t really want to happen. Anyway, Captain America survives on one wound, as is traditional. Zemo picks up the final hammer and contests the centre. My X-23 goes to the left portal and Deadpool takes a shot at her for minimal effect. Wolverine moves toward the centre, uses The Best At What I Do to close the gap then plays No Matter The Cost to get stuck into Baron Zemo, dazing him in one go with a beautiful roll. Grant’s X-23 also plays No Matter The Cost to attack Cable; the attack bounces but she does get to move in and collect Zemo’s fallen Hammer. The score is 4 – 3 to me.

Round 2: I have priority now and I ought to be able to keep it for the game unless something ridiculous happens. I’m basically happy collapsing the game away from Ms Marvel and broadly plan to continue to work over Grant’s team on attrition; in particular I need to deal with some combination of Captain America, Zemo and Winter Soldier as they’re such a good unit when together. Grant doesn’t have any steals so he’ll have to pry the Hammers from my characters by dazing them – not impossible for Cable but hopefully at least annoying. Cable goes first, putting a shot into Zemo to gain a bit of power and then Bodysliding deeper into the Avengers team. He then rolls the best area attack I’ve ever managed, KOing Zemo and dazing all three of Captain America, Winter Soldier and X-23. I guess I’m losing priority here! My X-23 tickles Deadpool a bit before he goes after Cable. Ms Marvel puts a couple of long ranged attacks into him for very little effect before Wolverine dazes Deadpool. The score is now 9 – 4 to me, mainly thanks to my dice.

Round 3: I’m going to lose someone (probably Cable) to Grant’s first activation but I still need to stay on the plan of disabling Captain America and Winter Soldier and I can probably ride out my attrition advance. The Avengers X-23 does indeed finish off Cable, uses a clever Frenzy to move over and hurt Wong while holding Cable’s Hammers in a fairly safe place. Meanwhile Wolverine is the recipient of the Disarm card which will inconvenience him considerably. My X-23 KOs Captain America and puts some nice damage into Winter Soldier, then Deadpool KOs her in turn and leaps through the Portal to land next to Psylocke and remove her power. Wolverine just rolls as many dice into Winter Soldier as possible, helpfully getting a bunch of wilds after paying for The Best At What I Do and KOing Bucky. Finally Ms Marvel finishes Wong and Psylocke leaves Deadpool on one wound after he plays X-Ceptional Healing. The score closes to 11 – 8 to me.

Round 4: I think that I can get over the line here and Grant has so little left that unless his dice are as hot as mine were in round 2 that he probably can’t get back into this just based on the number of available actions. I doubt that I can do much to Ms Marvel but I can probably KO both Deadpool and X-23 unless they both just flee. Ms Marvel starts us out by throwing Wong away, then Embiggens and hits Cable. I Sacrifice the second attack onto X-23 figuring that I can just use X-Ceptional Healing to survive but helpfully Grant’s dice continue to be awful so I don’t even need it. Cable makes heavy work of KOing X-23 but does eventually manage it and recovers her Hammers. Deadpool can’t get through Psylocke’s Martial Artist and she predictably finishes him off. We end at 16 – 10 to me.

I’ve rarely seen such ridiculous dice as that in a game. Fair play to Grant for taking it all in his stride as I’m sure I’d have been a bit moany if this had been the other way round; we had a good laugh over it both during and after the game. I think that there isn’t a huge amount to learn here as the dice meant that anything I did just worked and anything Grant tried didn’t work. I probably could have deployed Wolverine more centrally and had an extra attack available but I needed to make Grant think that he might have been able to collect the right Hammer.

Game 2: Stephen playing Asgard

Having chatted about our game plans for the last few weeks over Discord, I guess it was inevitable that Stephen and I would get paired together at some point here. I win priority and choose my Extracts as I don’t particularly mind the Secures that Stephen is packing; slightly to my surprise he chooses the larger threat level. Fury is in my list for this specific Crisis so it’s pretty easy to put him in. I need someone who can take hits so Colossus gets a nod and I think that Wong makes sense to sit at the back and heal people – so since I’m using Wong it seems rude not to play Wolverine! This is going to be a brawl in the middle so I just need to make Stephen keep attacking Colossus for as long as possible while depriving him of options. Loki is going to make that interesting – it didn’t occur to me that he might be in the team and I was expecting Hela to sit at the back and zap me.

Extraction: Mutant Extremists Target US Senators
Secure: Gamma Wave Sweeps Across Midwest
Threat: 19
My team: Cable, Colossus, Wolverine, Nick Fury, Wong
My cards: Brace For Impact, Cat and Mouse, Fastball Special, No Matter The Cost, X-Ceptional Healing
Stephen’s team: Thor, Beta Ray Bill, Loki, Hulk
Stephen’s cards: Brace For Impact, Brothers In Arms, Odin’s Blessing, Patch Up, Sibling Rivalry

Round 1: I need to play this a little cagey at the start to stop Hulk from completely stuffing up my team so I’m going to ignore the further away Senators until things are thinned out a bit. My primary goal is to bring down Hulk as soon as possible; apart from Patch Up Stephen doesn’t have any cute ways to keep him in the fight. If I end up going down on points a bit while I deal with Hulk then I’m OK with it. I also need to be aware of options to go to the back point since Stephen hasn’t got anyone who really wants to hang out there away from the fighting and I’ll be very pleased if he keeps any of them team back there. Cable plays Cat and Mouse to threaten the middle. Wong powers up Wolverine then Beta Ray Bill and Fury plus his Agents start hoovering up Senators. To my great surprise, both Thor and Loki opt to stay at the back while I put Colossus in the centre. I pull the trigger on Wolverine who uses The Best At What I Do and No Matter The Cost to set about Beta Ray Bill, ending up with a highly improbable 11 successes and not even leaving enough of the T-horse to throw away! Hulk goes after Wolverine but after that anything would be a let down and he doesn’t achieve much. Finally Cable Bodyslides in and shoots Hulk a bit. The score is 5 – 1 to me.

Round 2: That went better than I’d expected. I doubt that I’ll get a good opportunity to go through Bill again but being on his injured side will make him a bit more manageable; otherwise I just want to keep working over Hulk. Stephen starts with Hulk, heals him with Thor’s leadership and then sets about my team. He Gamma Leaps into the middle, pushes Cable away, throws Wolverine in Nick Fury (which I Brace) and picks up a Senator. Finally Bill pays five to Patch Up the big chap. Nick Fury and his Agents get stuck into Hulk and then Beta Ray Bill dazes Wolverine by throwing him into Fury again. Wong heals Cable and Loki comes forward to pick up a Senator, daze the Agents and generally be a nuisance. Thor applies Shock to Nick Fury but I suspect that won’t be a problem for very long considering where he is! Cable collects a Senator and then both he and Colossus pile some more damage onto Hulk. The score goes to 9 – 5 in my favour.

Round 3: Hulk will probably only get one more activation so I suppose that he’ll go first. I absolutely need to end Hulk here and then I can move onto Bill before I start worry about the others. Hulk removes Incinerate with the leadership, beams Wolverine and Fury and then hits Colossus to push him away [rules mistake on my side as I forgot that he can’t be pushed] then finally throws Fury into Wolverine, dazing the former and forcing me to play X-Ceptional Healing for Wolverine to survive on one. Finally he Gamma Leaps back to the rear point to make it harder for me to deal with. Fortunately, ‘left on one’ is the perfect situation for Wolverine’s injured side and he follows up to finish Hulk and then put some tasty damage onto Thor and throw him off the point. Thor will have no difficulty polishing off Wolverine from here but it should strand him out of the fight for another turn, and leave me scoring 2 VP if he decides to target someone else. But he doesn’t and that’s the end of the story for Wolverine; he also plays Sibling Rivalry and throws his Hammer to daze Fury. Cable slides into the middle and shoot Loki but Stephen cleverly Tricksters him out of range 3 and the damage ends up being quite minor. Wong heals both Cable and Colossus and then Bill strolls over and one-shots Cable anyway; Colossus tickles Loki a bit. The score is now 11 – 8 to me.

Round 4: That was a tough round but now that I’ve got Hulk out of the picture I feel like I’ve got a lot more scope to work now even without Wolverine. My priority now is to finish off Bill but both Loki and Thor are injured enough that I could plausibly daze them in which case I can look at whether it’s possible to score out late in the round. Bill gives Fury all he’s got but when the dust clears the SHIELD director is still standing on a single wound. He doesn’t need another invitation so he summons in his Agents and then does Lead From The Front twice to finish off Beta Ray Bill. Thor throws his Hammer into Fury but I get very lucky and he stays standing; Thor follows up with a For Asgard into Cable; Colossus takes this one and gets thrown into Fury to daze the latter. Cable guns down both Thor and Loki and I’m able to shuffle my few survivors around enough to score out the game before both of them wake up and wreck my team; 16 – 8 to me.

That was quite an interesting game; it was much closer than the score suggested. Once again I got rather fortunately with my dice – notably with Wolverine wrecking Bill in round 1 and Fury surviving two attacks that he had no business surviving in round 4 – but I think that I was ultimately favoured because Stephen didn’t have a neat way to protect his home objective. Loki continues to be a frustrating piece to play into (which, of course, is the intention) as I have a lot of cool superpowers that I was using a lot less than I wanted to. Stephen’s always a lovely chap to play and I think that the Asgard roster probably plays to his strengths a bit more than Web Warriors.

Game 3: Allan playing Brotherhood of Mutants

The numbers have worked out correctly for Allan (who is the TO) to also get to play, and I’m always happy to get a game in with him. Allan wins priority and chooses his Secures, which I mostly don’t mind as I only really dislike one of them. Of course we draw it and also Senators again so this is going to get bloody. I just go for the same team as last time as the same logic broadly applies. I need to be able to do some damage to the terrain early to reduce the amount of it that Magneto can hurl at me.

Extraction: Mutant Extremists Target US Senators
Secure: Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due?
Threat: 19
My team: Cable, Colossus, Wolverine, Nick Fury, Wong
My cards: Brace For Impact, Cat and Mouse, Fastball Special, No Matter The Cost, X-Ceptional Healing
Allan’s team: Magneto, Colossus, Mystique, Sabretooth Apex Predator, Toad
Allan’s cards: Asteroid M, Deception, Magnetic Refraction, Patch Up, X-Ceptional Healing

Round 1: I’m going to avoid messing about with the central Portal for a few turns as I think that this is going to be a very brawly game and I think that if I can avoid getting Incinerated for as long as possible it’ll help me out a lot. I doubt that I’ll see much of Toad and I don’t have a great way to mitigate Colossus so I’ll just have to take what I can get until he goes down; this is likely to be a problem as letting Sabretooth do as he pleases is likely to be a bad end for me. Cable plays Cat and Mouse to get forward. Toad, Fury and the Agents all collect Senators. Mystique comes in and plays Deception on the Agents; I think that’s probably a waste as they’re so easy to kill anyway but eventually Sabretooth picks them off. Cable Bodyslides up and neatly dazes Mystique. Both of our Colossuses (Colossi?) collect a Senator and position centrally, though as planned mine does not contest the centre. Magneto sits at the back and throws something at Cable. Wong powers up Wolverine and eventually he goes into Colossus with the full suite and dazes him, then follows up with a gentle tickle on Sabretooth. He does at least apply Bleed which, spoiler alert, will be relevant later. The score is 5 – 2 to me.

Round 2: Now that Allan’s Colossus is full of power I’m just going to have to brute force my way through him. If an opportunity arises I’ll try to KO Mystique though as that would take her off the board. Magneto puts up Magnetic Refraction then Apex uses his array of tools to daze Wolverine and take his Senator before Colossus plays Patch Up to undo my work. Sabretooth then attacks Cable and through my Colossus into Fury, bringing out my Brace For Impact. That’s a hell of a turn! Cable KOs Mystique, then his Colossus puts Stagger on mine… so Wong just removes it. Magneto plays Asteroid M to get into the action and dazes Fury, which does at least give me priority for next round. My Colossus bounces off Sabretooth and Toad strolls to the back point and sits back to watch the scrum in the middle. The score goes to 8 – 6 to me.

Round 3: I’m going to have to deal with Sabretooth as he’s running riot here, but I guess that’ll mean going through Colossus. I’m actually feeling OK about the score situation and my main worry is letting the attrition get out of hand. Fury starts off by summoning his Agents and then doing a double spender into Sabretooth; Colossus takes the first but the second does get Sabretooth down to 1. In return, he throws Wolverine about, dazes Colossus with a Pounce and draws X-Ceptional Healing out of me to keep Wolverine in the game. Wolverine finally KOs Colossus which should make the rest of this a bit more achievable, although Magneto is taking no prisoners as he one-shots Cable and follows it up by KOing Fury. Wong collects a Senator that the Agents helpfully threw to him and Toad can’t land any damage on Wolverine. The score is now 11 – 10 in Allan’s favour.

Round 4: Sabretooth and Magneto only have three wounds left between them, so if I play this well I can drop them both and pick up enough Senators to see out the game while only Toad is active. Cable opens up by shooting Magneto, no damage. Second shot, also no damage. In desperation, he Bodyslides into range of a bit of terrain and throws it at Magneto, just does one damage and leaves him on one. This is possibly the worst outcome (though I’ll admit that I deserve it after what happened in game 1) and has probably lost me this game on the spot. Sabretooth hurts Colossus who can’t finish off the one wound on either Magneto or Sabretooth. Magneto hurts Cable but at least he has basically run out of terrain to throw at me. Toad KOs Cable and Wolverine dazes him in return. We go to 14 – 13 to me, which honestly feels like a bit of a let off after the first activation.

Round 5: I guess I have the same plan as last time here, except that Magneto and Sabretooth are down to just a single wound each now. Magneto KOs my Colossus. Wolverine KOs Toad but still doesn’t manage to get that last wound through on Sabretooth. The return attack also doesn’t finish off Wolverine so it comes down to Wong to walk up and win the game if he can drop a single wound onto Sabretooth. He can’t either, so we go to 15 -15!

Round 6: This is getting silly now. Magneto can’t get through Wolverine so my mutant finally manages to apply the one wound each to daze both him and Sabretooth, and we finish up at 17 – 15.

Well, that was just ridiculous. Neither of us could roll good attack dice when targeting Magneto, Sabretooth or Wolverine; Sabretooth sat on one wound for 4 rounds straight before Wolverine finally polished him off. I think that my plan not to engage with the central Portal was basically correct, although I guess if I had done it would have scored me the point that I’d needed to win on round 5. On balance, I reckon that not having the Incinerate token was better for me. Anyway, I always enjoy a game with Allan, even one as mutually frustrating as this one, and I’m sure that there’ll be plenty more to come.

Game 4: Alasdair playing X-Force

So it comes down to a mirror match! Fortunately our rosters are quite dissimilar so it’s pretty unlikely that we end up with a direct face off, and Alasdair has some really interesting choices available. He wins priority and chooses his Extracts and I choose the slightly higher threat value. I should give some more thought to my team but after three tricky games I just decide to go with what I know and take the exact same selection as from games 2 and 3 on the basis that it’s less likely that I forget something important. In retrospect I think that Psylocke would probably have been a better choice than Nick Fury but one of the many things I love about this game is that most options are defensible if you have a plan for how you’re going to use them.

Extraction: Paranoia Pummels Populace!
Secure: Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse
Threat: 19
My team: Cable, Colossus, Wolverine, Nick Fury, Wong
My cards: Brace For Impact, Cat and Mouse, Fastball Special, No Matter The Cost, X-Ceptional Healing
Alasdair’s team: Cable, Deadpool, Wolverine, Spider-Man (Miles Morales), Star-Lord (plus Power gem)
Alasdair’s cards: Advanced R&D, Brace For Impact, Cat and Mouse, No Matter The Cost, X-Ceptional Healing

Round 1: It looks like Alasdair is planning to stack the left so I’m going to try taking the centre Extracts and Secure with Colossus and Cable and then overwhelm the right side; this isn’t like to be very quick scoring. We both play Cat and Mouse on our Cables. His Wolverine goes on the left and my Agents take the right Extract; Fury stays back a little to hopefully remain somewhat safe. It’s not safe enough as Star-Lord zaps him and then plays Advanced R&D to pass power to basically the whole team. His Cable heads to the right and neatly drops both Fury and the Agents which is quite a problem while Colossus goes into the middle followed by my Cable who does depressingly little to his. Miles bounces off Colossus in the middle and Deadpool dazes Wong after he’s powered up Wolverine. Finally my Wolverine uses The Best At What I Do and No Matter The Cost to daze Star-Lord. The score is 4 – 2 to me, but I seem to have forgotten to take a photo.

Round 2: My priority is not to let Star-Lord get away with that Extract as he’s a pain to chase down. His Cable Bodyslides forward and uses his spender to KO Wong and leave Fury on a single wound. That seems to happen a lot to that guy! Fury summons in the Agents and lets rip, KOing Star-Lord and sadly (but fittingly) leaving Deadpool on one wound; the Merc With A Mouth finishes off Fury and forces X-Ceptional Healing out of Wolverine. I’m feeling very bad here and getting absolutely crushed on attrition. Colossus attacks Spider-Man and does almost damage but hilariously hits the wild trigger repeatedly to leave the young man with no power at all. His Wolverine decides that he isn’t interested in the left Portal after all and does the same trick as mine to one shot my Cable even through his TK Shield. My Wolverine, not to be outdone, dazes both his Cable and Deadpool before Spider-Man bounces off Colossus. Hilariously, this means that he doesn’t even have enough power to pick up the fallen Extract in the middle. The score is 6 – 3 to me now.

Round 3: I’m getting a sound beating on attrition but at least I’m still in the game for score. My Wolverine has a lot of power on him so it’s not out of the question to drop Cable on the right which will change things but I think that at this point I’m better off trying to keep control in the centre as that is where the Extracts are sitting. My Cable starts us off with a spender which dazes Spider-Man and then draws X-Ceptional Healing out of his Wolverine; he also collects the fallen token. His Wolverine probably doesn’t survive Colossus at this point so he activates him but I’m able to tank one hit on Colossus so both of my characters survive. My Wolverine then goes wild on his Cable, taking him off the board and making me feel like I’m right back in the mix here. Deadpool can’t do much more than tickle my Wolverine, and Colossus sticks Stagger on Alasdair’s. I breathe a sigh of relief and we go to 9 – 5 in my favour.

Round 4: My priority here is to take out Spider-Man as he can just force me to drop an Extract and then run to the left Secure and score points quietly for the rest of the game. Alasdair’s Wolverine dazes Colossus but he does his job Bodyguarding hits off Cable who KOs Spider-Man. Deadpool rolls about a million dice and finally dazes Wolverine and the score goes to 10 – 9 to me. That might look like a bad turn for me in terms of the score but I’m in a fine place for attrition and have priority again.

Round 5: I just need to keep Cable and Colossus standing so that they can keep scoring three VP for the Extraction each turn. Cable dazes Alasdair’s Wolverine and Deadpool can’t quite do the same to mine; he gets KOed in return. We go to 15 – 9 to me.

Round 6: We don’t really need to do this as Alasdair would need to table me at this point which he’s obviously not going to do. His Wolverine KOs Cable and then mine rushes over to throw him off the point out of spite. We finish up at 18 – 9.

Wow, what an intense game! It was really fun to play someone who was on the same broad attrition plan as me and I was very worried when it was all working out for Alastair in the early turns. I think that him giving away priority at the end of round 2 really hurt Alasdair even though it came about by dazing my Cable; it allowed me to take firm control of the centre from then on. Still, I was also very fortunate to KO his Cable in round three; if I’d had bad dice there the result would surely have been very different. Hopefully we can play again as I had a great time with Alasdair.

When all the scores are in I’m the last one undefeated so I get to walk away with first place. I’m very excited to play even more MCP and I guess I’ll have to decide whether to tweak this roster, move onto something else or go back to old faithful Criminal Syndicate. I really enjoyed this event with four skilled opponents; thanks to Grant, Stephen, Allan and Alasdair for four fun games of MCP and to Allan (er, again) for running this event and generally being the focal point for the whole Scotland scene. I shall return in 2024!

Marvel Crisis Protocol tournament report: MCP Monthly Mayhem 19Nov2023

Allan and I travelled down to Protech Games in Stockton for another four round Marvel Crisis Protocol event. It’s a bit too far for me to be going every month, even with Allan doing all the actual driving, but I always enjoy a trip out to see how other groups play and how we measure up amongst the wider MCP community.

I was fully planning to play a SHIELD roster here but a few test games against local friends clearly demonstrated that I’m awful at playing them and that many more games would be required if I wanted to get proficient enough to consider playing them in a competitive setting. I did also consider an X-Force roster but a quick look at Longshanks a couple of days ahead of the event showed that there was already a quarter of players expecting to use them and I prefer to help events have a more diverse spread of affiliations. So I simply went back to my old favourites in Criminal Syndicate. As always, the main plan is to sit on Secure points and score enough VPs to win the game before all my characters get KOd. I have Shadowland Daredevil as a back-up plan in case I end up playing on a pay-to-flip Crisis or similar. I put Captain America (Sam Wilson) in as I feel that he’d be very useful especially on Superpowered Scoundrels where his mobility and control plus ignoring cover makes him a huge asset.

Characters (10)
* Kingpin (4)
Black Cat (3)
Bullseye (2)
Mysterio (3)
Rhino (4)
* Shadowland Daredevil (4)
Ulik (5)
Juggernaut (5)
* Captain America (Sam Wilson) (3)
Toad (2)

Team Tactics (10)
All According To Plan
Shadow Organization
Advanced R&D (R)
Brace for Impact (R)
Bird of Prey
Do You Know Who I Am?
Eyes on the Prize
Mission Objective
The Grand Illusion
This is a Robbery

Secure Crisis
Cosmic Invasion! Black Order Descends on Earth (D, 16)
Riots Spark Over Extremis 3.0 (D, 17)
Super-Powered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate (F, 20)

Extract Crisis
Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan (F, 17)
Struggle For The Cube Continues (F, 17)
Deadly Legacy Virus Cured? (C, 19)

Game 1: Martin playing Criminal Syndicate

How ironic that after avoiding X-Force to reduce the possibility of a mirror match that my first game is to be a Kingpin mirror. Martin was a quite extraordinarily cheerful and friendly chap right from the start of the game and I knew that I’d be in for a treat here. I win the priority roll and choose my Secures; normally it wouldn’t matter much in a mirror match but Martin’s Crises are rather different from mine. My basic plan here will be to take the central Extract with Ulik and then retreat to just sit on whichever points suit me best. Martin has made (in my opinion) an error in selecting Mysterio here as he’s too slow to chase the fight and I fully expect to just let him go and sit on a Secure somewhere and leave him alone for as long as possible. I figured that I was unlikely to need All According to Plan in this match-up so I left it out. We agreed to count the terrain pieces as being flat on the top all over so that we could actually interact with them.

Extraction: The Montesi Formula Found
Secure: Cosmic Invasion! Black Order Descends On Earth
Threat: 16
My team: Kingpin, Black Cat, Rhino, Ulik
My cards: Advanced R&D, Brace For Impact, Eyes On The Prize, Mission Objective, This Is A Robbery
Martin’s team: Kingpin, Bullseye, Mysterio, Immortal Hulk
Martin’s cards: Brace For Impact, Cruelty, Patch Up, Shadow Organisation, The Grand Illusion

Round 1: Martin’s Mysterio is on the right so I plan to just let him go over there and take his one point per turn and deal with the rest of his team with the whole of mine. Ulik plays Eyes On The Prize, takes the central Book and retreats back to my home point. Bullseye and Black Cat take the remaining Books and Mysterio goes on the right as expected. The two Kingpins have an existential crisis on the left and Rhino ends up just sort of sitting in the middle of nowhere in preparation for going after Bullseye next turn. Hulk comes over and throws Rhino into Black Cat which hurts a lot; luckily he can’t quite make it onto the left Portal. The score is 3 – 3.

Round 2: I plan to drop Rhino on Bullseye and steal his Book and hopefully the back point at the same time. I’ll keep Ulik for last ideally to push anyone on the left away from the Portal and otherwise bunker up on the left and rear points. Rhino goes into Bullseye and plays This Is A Robbery to take his Book and throw him away; sadly he can’t actually do very much damage. Hulk throws Kingpin into Black Cat twice; she plays Brace on the first and rolls remarkably well on the second to survive on a single wound; Kingpin himself gets off rather lightly as Martin’s dice go a bit cold. Bullseye moves back onto the point and hurts Rhino, throwing in a Cruelty for good measure while Black Cat thanks her good luck and retreats way back to my home Portal. My Kingpin applies Stun to his evil twin and throws him away, and Martin’s just walks back and throws my backwards. Ulik comes in with a Crushing Leap but can’t roll a Wild to push Kingpin away. The score goes to 7 – 4 in my favour.

Round 3: I basically just need to keep this up now. I have a choice for first activation to either daze Bullseye with Rhino or try to Stagger Hulk using Ulik; I decide to go with Rhino first as I need to get some power off an initial swing with Ulik which might not work, or worse might just give more power to Hulk without actually dealing with him. Rhino does obligingly daze Bullseye and the clears Bleed and sits on his lonely Portal at the back of the board. Hulk hurts Ulik and throws him into Kingpin repeatedly but Ulik is still standing at the end. Mysterio moves toward Rhino, realises that he’s out of range and just moves back again; Black Cat also twiddles her thumbs on the back point. Ulik pushes Hulk away and Kingpin throws Ulik off the point. Finally my Kingpin pushes his off the left Portal; I had enough power for the throw if necessary but I figured I’d be better to hang onto the power rather than throwing him a bit further into the distance. The score is 13 – 5 to me.

Round 4: As I only need 3 points I just need to defend Black Cat and then keep Martin honest on the left; even taking this to one further round feels very manageable if needed. I think I’ll lose either Rhino or Ulik in the first activation so my plan is to use whichever other one remains in the game to reduce Martin’s options for activations and force him to make a desperate move to contest either the back or left point. Bullseye starts us off by dazing Rhino and picking up his Book so Ulik lays into Hulk with Shatter Mountains Shatter Bones. I actually do manage to roll the triggers to Activate Hulk but also do enough damage to daze him which is probably even better. Martin’s Kingpin dazes Ulik and takes the Book but then my Kingpin dazes his and right takes it right back. We finish up at 17 – 8 in my favour.

It was an absolute joy to play with Martin and I definitely hope to do so again. The game played out largely as I’d hoped – indeed you might say that it went All According To Plan! Martin and I discussed Criminal Syndicate for a while after the game as he’s just getting into them and he seemed to do pretty well in his other games so hopefully it was helpful to him.

Game 2: Peter playing Guardians of the Galaxy

For my second game I get matched up with Peter, an old friend from our days playing a lot of Malifaux. I was really looking forward to getting another game into him after all this time, but I will admit that I was a bit nervous as Peter is notorious for playing the most OP stuff available and therefore I was absolutely certain to see Cosmic Ghost Rider. Peter won priority and picked his Secures. I decided that Kingpin wasn’t going to be very useful as there aren’t many points available and I thought that going for more of a brawling option with Shadowland Daredevil would be better. Black Cat came in partly to potentially steal the Extracts if possible but mainly to threaten a key Stagger somewhere and at least force the playing of the inevitable Crew Of The Milano card.

Extraction: Deadly Legacy Virus Cured?
Secure: Demons Downtown! Has Our Comeuppance Come Due?
Threat: 19
My team: Shadowland Daredevil, Black Cat, Mysterio, Rhino, Ulik
My cards: Advanced R&D, All According To Plan, Mission Objective, The Grand Illusion, This Is A Robbery
Peter’s team: Star-Lord, Beta Ray Bill, Cosmic Ghost Rider, Gamora, Rocket Raccoon
Peter’s cards: Brace For Impact, Crew Of The Milano, Galaxy’s Greatest, No Matter The Cost, Patch Up

Round 1: I’m expecting to pick up the left Extract with the Ninjas and then basically have them run away so that I get at least a few points scored through the game. Otherwise I think that this turn will mainly be positioning for later, though if Peter is a bit careless he might possibly give me an opening for Rhino in the centre. I’ll aim to go late with Ulik and Crushing Leap him into position and push a few characters away from the middle. Cosmic Ghost Rider gets 3 extra power, and Winging It tokens go to him, Beta Ray Bill and Star-Lord. Star-Lord takes the right Extraction, the Ninjas take the left and Daredevil moves toward the middle while also playing Advanced R&D to give Ulik a power. Rocket goes to the back point and Gamora takes the middle where Mysterio joins her. His involvement is brief as Cosmic Ghost Rider dazes him. Ulik leaps into the middle and pushes both Cosmic Ghost Rider and Gamora; the latter gets pushed towards the waiting arms of Rhino who gets stuck into her and plays This Is A Robbery to daze her and steal her Extract. The score is 3 – 2 in my favour; I guess I could have had an extra point if I’d put Black Cat on the rear point but I was worried about getting yet another character needlessly Incinerated.

Round 2: I’m assuming that I’m going to lose someone early here as Peter still has Priority so my intention is to try to KO Gamora and get her out of my hair for the rest of the game. Star-Lord is also a reasonable target as he’s positioned very far forward and is temptingly carrying an Extract. Cosmic Ghost Rider gets 2 extra power, and the Winging It tokens are given to him, Beta Ray Bill and Gamora. Gamora plays Galaxy’s Greatest and also uses No Matter The Cost to do Cosmic Assassin twice, targeting Ulik and Rhino both times and dazing the former. She turns out to be out of Patch Up range from Cosmic Ghost Rider though, which becomes important as Rhino goes on a rampage. The activation starts off with Mysterio playing The Grand Illusion, then Rhino KOs Gamora with a throw, dazes Rocket (who, it turns out, does not like to be Incinerated) and puts some hefty damage into Star-Lord. Star-Lord helpfully bounces off Daredevil, as counting Blanks while in Cover turns out to be quite tough, but does manage to Hit and Run over to Cosmic Ghost Rider who pays for Patch Up. Mysterio leaves Beta Ray Bill on a single wound and retreats to a slightly safer position. Bill wounds Mysterio in return and also moves back to his home point, where I’m probably quite happy for him to stay. Daredevil finishes off Star-Lord and the Cosmic Ghost Rider pulls him in and one-shots him. The score goes to 7 – 2.

Round 3: My plan is now much more clearly on attrition as I can probably leave Peter with ‘just’ Cosmic Ghost Rider and Beta Ray Bill (i.e. perhaps the two best characters in the game right now) as I can take Priority off him for this crucial turn. Cosmic Ghost Rider rolls terribly and gets no free power this turn which means that he briefly loses his Psychosis token. The Winging It tokens go to him, Beta Ray Bill and Star-Lord. I predictably play All According To Plan. The Ninjas pass their Extract to Mysterio to take themselves off the table, then Daredevil hits Star-Lord to bring them back. The resulting AoE Demons Devastation KOs both Rocket and Star-Lord while leaving Cosmic Ghost Rider on a fairly precarious two wounds. Cosmic Ghost Rider comes in and wounds Ulik and we realise that I wasn’t quick to declare Tricks and Traps before the attack. Peter very kindly lets me play it in retrospect and it does the two wounds to daze him; rather than tumble into a rules black hole we agree to just stick with the damage rolled on Ulik. Many thanks to Peter for his very gentlemanly behaviour. Ulik does the one remaining wound to Beta Ray Bill and everyone else moves to score; we’re now at 13 – 2 to me.

Round 4: I think that the game is essentially over now but I can make it clean if I can just score 3 points. If either Black Cat or Mysterio live long enough to get a turn then they’ll just run for the corners and the rest will have to just either fight a delaying action or sit on the Secures as needed. Cosmic Ghost Rider picks up 3 more power, KOs Ulik and dazes Rhino; the latter uses Mission Objective to pass his Extract over to Daredevil. Black Cat runs for the back corner. Peter does some quick sums and realises that the game is over and shakes my hand at 16 – 2.

Thanks to Peter for a great game; it was a pleasure to play him again after so long. I think that he got a bit greedy at the start of round two with Gamora as it got two very powerful cards (Galaxy’s Greatest and No Matter The Cost) out of the way and allowed me to KO Gamora at a very opportune time. His dice were not very kind after that either, though it didn’t really impede Cosmic Ghost Rider himself it did mean that Rocket and Star-Lord had very little impact. I should have sat Black Cat on my home point in round 1 as at that time I was thinking that I needed to play the scenario game as my first approach.

Game 3: Danny playing X-Men

I was really pleased to be able to get another game against Danny after quite long gap. He’s one of the players who I’d consider to be roughly in the same skill bracket as me, but I think I’ve actually never beaten him so perhaps I’m flattering myself a little here. A lot was going to come down to the priority roll here as I really don’t want a pay-to-flip Secure and Danny really does. He wins it and we end up on SWORD Base; I go for a slightly smaller game size as I hope that will enable me to leverage the extra activation of the Ninjas a bit more easily.

Extraction: Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan
Secure: SWORD Establishes Base On Moon’s Blue Area
Threat: 15
My team: Shadowland Daredevil, Rhino, Ulik, Toad
My cards: Advanced R&D, All According To Plan, Mission Objective, Shadow Organisation, This Is A Robbery
Danny’s team: Cyclops, Beast, Domino, X-23, Bullseye
Danny’s cards: Brace For Impact, First Class, Mission Objective, To Me My X-Men, X-Ceptional Healing

Round 1: Danny has Priority so I’m expecting that he’ll do a safe grab of the central Spider-Infected (probably with Beast) and otherwise we’ll just end up sitting on our own sides of the board. I realise as we set up that I won’t have any spare power to use Advanced R&D for Ulik unless I forgo a scoring opportunity which seems unwise. Danny plays First Class and starts us out with Beast taking the central Spider-Infected and then returning to the right Secure with To Me My X-Men. Otherwise everyone just moves up very tamely to collect Spider-Infected and flip SWORD bases. Ulik and X-23 end up just walking into position for next turn. The score is 5 – 4 to the X-Men.

Round 2: I need to break the deadlock and relieve the X-Men of at least one of the Spider-Infected. My plan is to go aggressive with both Rhino and Ulik and see what damage I can cause. Ulik starts us off by dazing Cyclops with some stellar rolls and then follows up by throwing some terrain into Beast. In retrospect I wonder if I’d have been better to go the other way here and attack Beast but I was thinking that I should try to remove the leadership. Domino comes slightly forward and Rhino attacks her then plays This Is A Robbery. At the time I was thinking that it was worth getting Mission Objective out of Danny hand but again looking back I think that I should have saved it for a more opportune moment. Toad pushes Domino and Bullseye plinks him in return. Daredevil advances to get into the action and completely bounces off Domino before having X-23 tear a strip off him and flip that SWORD point back and take my home one. The score goes to 9 – 9.

Round 3: My main plan here is to continue to beat Cyclops and get him out of the way, and otherwise keep parity on the SWORD bases. Ulik gives Cyclops all he’s got but his good rolls last turn are matched by some very poor ones here, doing a total of two damage including his spender attack. Domino dazes what’s left of Daredevil after X-23’s efforts last turn. Rhino dazes both Bullseye and Beast, collecting a Spider-Infected in the process. Cyclops does a Hit and Run and moves toward my back right SWORD base and then uses a very clever Field Leader to bring X-23 into range of Toad. Toad moves twice to stay away from the scary lady and flips a SWORD base, and X-23 makes two moves and flips two Secures on the left. The score goes to 14 – 13 to me, but it looks like I forgot to take a photo.

Round 4: This is going to be the last turn. I feel like I’m still committed to KOing Cyclops here and I think that if I can daze a character on each of the bases then I can make the unopposed flip. Ulik fails again to push through the trivial amount of damage needed on Cyclops, but does at least push him and flip the SWORD base. Cyclops pushes him away in return and hits the Speed of Light trigger to also KO the Ninjas, so collects their Spider-Infected and flips that point again. Rhino KOs Bullseye but can’t finish off X-23 and fails to flip the back left point. Beast throws Daredevil into an annoying spot out of the action and flips the back right Secure, moves to the near right and takes that one too. Toad pushes Cyclops off the point again and fails yet again to flip it as Beast is in the way. Daredevil finally dazes Domino but can’t manage to put the final point of damage onto Cyclops (therefore allowing him to retain his Spider-Infected) and also fails to flip the SWORD base. X-23 just flips the final SWORD base that I’m holding and we finish up at 21 -17 to Danny.

What a great game! Full credit to Danny for playing his characters very nicely, I was particularly impressed with the way that he was able to conduct his scenario game in a very diceless way whereas I always seemed to need to roll a die to get anything done. I made some big mistakes here – I think that in retrospect I’d have been better off just leaving one of the Spider-Infected on the ground in round 1 in order to preferentially pass Ulik a power with Advanced R&D and played a more aggressive game overall. In round two I could perhaps have attacked Beast instead of Cyclops with Ulik – the former was holding a Spider-Infected but of course the latter is the leader; I’d welcome thoughts or advice on this one. Also in round two I shouldn’t have wasted This Is A Robbery in exchange for Mission Objective, that card is for more valuable to me in hand than Mission Objective. Strong play by Danny who did it all right, and I’m always happy to get a good schooling from a skilled player.

Game 4: Percy playing Spider-Foes

My final game was against Percy playing a very cool themed Spider-Foes roster which was based on the idea of scientists and their robot creations; he was using some Sentinels painted up in the Spider-Foes green and purple. Percy won Priority and wisely picked his Secures. I decided that Mysterio would be potentially quite a fun option as the Secure encourages a central brawl where The Grand Illusion and his general nonsense can be most entertaining. Seeing Percy pick a pair of Sentinels worried me a bit as I had no good way to displace them so my strategy would have to be to fight them off the scoring points.

Extraction: Deadly Legacy Virus Cured?
Secure: Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse
Threat: 19
My team: Kingpin, Black Cat, Mysterio, Rhino, Ulik
My cards: Advanced R&D, All According To Plan, Mission Objective, The Grand Illusion, This Is A Robbery
Percy’s team: Doc Ock Sinister Scientist, Lizard, Mysterio, Sentinel Mk4, Sentinel Prime
Percy’s cards: Face Me, Mission Objective, Patch Up, Sinister Traps, This Is Our Day

Round 1: Percy puts the Sinister Trap on the right objective. I’ll get the last activation so hopefully the board state will be such that either Percy will be obliged to stand on it himself to score points or I can just live with taking ~3 wounds to get both VPs from that side. Otherwise I’ll plan to send my team into the middle and rely on passing Ulik a power to deal with whoever goes on the left. Lizard goes to the left and my Mysterio takes the centre. The Prime comes forward, zaps Mysterio and pulls him forward. Kingpin goes to replace him in the centre then gives his power to Ulik with Advance R&D before the other Sentinel repeats the big one’s trick to pull Mysterio even further out of position, which is looking extremely alarming for me now. I realise that Percy has no intention of taking the right points so I send in Black Cat… who annoyingly takes the full 5 damage and dazes. Doc Ock dazes my Mysterio (taking his Extract) and his Mysterio bimbles about the backfield to little effect. Meanwhile Rhino sighs and heads to the right to at least score me those points after Black Cat’s unfortunate trap-related injury and Ulik rolls like a boss to daze Lizard and push him off the Secure. Quite a bloody round 1, with 3 characters dazed already; we finish it at 5 – 1 to me.

Round 2: Since I’ve got so much power on Mysterio, Black Cat and Ulik I decide I might as well play All According to Plan. I’m really comfortable on scoring so I want to keep on working on attrition and reduce Percy’s options to just standing on points with Sentinels. Percy follows my All According To Plan with his own This Is Our Day. Mysterio starts us out by playing The Grand Illusion and zapping Doc Ock, moving back with Tricks and Traps. He makes a second attack on the Prime as I forgot that they can’t be moved, but he rolls all blanks anyway. Percy’s Mysterio comes to attack Kingpin but I reduce away the one damage to avoid getting moved backwards; the return attack hurts him a little and he gets thrown far enough away that I’m not really worried about him now. The Prime hurts Kingpin and Rhino bounces across the Sentinel MK4 on his way to attacking Doc Ock; I decide not to play This Is A Robbery this turn as it’ll just be thrown to safety with This Is Our Day. The MK4 punches Rhino and he uses Aggressive to move away from the enraged Doc Ock as I want him to have to either beam his own Sentinel or spend an action moving. As it happens he advances into range to attack Mysterio who deals his final point of damage with Tricks and Traps. Percy has seen enough after this and decides that he’d rather not play out the game so we shake hands and finish it up there. Anth advises us to mark it as 14 – 0 in Longshanks.

Percy seemed like a nice chap and I’m very sorry that the game was a bit one sided and he wasn’t having fun. That said, full credit to him for recognising it and stopping early rather than suffering through the rest of the game. Notwithstanding Black Cat triggering the Sinister Trap, the dice were in my favour which wasn’t helping to make this an even game. I hope that we can play again.

Once the scores are all in, I get third place just behind Danny (round 3) and ahead of Peter (round 2) out of 14 player. Meanwhile Allan had a torrid time and finished up down the bottom of the table so between us we had a pretty average run. After all the discussion in the car on the way down about the relative merits of Captain America or other options I didn’t end up playing him at all! Many thanks to Martin, Peter, Danny and Percy for four very fun games of MCP and, as always, to Anth for running the event. I have just one more MCP event this year so I need to decide which affiliation to play.

Marvel Crisis Protocol tournament report: My Gang’s Better Than Your Gang 23Sep2023

It’s time for another Marvel Crisis Protocol tournament hosted by Allan at Common Ground Games in Stirling. Scott and newcomer Akos travelled with me to Stirling for a tournament with a slight difference. This event required that the rosters all be single affiliation with an allowance of one Rogue Agent (or Punisher, who at the time of the event being organised wasn’t affiliated anywhere); smaller affiliations like Sentinels or Winter Guard were allowed to take both Rogue Agents and Punisher, while oddities like Dark Dimension and Hellfire Club weren’t allowed.

For a variety of reasons in my real life I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to get games in ahead of this event so I fell back on my ‘comfortable pair of slippers’ affiliation: Criminal Syndicate. I had been considering Avengers simply because they have so many affiliated characters that there is a lot of scope in how to play, but Scott suggested a Kingpin-centric roster and I agreed that it would be a good solution. In addition, I did think about a very late switch to X-Force following the recent balance pass but decided that playing them with zero practice games would be a poor idea. The roster here is pretty simple – I take Kingpin as leader and then use mobile elements like Ulik and Rhino to sit on Secure points and hope that I score enough points to win before I run out of characters. The Crisis Cards are intended to be fast scoring widely spread maps to avoid getting into too much of a brawl as I’m not really set up to go head to head vs full attrition teams. Having a fully affiliated team should increase the relative value of Shadow Organisation as now my entire team is eligible to pay for it, so I’m planning to try it out – in my experience it’s a cool trick but I don’t have the power to spare for it.

Characters: (10)
—Kingpin (Wilson Fisk) Threat: 4
—Shadowland Daredevil (Matt Murdock) Threat: 4
Black Cat (Felica Hardy) Threat: 3
Bullseye (Benjamin Poindexter) Threat: 2
Hood (Parker Robbins) Threat: 3
Mysterio (Quentin Beck) Threat: 3
Rhino (Aleksei Sytsevich) Threat: 4
Ulik (Ulik) Threat: 5
—Klaw (Ulysses Klaw) Threat: 5
Omega Red (Arkady Gregorivich Rossovich) Threat: 4

Tactics: (10)
Advanced R&D
Brace for Impact
All According To Plan
Cruelty
Shadow Organization
Hood’s Gang
The Grand Illusion
This Is A Robbery
Eyes on the Prize
Mission Objective

Secure Crisis: (3)
Cosmic Invasion! Black Order Descends on Earth (Threat: 16)
Infinity Formula Goes Missing! (Threat: 17)
Super-Powered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate! (Threat: 20)

Extract Crisis: (3)
Deadly Legacy Virus Cured? (Threat: 19)
Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan (Threat: 17)
Struggle for the Cube Continues (Threat: 17)

Game 1: Gordon playing Defenders

The first game is into a fairly new player who is packing the recently-improved Defenders. I win the Priority roll and, while I could have happily played into any of his Secures, I do pick my Secures just for a sense of Criminal Syndicate form; Gordon goes for the lower threat value which will make scoring both the Researcher and the Ambush points quite tricky as I’m not really set up to go very wide. On the plus side, if he takes Hulk then he won’t be too wide either. I suppose that I’m expecting to see the new Daredevil leadership as he’s the new hotness. I would normally use Rhino here but decide that Shadowland Daredevil will be a better pick as the Ninjas can contest the Researcher, plus using Rhino feels like a bit of a waste without getting the use of This Is A Robbery.

Extraction: Research Station Attacked!
Secure: Superpowered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate
Threat: 15
My team: Kingpin, Bullseye, Shadowland Daredevil, Ulik
My cards: Advanced R&D, All According To Plan, Brace For Impact, Cruelty, Shadow Organisation
Gordon’s team: Doctor Strange, Daredevil, Iron Fist, Luke Cage
Gordon’s cards: Brace For Impact, Heroes For Hire, Pentagrams of Farallah, Recalibration Matrix, Trip Up

Round 1: I nominate Kingpin as my leader, and slightly to my surprise Gordon picks Strange as his. I’m not expecting to do any attacking other than with Ulik here, I just want to sit on my side of the board and the centre point, then send Ulik bouncing off to inconvenience someone. Bullseye plays Advanced R&D to pass a power to Ulik and then strolls onto the back left point; Iron Fist takes a spot opposite him. My Daredevil sits on the back right point and sends the Ninjas into the middle where Gordon’s Daredevil makes short work of them. Kingpin goes into the centre; I figure that Gordon can either push him off with Strange or contest it but probably not both. Luke Cage takes the back right point and Ulik does a Crushing Leap to push him off. He also throws some terrain at Daredevil who pays for Brace For Impact. Strange moves up but rolls quite poorly (which will be a recurring theme in this game) into Kingpin who reduces to zero to avoid both the Hex and the push. The score is 6 – 1 to me.

Round 2: Well that went rather nicely. I need to control Iron Fist so that he can’t get two goes of his spender out across the whole game. Otherwise I can settle into attrition here and see if Strange’s control is enough to keep me off the points. Bullseye plinks Iron Fist a couple of times. Cage uses Sweet Christmas on Ulik, throwing him into my Daredevil (I pay for Brace For Impact on both) and giving him a suite of annoying status conditions. My Daredevil attacks his and totally fails to hurt him, then Iron Fist bounces ineffectively off Kingpin who swing back and also can’t do damage, though he does at least push him away. Daredevil moves to contest the centre and goes for Bullseye but the terrible attack rolls continue so he achieves nothing apart from taking a Parting Shot for his troubles. Ulik comes for Daredevil but the first swing bounces off him and Gordon plays Heroes For Hire on the second which throws Ulik off the point; nice play Gordon! Finally Doctor Strange pushes Kingpin clear of the centre. The score swings back a bit and it’s now 8 – 6 to me.

Round 3: Now that Heroes For Hire is out of the way I can start to pressure Gordon’s lack of control (other than Doctor Strange) and focus on sitting on the objectives. I need to deal with Iron Fist since he’s fully revved up now but even if I lose Priority from this I can get it back with All According To Plan. Bullseye spots that Iron Fist has just two wounds left so that’s an easy choice to daze him. Strange pushes Ulik further away (a mistake in my opinion as Ulik is so mobile; he should have pushed Kingpin further) and moves across to heal Luke Cage. Kingpin just double moves and throws Daredevil into Strange as Gordon is out of realistic ways to move him. His Daredevil moves to score after another fairly ineffective swing into Bullseye and mine gently pokes Luke Cage; the Ninjas appear and fail to hurt Strange. It’s been a weird game for attack rolls. Cage ends the Ninjas again but rolls terribly on a Sweet Christmas attack into my Daredevil, failing to get any damage or the throw. Ulik rather boringly just moves to score the back right point and (briefly) clears Hex. The score swings right back in my favour; 14 – 7.

Round 4: I just need to hang on to two points here and I don’t think that there is enough on the board to stop that unless the dice go crazy. The safest are probably the back two which currently have Bullseye and Ulik on them but Ulik is quite mobile so I have options. Iron Fist pays for his big attack into Kingpin and, as usual, it doesn’t apply Activated but instead applies Dazed! Bullseye dazes Daredevil in return. Strange moves to push Bullseye and gets surely the worst dice I’ve ever seen – he blanks out his attack, rerolls with Eye of Agamotto into more failures, then pays for Recalibration Matrix and still can’t get a success. My Daredevil leaves Cage on one wound and the fight back is also not enough to daze. Ulik comes over to daze Doctor Strange, though I could have just left him where he was as the game was clearly up by then. We finish at 18 – 9.

Many thanks to Gordon for a fun game, and full credit to him for staying chirpy even when the dice were truly awful. I flatter myself that I would have held on to win even if the luck had been a bit more even, since my plan didn’t really require me to do much fighting, but you never know how much the dice can swing things. I was satisfied that my basic plan was working; Gordon frequently had to spend actions walking back to the objectives which blunted his damage output a little and my mobility was generally good enough to be where I needed. That said, Kingpin really hats getting pushed around by Doctor Strange (or anyone else) and I spend a lot more time walking with him than I’d like.

Game 2: Derek playing Defenders

You wait ages for a Defenders game, then two come along at once! Actually it was no surprise to see Derek playing Defenders as they’ve long been his main affiliation so I’m keen to see if he sticks with what he knows or tries out the new Daredevil option. Derek wins Priority and chooses his Secures; I choose the lower threat value as I think that my core is tighter than his and I don’t want him to have too many toys to work with. Rhino and Black Cat are slightly less good in Skrulls as they can only hold a single one each, but I’m keen to see how Black Cat gets on after her rules change. Plus I figure that having a long mover on a D map is always helpful.

Extraction: Skrulls Infiltrate World Leadership
Secure: Cosmic Invasion! Black Order Descends On Earth
Threat: 16
My team: Kingpin, Black Cat, Rhino, Ulik
My cards: Advanced R&D, All According To Plan, Brace For Impact, Shadow Organisation, This Is A Robbery
Derek’s team: Doctor Strange (Soul stone), Iron Fist, Valkyrie, Wolverine
Derek’s cards: Brace For Impact, Heroes For Hire, No Matter The Cost, Patch Up, X-Ceptional Healing

Round 1: I start with Rhino in range of the nearest Cosmic Vault but it doesn’t give him any power. My plan for round 1 is to stay even on the Skrulls and sit on three Vaults to score them. There might also be a possibility to drop an extra Skrull if I can get This Is A Robbery off. Iron Fist moves up and takes the left Skrull and Kingpin takes the right. Valkyrie just double walks over to Kingpin; I did ask afterwards why she didn’t Charge him and Derek explained that he wanted to keep the power for next turn. I send Ulik in to get the nearer of the central Skrulls but my positioning has been very poor and he can’t get to it in one move which rather leaves him stranded. Wolverine comes in and collects the last Skrull. Black Cat gives Rhino a power with Advanced R&D before moving to score the left Vault. Strange just moves onto the back Vault where I hope he’ll stay for the rest of the game. Finally Rhino has to walk twice to get in range of Wolverine then pays for This Is A Robbery. I don’t have enough power to pick up the Skrull but it stops Derek scoring and also crucially punts Wolverine away and hopefully keeps him out of my hair for another turn. The score is 4 – 2 to me.

Round 2: Iron Fist gets moved by the Cosmic Vaults. I’m assuming that Derek will send someone in to collect the Skrull that Wolverine dropped, although that will leave them isolated in the centre. I need to get some help for Black Cat before Iron Fist wrecks her on the left. I’m quite happy with Valkyrie and Kingpin tackling each other on the right so I can either move back to safety with Ulik or send him to mess with the Defenders depending on how the rest of the turn goes. Derek actually starts with Valkyrie who helpfully bounces off Kingpin without much effect. This gives me the opportunity to pick up the fallen Skrull in the centre with Rhino. He gets moves and Derek chooses to bring him forward so I use the big chap to give Iron Fist a beating, both dazing him and getting onto the left Vault thanks to Rhino’s extraordinary mobility. Wolverine just double walks into the middle to set up for next turn. Black Cat collects Iron Fist’s Skrull, gets pulled forward and then moves as quickly as possible toward my back point; however she can’t quite make it to the Vault. Strange zaps Ulik a couple of times, pulling him forward so Ulik obliges by jumping the rest of the way and dazing the pesky wizard. Finally Kingpin returns the favour with Valkyrie by failing to make any big impact on her. The score goes to 11 – 2 to me.

Round 3: No-one gets moved by the Vaults this turn, and I play All According To Plan. Number one priority is to deal with Iron Fist, which I think Rhino can manage. Otherwise I just want to play keep-away as much as possible and ride out the score to the end. Rhino does his work, KOing Iron Fist by throwing the portacabin at him – that’s a huge relief as it also takes Heroes For Hire out of the equation never mind not having to worry about him nuking someone. Doctor Strange finishes Ulik and collects his Skrull and Kingpin dazes Valkyrie over on the right. Wolverine rolls rather disappointingly against Black Cat to leave her alive; she wants no part of that so she gratefully walks onto my home Vault to see out the game. We finish up at 17 – 4.

Derek is always a fun chap to play and this was certainly no exception. I felt that I had a rather disappointing start; first I’d mispositioned Ulik so he couldn’t get the nearer Skrull in one move and then I’d compounded that by leaving him in the exact spot that I wanted Rhino to stand; this stopped him from being able to make an attack into Wolverine which might have gained me the power to collect the Skrull in round one after playing This Is a Robbery. Otherwise the game went in my favour; Derek was a bit too cagey and he really needed to be trying to apply as much damage as possible with Iron Fist, Valkyrie and Wolverine to counteract Kingpin’s leadership.

Game 3: Dave playing Defenders

Now this is getting ridiculous! I’m genuinely facing the possibility to get four games in a row against Defenders. I win Priority and pick my Secures, though I could have lived with any of Dave’s Crisis cards so it didn’t matter too much. Dave chooses 20 threat, so at least the game will be rather different from the first one against Gordon despite having the same Crises. I decide to bring in Omega Red for a change; he used to be a staple of my Criminal Syndicate rosters but lately I’ve been trying to use more mobile characters since I’m already tied to one slow potato in Kingpin. Mysterio is superficially rather slow too, but he’s actually very mobile once he gets revved up and I think that he works really nicely on a map with a central point like Superpowered Scoundrels.

Extraction: Research Station Attacked!
Secure: Superpowered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate
Threat: 20
My team: Kingpin, Mysterio, Omega Red, Shadowland Daredevil, Ulik
My cards: Advanced R&D, All According To Plan, Brace For Impact, The Grand Illusion, Shadow Organisation
Dave’s team: Daredevil, Hulk, Luke Cage, Taskmaster, Wolverine
Dave’s cards: Brace For Impact, Heroes For Hire, Patch Up, Smash, Brace For Impact

Round 1: I nominate Kingpin as my leader. With no Doctor Strange facing me here I can afford to be a bit less cautious in my movement as I’m unlikely to get pulled across the board and murdered. As with the first game I want to try to hold the centre and two nearer objectives which controlling the Researcher. Omega Red plays Advanced R&D to give Ulik a power, then moves the near right objective. Both of our Daredevils move onto our respective near left points; his also tickles Omega Red while mine sends his Ninjas to the centre. Taskmaster goes to my left and throws a shield at my Ninjas. Mysterio commits to the middle and Hulk comes over to push him away. Ulik joins the scrum in the centre and pushes Hulk back. Wolverine then comes into the middle while Kingpin and Luke Cage both go left. The score is 5 – 2 to me.

Round 2: I feel confident on the back and central points to ideally I want to try to pin Dave’s team back a bit here; I also move the Researcher toward my own back left point. I send Daredevil and the Ninjas over to attack Taskmaster; Cage takes one swing and anyway I don’t really do anything substantial. Cage then drops Daredevil in two swings despite all his cool defensive tech and I’m feeling a bit more fragile. Omega Red pulls in his Daredevil, swings twice for no damage and gets countered twice for two damage each through his armour. Good work Arkady. Hulk slaps Ulik around a bit and I Brace the throw into Mysterio; I’m glad that Hulk has gone so early as I have a bit less displacement to worry about for the rest of my turn. Ulik lays into Wolverine and draws out X-Ceptional Healing and Mysterio moves to the Researcher and uses Hypnosis Gas to move Wolverine away. Daredevil doesn’t even bother to deal with Omega Red, and instead comes in for Mysterio but he’s able to move away with Tricks and Traps; instead he dazes Ulik. Kingpin fails to hurt Daredevil and I take yet more damage from Man Without Fear, eventually I settle for just throwing the irritating lawyer away. Taskmaster comes into the fray. The score goes up to 9 – 3.

Round 3: Attrition is starting to get away from me a bit here but I think that I still have enough in the tank to score this out before I run out of wounds if I’m a bit careful about how to attack. I mainly want to be focussing on displacement over raw damage. Mysterio starts by paying for The Grand Illusion which should make my life a bit easier this turn. Sadly it doesn’t help Ulik who totally whiffs on Hulk, although he does at least push him away. Hulk hurts both Ulik and Kingpin before throwing Mysterio away. My Daredevil attacks Luke Cage to bring in his Ninjas then pays for his area spender which dazes the Cage after he taunted one attack away from Taskmaster. His Daredevil dazes Omega Red and moves toward the centre; annoyingly Mysterio rolls zero successes on Tricks and Traps when Daredevil has only one wound remaining. Mysterio leaves Wolverine on one wound (on brand as usual!) but does move both him and Hulk away. Wolverine charges back across and hurts my Daredevil. Kingpin unleashes Hail To The King on Taskmaster for disappointingly little damage and then insult is added to injury and Kingpin is dazed by a random shield throw. The score goes to 10 – 4 to me.

Round 4: I need to get more scoring done than that! My focus now needs to be on the Researcher as it’s the one that might actually score me enough to get over the line. Daredevil and the Ninjas hurt Luke Cage (who takes a hit for Wolverine in the process) and daze Taskmaster with Demon’s Devastation. Wolverine puts some tasty damage into Kingpin; Mysterio moves the mutant away but can’t do anything to Hulk this time. Daredevil misses Mysterio and heads back to contest the back right point. Ulik goes for Hulk but only gets a single push to lead Hulk still in danger range. Luke Cage uses Sweet Christmas on Ulik, gets the wild throw and I then roll zero blocks from 5 dice on Mysterio to take exactly the right amount of damage to daze him too. Omega Red uses Ensnare to move Luke Cage into range and Daredevil off the point; his awful dice continue and he fails to do the single remaining wound to Luke Cage on either attack. Hulk then KOs both Ulik and Daredevil and Kingpin throws Luke Cage to finally KO him. The score goes to 14 – 4, but it looks like I forgot the photo in all the excitement.

Round 5: I think that I can get over the line here as only Daredevil is on the right side of the board. It seems unlikely that Dave can catch my points here so I need to keep everyone clear of Omega Red in case he needs to spend round 6 running away. I play All According To Plan and Omega Red uses Death Factor to finally daze Daredevil without having to roll any dice. Hulk leaps to the middle and Mysterio uses Tricks and Traps to move away; Kingpin survives the Hulk attack and runs away. Taskmaster comes to the middle and Mysterio finishes him off, then Wolverine makes short work of Mysterio. We finish up at 16 – 7.

Wow, that was a tight game despite the score line. Dave played well and I think that he had the right idea with prioritising attrition. The contrast between our two Daredevils was stark – mine hardly rolled a single block all game while it took me 5 turns to apply 5 damage to his. Omega Red was a bit unfortunate with his dice in round 2, effectively committing suicide-by-Daredevil without doing even a single point of damage in return. I probably would have had better value from Rhino but at least Ensnare and Death Factor did have an impact in the score. Overall I was very glad to stagger over the line by the end of that one. Well played Dave! It had looked possible that I’d end up with a fourth Defenders player in game 4 but sadly Stu lost his round 3 game so I was definitely going to get a bit of a difference for the last match.

Game 4: Franky playing Avengers

The final game is, finally, not into a Defenders roster – although Franky does have a few Defenders in there just to keep us on theme. I’m really looking forward to playing Franky again as he’s got so much better lately than when I first met him; in fact he hadn’t lost a tournament game for three events in a row so it would be up to me to end his reign of terror! He wins Priority and chooses his Extractions and I again go for the lower threat value as I’m quite comfortable at 16. I’m a bit concerned about this one as Franky definitely has a safe central grab and he can then just turtle up in a corner and force me to do all the running – I lost a similar game to Sam in the summer team event (here). Still, I’m happy with team for Cosmic Invasion so I go for it. I’m expecting Kingpin to get isolated so I’ll have to get a lot of pushing work done from Ulik.

Extraction: The Montesi Formula Found
Secure: Cosmic Invasion! Black Order Descends On Earth
Threat: 16
My team: Kingpin, Black Cat, Rhino, Ulik
My cards: Advanced R&D, All According To Plan, Brace For Impact, Mission Objective, This Is A Robbery
Franky’s team: Captain America (Steve Rogers), Captain America (Sam Wilson), Hulk, Iron Man
Franky’s cards: Avengers Assemble, Brace For Impact, Helios Laser Bombardment, Patch Up, Recalibration Matrix

Round 1: Franky confirms Steve Rogers as his leader; I’ll refer to the two captains as Captain Sam and Captain Steve for ease of reading. Rhino gets power from the Cosmic Vault so there is now a bit of extra jank available. I’m assuming that Hulk will take the central extract with Hulk but I have some extra options now. I will try to steal that middle Book back with This Is A Robbery and get a lead on the Secures, then spend the rest of the game running away from Hulk. Hulk does indeed take the central Book and then retreat to his home Secure. Kingpin gives Ulik a power with Advanced R&D before waddling to the left Vault where I suspect he’ll remain for the rest of the game. Captain Sam uses Charge and throws a couple of shields into Kingpin and Black Cat just picks up my home book and sits on my Vault. Captain Steve picks up the last book and sits on his home objective too. Rhino advances, Stampedes (he might have been in range to attack Hulk if I’d used Stampede first, I must remember that) then attacks Captain Steve. He does manage to get 2 power which is good (but not as good as 3) so he plays This Is A Robbery and throws Hulk away. Iron Man then has to come over to pick up the fallen Book so Ulik decides not to bother with the right Secure and instead slaps Iron Man around a bit. The score is 4 – 2 to me.

Round 2: Black Cat gets moved by the Vault. I want to deal with Captain Steve as he’s somewhat vulnerable now, and otherwise keep looking after my Secures. Hulk leaves Rhino on one wound which is quite fortunate, however the luck goes the other way when Rhino gives Captain Steve all he’s got – which turns out to be almost nothing. Iron Man puts some damage into Black Cat as the Vault has pushed her into range; she runs away before Same can get her. Captain Steve finishes Rhino and gets Hulk to use Patch Up on him. Ulik totally bounces off Captain Steve and fails to move him; looking back I’m not sure why I didn’t just attack Iron Man. Captain Sam moves to the middle. We move to 7 – 4 to me, but it seems that I forgot the picture.

Round 3: No one gets moved by the Vaults this time. I play All According to Plan and I need to make this a good one. I’m going to get stuck into Iron Man with Rhino which is quite likely to do enough to finish him off and give me that Book. That does indeed work exactly as I had hoped. Captain Sam comes over to contest Black Cat’s Secure but can’t finish her off. Captain Steve hurts Ulik who hits him back to push him out of Bodyguard range then lets rip with Shatter Mountains Shatter Bones on Hulk. Franky plays a timely Recalibration Matrix to make me re-roll a successful Activated trigger – good play Franky! I think that might have been the game if I could have Activated Hulk there. Instead Hulk fights back and Staggers Ulik. The score moves to a more comfortable 11 – 5 to me.

Round 4: The Vaults do nothing again (actually I think that we might have just plain forgotten them this round until part way though an activation). I’m in full ‘run away!’ mode now. Captain Sam dazes Black Cat and collects her Book; Rhino comes over to daze him but of course can’t pick up a second one. Iron Man hurts Rhino and moves to score the left point which will effectively keep him out of the game like Kingpin. Ulik bounces off Captain Steve again and gets dazed in return. Hulk crosses the board and throws Rhino off the Secure and we go to 13 – 9 to me.

Round 5. Iron Man gets moved rather pointlessly by the Vault. I need to score this out this round as I’m going to be so far behind on attrition that I’ll never last round 6. If I can drop Sam I might be in with a chance, otherwise it’ll come down to whether Ulik can make amends for his rather anaemic performance with Captain Steve over on the far side of the board. Rhino frustratingly leaves Captain Sam on one wound so Sam picks up that fallen book and runs away. Ulik dazes Captain Steve finally, collecting his book in the process Hulk swithers between attacking Black Cat or Rhino first and eventually decides to start out with a throw. Black Cat rather unhelpfully rolls zero blocks on her dodge and is KOed by a flying Rhino. Needless to say the follow-up attacks make short work of Rhino. Iron Man would need to push Ulik off that far point to keep us going into another round and fortunately he doesn’t have the range to make the attack. We finish up at 16 – 13 in my favour.

It’s always a pleasure to play with Franky and this was no exception. I found this game (and the previous one) quite stressful as these Kingpin games always seem to end with me getting crushed on attrition and hoping to eke out the remaining couple of points to win before I run out of pieces. Franky played quite well and I made quite a few unforced errors – especially sending Ulik after Captain Steve in round 2 instead of Iron Man, who would have been a much more manageable target.

So in the end I’m the only undefeated player (though I should note that Alasdair could have been undefeated too but had to leave during the last round to go to work) so I get to be top of the table. It was fun event, and I enjoyed the slight difference in format with every roster having to be single-affiliation. Scott and Akos both picked up a nice win each so we were all pleased on the journey home. Thanks to Gordon, Derek, Dave and Franky for four fun games of Marvel Crisis Protocol, and of course thanks to Allan for running the whole event.

Marvel Crisis Protocol tournament report: Secret Invasion Sunday 14Aug2023

It’s been a couple of months since I’ve been free to play competitive Marvel Crisis Protocol, so it was a great pleasure for Gareth, Scott and I to take the train through to Common Ground Games in Stirling to take part in Secret Invasion Sunday. This was only a three round event to allow for a slightly later start – public transport into Stirling appears to need a long lie on Sundays – but otherwise was expected to be the usual fun time. Our journey over was a bit more stressful than I’d hoped due to a very late running bus but TO Allan was kindly able to delay the start of round one until we had arrived.

I was back to playing X-Men after a bit of a hiatus. The basic plan is to zip around the board and not fight too much, instead focussing on picking up Extracts and running away with them, while only keeping on the Secures that I could safely hold. Between the ‘X-Men hop’ from Storm’s leadership and the Tactics card To Me My X-Men I can pick up basically any Extract on the board and get back to (relative) safety so the goal is to always finish round one with a lead. The hard part, of course, is keeping that lead when the punches start flying later on. I spent a lot of time going over options for four-threat characters, eventually ending up with Logan, Psylocke and Rogue from the affiliated options (not a particularly hard choice) and Doctor Voodoo as a splash. I’ve tried Rhino in that spot as he also has a cool way of stealing tokens and his bigger base makes the X-Men hop a bit better, but went with Doctor Voodoo in the end partly because I felt he fitted a bit better but also because he’s not relying on a Tactics card to do his trick. Captain America (Sam Wilson) has great mobility and in particular his long move enables some round 1 shenanigans; I previously used Mystique in this spot but Deception moving to the Restricted list tempted me to try another option. Hulk gives me a bit of brawling potential if I want to fight anyone, plus his mobility is a great fit for X-Men, and finally I just plain like Pyro. That said I find that Pyro often wants to be sitting in the same spot as Storm (ie far away from the nasty bad people who beat him up easily) so it’s not always easy to fit him into the team. The Crisis cards are widely spaced (and ideally pay-to-flip) Secures and fast scoring low(ish) threat Extractions – basically I want the other team to have to spend their time running around after me, and then to win before they catch me and punch all my weedy mutants.

Characters: (10)
—Storm (Ororo Munroe) Threat: 3
Beast (Henry McCoy) Threat: 3
Domino (Neena Thurman) Threat: 3
—Logan, The Wolverine (James Logan Howlett) Threat: 4
Hulk (Bruce Banner) Threat: 6
—Captain America (Sam Wilson) Threat: 3
Psylocke (Elizabeth Braddock) Threat: 4
Doctor Voodoo (Jericho Drumm) Threat: 4
Rogue (Anna Marie LeBeau) Threat: 4
Pyro (St. John Allerdyce) Threat: 3

Tactics: (10)
First Class
To Me My X-Men
X-Ceptional Healing
Mission Objective
Sacrifice
Escort to Safety
Advanced R&D
Crimson Dawn
Bird of Prey
Pyrotechnics

Secure Crisis: (3)
Mutant Madman Turns City Center Into Lethal Amusement Park (Threat: 18)
Portals Overrun City With Spider-People! (Threat: 18)
Infinity Formula Goes Missing! (Threat: 17)

Extract Crisis: (3)
Paranoia Pummels Populace! (Threat: 16)
Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan (Threat: 17)
Struggle for the Cube Continues (Threat: 17)

Game 1: Ross playing Black Order

The first game is into Ross playing Black Order. I’m glad for him on a personal level as I think that he’s much more skilled as an opponent with fighty attrition teams like this than he is with the movement-based objective teams which he’s been playing over the last few events. He wins priority and, not surprisingly, picks his Secures. I choose the lower threat, as although this means that I’ll almost certainly face the ‘classic’ 15 threat Black Order list it does at least mean that I probably don’t have to worry about Cosmic Ghost Rider (who is overtuned to hilarious extent, and unbalances the game such that I wonder if he was designed by one of GW’s team and snuck in here); I’m quite surprised by the Infinity Gem load out on Thanos. I decide to go wide and try to collect as many of the Spider-Infected as possible and then hunker down and force Ross to spread his team out or risk me sneaking to his far point; Captain America will definitely get this duty if possible.

Extraction: Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan
Secure: Gamma Wave Sweeps Across Midwest
Threat: 15
My team: Storm, Beast, Domino, Captain America (Sam Wilson), Pyro
My cards: Advanced R&D, Bird Of Prey, First Class, Pyrotechnics, To Me My X-Men
Ross’s team: Thanos (Mind and Power stones), Corvus Glaive (Reality stone), Proxima Midnight [edit: actually this is a 16 threat team – both Ross and I made the same mistake that the original 15 threat version included only one Infinity Stone on Thanos. Oops!]
Ross’s cards: Advanced R&D, Execute, Eyes On The Prize, Mothership, One-Two Punch

Round 1: I don’t think that Ross has any great safe extracts plays on the centreline unless he wants to go first with Thanos (which is also OK for me) so I set up to either steal in the centre or the rear right depending on what gets left alone. I lead with First Class, of course. To my great surprise Thanos does indeed go first but only picks up the left rear Spider-Infected and then stands on the back point. He plays Advanced R&D to power up the other two… not that they really need it either! Storm plays To Me My X-Men to bring Beast in front of Captain America and the latter uses the X-Men jump for even more distance and then rushes to collect the rear left Spider-Infected and zoom back to my side of the board. Ross passes so Storm picks up my left Spider-Infected and moves to my home Secure. Proxima goes for Sam but can’t make damage stick. Beast takes my near right Spider-Infected and Corvus slogs into the middle to collect the final one. Pyro gives Corvus Incinerate before applying Firewall to keep him busy but Domino bounces uselessly off him anyway. The score is 4 – 4.

Round 2: Thanos is helpfully hiding far away and I’m going to get last activation so I figure he can either stay at the back or I’ll move in and take that point. I’m likely to get an absolute blending off Corvus and Proxima first so whoever survives will have the job to stack conditions on them, displace them or relieve them of their Spider-Infected depending on how much damage is done. Proxima starts us off by hurting Pyro and chain activates Corvus who casually one-shots Storm. Pyro uses his beam on both Corvus and Proxima (taking a couple of damage from Martial Prowess in the process), uses Pyrotechnics to push them away and collect Corvus’s Spider-Infected, moves back to (relative) safety and then caps off an excellent activation by using Advanced R&D to give his remaining power to Captain America. Good work Pyro, good work. Thanos comes into the centre and Mind Stones Domino into range for a surprisingly timid beating before she collects Storm’s fallen Spider-Infected and runs away from the scary man. Captain America finishes off Corvus, takes yet more damage from Proxima’s Martial Prowess and finally moves to the back point. The score goes to 11 – 6 in my favour.

Round 3: Once again I’ll have to weather the storm of the Corvus and Proxima double activation so my game plan for this round is rather going to be determined by what I have left at that point. Having Captain America at the back point will hopefully make Thanos focus on that and let whatever I have left keep working on the husband and wife duo. Proxima goes into Storm and leaves her on a single point of health before playing Mothership to bring Corvus over and chain activating him. He plays all of his cool tricks and absolutely blends Beast (but crucially doesn’t trigger Flurry) before finishing Storm and earning a VP from Thanos’s leadership. Pyro beams the pair of them but annoyingly Proxima survives by rolling four blocks off her two defence dice. Thanos strolls back toward Captain America and easily dazes him, though at least he can’t also collect the Spider-Infected. Domino KOs Corvus and rather boldly moves into the centre; the score goes to 15 – 9 to me.

Round 4: I’m feeling pretty good about this now and my team is nicely dispersed and dropping Corvus really blunts Ross’s offensive options. My plan is just to play defensively and make sure that I can get over the line this round which will either be Domino or Captain America running away with a Spider-Infected in tow. Ross leads with Proxima Midnight who finally dazes Pyro and hurts Beast before picking up the token dropped by the former. Domino runs for my home point and Thanos KOs Captain America. Beast picks up a Spider-Infected that’s just lying on the ground and dazes Proxima out of spite. We finish up at 19 – 12.

That was a very satisfying game and Ross is always a fun chap to play against. From my point of view everything went quite as expected, in as much I didn’t really attack a great deal and mostly spent the game adding damage tokens to my heroes while they ran around trying to keep ahead on scenario. Overall I think Ross can learn more about how to play Thanos as he spent too many turns sitting on points and not enough doing Cosmic Portal and Death’s Decree shenanigans to either displace or brutalise my team.

Game 2: Liam playing Guardians of the Galaxy

So now I get the most difficult possible match-up in the form of (in my opinion) the best player in Scotland – Liam. I get some advantage here because I win priority and so I get to go with my main game plan of running around with pay-to-flips which should hurt Liam’s action economy somewhat. He picks the slightly higher threat value. I decide that there isn’t much I can do about his choices as I’m fully expecting one or both of Cosmic Ghost Rider and Thanos to murder all of my heroes so I just go for full ‘run around and hope for the best’ options. Depending on who picks up the Extractions I might be able to use Doctor Voodoo to possess them, but obviously picking up the 8 power needed to do this on Thanos is a bit of an ask.

Extraction: Deadly Legacy Virus Cured?
Secure: Portals Overrun City With Spider-People
Threat: 19
My team: Storm, Beast, Domino, Doctor Voodoo, Hulk
My cards: Escort To Safety, First Class, Mission Objective, Sacrifice, To Me My X-Men
Liam’s team: Star-Lord, Cosmic Ghost Rider, Rocket Raccoon, Thanos (Reality and Space stones)
Liam’s cards: Escort To Safety, Fall Back, Galaxy’s Greatest, Lovable Misfits, Recalibration Matrix

Round 1: As I have Priority my hope is that I can pick up two of the Legacy Virus tokens and get them far enough back to be safe, and otherwise leverage First Class to flip the Spider Portals. Cosmic Ghost Rider gets 3 extra power and the Winging It tokens go to him, Rocket and Thanos. I play First Class and Beast takes the central Extract token before Storm pulls him back into my lines with To Me My X-Men. Rocket and Storm both just move up cautiously and flip our respective home points. Thanos comes across, pulls in Beast and hits him; I get lucky on the defence roll and not a lot goes through. Hulk takes the right points before Cosmic Ghost Rider teleports into the middle of the board and vaporises Beast. Domino picks up the leftmost Extraction then not only fails to flip the left Portal but also gets teleported by it. Voodoo makes up for it, though I’d rather have had the power on him! We end the round at 5 – 1 to me.

Round 2: Cosmic Ghost Rider gets 4 extra power this time and the Winging It tokens go to him, Star Lord and Thanos. It seems unlikely that the token remains on the ground for Liam’s activation but if it does then I’m definitely picking it up and running away with it! Otherwise I’ll try to mess with Rocket and the back Portal and try to gain some power with Doctor Voodoo so I can mess with Liam’s ability to play the points game. Thanos picks up the fallen token and comes over to daze Domino and pick up her token too. Beast pushes Thanos (but does no damage) with his spender and moves to do the attack on Rocket, predictably leaving him on 1 wound. Beast does at least manage to steal that rear point. Rocket hurts Beast and fails to reflip the Portal. Voodoo attacks Thanos but fails to do even a single point of damage then Cosmic Ghost Rider deletes Beast and leaves Doctor Voodoo on a single wound. Star-Lord reflips the back point so Hulk comes over there, fails to hurt him but does at least push him off the point and reflips it to me. The score is now 10 – 3 to me.

Round 3: Cosmic Ghost Rider gains only a single extra power this time but keeps his Psychosis token, the Winging It tokens go to him, Star Lord and Thanos again. I’m expecting to lose Voodoo this time before I activate him so I think that I need to pivot away from my left side and keep working on the Secure objectives. Cosmic Ghost Rider has no difficulty dazing Doctor Voodoo then unleashes his spender on Domino. I roll heroic defence dice and Liam’s attack roll is truly awful, making this literally the only time I’ve ever seen that attack fail to finish its target; it merely leaves Domino on one wound remaining. I have her pivot to the rear point and Storm moves to the right side. Rocket and Star-Lord both make up for this failure by piling 14 damage onto Hulk between them, so instead of staying and swatting them I feel that I have to retreat to the right point with him. Finally Thanos flips the left and far Portals and we go to 13 – 7 to me.

Round 4: The Winging It tokens are given to the same characters as last turn and Cosmic Ghost Rider generates another four extra power to keep in Psychosis. Hulk is well within killing range so I need to get him to safety and then flip at least two of the Portals. I lead with Hulk fleeing before anyone can get to him, so Cosmic Ghost Rider shows me the error of his ways, and also comes back to normal expectations, by one-shotting Doctor Voodoo with the spender attack. Domino takes back my home Portal then comes to the left Portal and flips it too but Star-Lord is able to flip it back. Storm moves to the back point and flips that one before Rocket KOs Domino and Thanos one-shots her, flips it back, moves all the way across the board and also flips his home point again. The score is now 15 – 12 to me.

Round 5: Once again the same set of characters get Winging It tokens and Cosmic Ghost Rider gains just one extra power and finally loses his Psychosis token. I think I’ve run out of steam here and as I have almost nothing left there aren’t many options for me. Storm fails to hurt Rocket but does flip that home point. Star-Lord and Rocket both improbably blank out flipping Liam’s home Portal and Cosmic Ghost Rider does get the right one. I have to send Hulk over in a desperate attempt to retake my home point but of course Thanos has no difficulty in KOing him and taking the last Extract to finish the game at 21 – 16 in Liam’s favour. In retrospect I’m not sure why I didn’t send Hulk to the right point as that might have kept me in the game… though maybe I’d had enough of the pain by that point!

So close! I love to play against Liam, he’s just such a strong and thoughtful player while also being a really chill and pleasant chap to game with. I made a few mistakes here; I probably should have prioritised attacking with Doctor Voodoo in round 4 as I could possibly have dazed Cosmic Ghost Rider with some decent rolls on Staff of Legba. Storm could have made a move to Liam’s home Portal in round 3 instead of going to the left, though in fairness I hadn’t seen the massive amount of damage that Rocket and Star-Lord were about to put into Hulk at that point. It’s probably not clear from the way I’ve written about this (as I try to make the whole thing readable) but one of Liam’s great skills is using Thanos and Cosmic Ghost Rider’s displacement to stop me using the X-Men hop, Mission Objective and other things that rely on my characters being within range of each other. One day I’ll get a win against Liam, but in the meantime I’ll have to take comfort in making him work for his victory.

Game 3: Steve playing X-Men

My final game is going to be an X-Men mirror match. This is interesting in the sense that we have the same tools so the result should come down to either the choices we make during the game or possibly egregious dice. I win priority and pick my Secure; our Crisis cards are actually identical but they’re obviously very similar and this choice isn’t likely to be very impactful. Steve goes for the slightly higher threat value of 18. For my splash characters I decide that I want Captain America as his long move will be very useful moving between the Secure objectives and Hulk because I think that this is a match-up where being able to just splat someone into the ground will be extremely valuable. When I see Steve’s team I’m quite glad I went that route because my other favoured option looked a lot like his and it would have been a bit annoying to just have such similar teams.

Extraction: Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan
Secure: Mutant Madman Turns City Centre Into Lethal Amusement Park
Threat: 18
My team: Storm, Beast, Domino, Captain America (Sam Wilson), Hulk
My cards: Advanced R&D, Bird Of Prey, First Class, Mission Objective, To Me My X-Men
Steve’s team: Storm, Beast, Logan The Wolverine, Rogue, Doctor Voodoo
Steve’s cards: Fall Back, First Class, Gotta Get Some Air, To Me My X-Men, X-Ceptional Healing

Round 1: Fortunately I have priority so my basic plan here is just to take the central objective and then ride out my one-point-per-turn advantage for the rest of the game – let’s see how that works out. We both play First Class. My Beast takes the central Spider-Infected, plays Advanced R&D to give his power to Captain America then gets pulled to relative safety by Storm playing To Me My X-Men. Steve’s Storm picks up the far right Spider-Infected and uses her own To Me My X-Men to move Logan a bit closer. Hulk takes both objectives on the left and positions to give a perfect X-Men hop for Captain America. Steve’s Beast hops over Rogue and Logan uses the opportunity to advance further toward me with Gotta Get Some Air, Beast finishes his activation tidying up the objectives on the back left. Domino takes my near right objectives (but note that I’m an idiot and initially picked up the Secure token; once we noticed and fixed it, Steve very kindly let me fix a minor positional error with Storm that resulted from this) and Doctor Voodoo finishes up on the far right. My Storm zaps Doctor Voodoo but rolls no successes. Rogue comes forward to set up for next round and Captain America hops over Hulk and throws his shield at her twice (I had the power to Charge but the board state made it rather unnecessary), rolling a total of zero successes. I guess it’s going to be one of those games! Finally Logan shows that it’s the same on both sides of the table as he bounces ineffectually off Beast. Luckily for me he wasn’t able to make two attacks as the two out-of-activation moves didn’t quite get in range for a double tap. The turn wraps up at 5 – 4 to me.

Round 2: I think that I can overwhelm Steve on the left with my Avengers but I’m in no hurry there as I don’t think that I’m likely to lose those characters before they activate. On the right I just need to keep hold of my back right point and not offer up anything too easy for Steve. Domino starts firing into Doctor Voodoo but fails to do damage and also misses the Rapid Fire trigger on both actions. Logan is clearly on the same page as he does almost nothing to Beast. My Beast pushes Doctor Voodoo off the point, throws Storm and then flips the Objective over there. Rogue just walks over to Hulk and drains some of his power before moving back to the same spot. I was surprised that she didn’t charge and make attacks but I guess our dice have been telling us so far not to bother with that! Captain America does the same, failing again to hurt Rogue; he does at least set up a nice X-Men hop for Hulk. However that doesn’t help as Beast throws him away. Hulk has to walk over like a peasant then all of the dice luck rubber-bands back into place and the big green chap squashes the slightly-less-big blue chap with a single swing before throwing Rogue into the backfield. Doctor Voodoo sticks Brother Daniel on Beast and hurts him a little. However Steve makes an error here and drops the Spider-Infected near Storm, who is already holding one. He does at least manage to retake that point. My Storm comes right across and reflips it right back and stick Shock on Doctor Voodoo. His Storm attacks mine for not much effect (it turned out later that Steve had thought that he’d dazed Beast somewhere, otherwise he probably would have attacked Beast) and then fails to flip that point. The score goes to 11 – 6 in my favour.

Round 3: I think that it should be possible to hang onto 5 points here and end the game so that’s my plan. On the left I think that attrition is probably an option as Hulk is not going to get dropped this turn barring some extraordinary dice; on the right I think that I’m happy with Logan being trapped out on his own and letting Beast and Storm keep the fight up in that corner of the board. My Beast gets us started rather inauspiciously by failing to hurt Doctor Voodoo with his spender; he does at least push him away. Logan continues his poor run, leaving Domino on a single wound. Captain America and Doctor Voodoo both pick up fallen Spider-Infected and run for the board edges. Steve’s Beast flips both of the left Secures and Rogue tickles Hulk; Hulk pushes them around and reflips on of the points back to me. Domino runs to body block Steve’s Storm from getting to the right point and my Storm throws his away. In the end Steve’s Storm need to roll three from three successes to retake that Portal and can’t manage it so we finish up at 16 -11 to me.

Thanks to Steve for a very fun game. After the brutal first two rounds into Black Order and Guardians it was quite refreshing to play a game where the objectives were Plan A for both sides. I messed up some order of activation items especially on the left but ultimately the very poor attacking dice rolls on both sides meant that I wasn’t punished too much here. Steve also made a crucial mistake in round two after giving my Beast the Brother Daniel token and, while I wasn’t able to capitalise on directly, it threw him off his game and put both Doctor Voodoo and Storm out of position. I definitely hope to get another game in with Steve soon.

Once the scores are all in I’ve somehow ended up in 4th place, rather better than I felt likely. I guess normally there would be a fourth game to sort people out further; this ended up getting split by tie breakers. Overall I had a brilliant time and I’m already looking forward to the next event… and even my next games. Many thanks to Ross, Liam and Steve for gun games of MCP, and of course to Allan for running the whole thing. In particular I should shout out Allan’s great work building the community here. My first MCP events had 10 – 12 players, this time even for a three game event we had 22 and several more on a waiting list. Next time there is nominal cap of 20 players (though that might increase) and there is already a waiting list less then 24 hours after the date was announced.

Marvel Crisis Protocol team tournament report: Crisis in Caledonia 20May2023

Another month, another Marvel Crisis Protocol event! This was the long awaited teams event at Common Ground Games where we set up in teams of three. Our team, Underpowered Scoundrels Form Mediocre Syndicate (apologies to whoever came up with this first as I’m sure I saw it somewhere and then stole it) comprised of me, my long-time friend and gaming sparring partner Gareth and my son Scott. There were some restrictions in roster selection to avoid duplicates of characters and cards but with the number of options available and only needing 3 rosters this wasn’t a huge issue.

My roster is basically the same Criminal Syndicate roster I’ve been playing for a few months, but without Patch Up as Gareth wanted that. I put in Indomitable instead as my main game plan on Secures is to sit on the objectives like a bunch of potatoes and not get moved off them. Gareth played a slight variation on Web Warriors and Scott was using Weapon X with an option to flex into X-Force if he felt like it. Tales of Crisis did a fun podcast reviewing the rosters which you can find here. Our team did briefly chat about which match-up we’d like to get and avoid, but in the end the pairing process doesn’t really allow you to do anything more than just avoid one specific opponent with one of your rosters so it’s barely more than random.

Characters: (10)
—Kingpin (Wilson Fisk) Threat: 4
—Shadowland Daredevil (Matt Murdock) Threat: 4
Rhino (Aleksei Sytsevich) Threat: 4
Ulik (Ulik) Threat: 5
Black Cat (Felica Hardy) Threat: 3
Hood (Parker Robbins) Threat: 3
Bullseye (Benjamin Poindexter) Threat: 2
Black Widow (Natasha Romanoff) Threat: 2
Toad (Mortimer Toynbee) Threat: 2
Juggernaut (Cain Marko) Threat: 5

Tactics: (10)
All According To Plan
Shadow Organization
Brace for Impact
Indomitable
Do You Know Who I Am?
Hood’s Gang
This Is A Robbery
Mission Objective
Eyes on the Prize
Versatile Strategy

Secure Crisis: (3)
Cosmic Invasion! Black Order Descends on Earth (Threat: 16)
Super-Powered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate! (Threat: 20)
Riots Spark Over Extremis 3.0 (Threat: 17)

Extract Crisis: (3)
Deadly Legacy Virus Cured? (Threat: 19)
Struggle for the Cube Continues (Threat: 17)
Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan (Threat: 17)

Game 1: Ross playing X-Men

Our first round is against Brotherhood Without Manners and I get paired into Ross’s X-Men. I normally hate the X-Men vs Criminal Syndicate match-up as both sides really want to play on their own Secures and it feels like there is a big advantage in just winning the roll for priority. However in Ross’s case he’s not playing pay-to-flip options so that suits me just fine. Ross wins priority and chooses his Extractions, I choose the higher threat value as I wanted to include both Bullseye and Toad and it’s more awkward to do so at 18 threat. Normally I would be expecting some X-men trickery to take a 3 – 1 lead on the Hammers but I think that Ross is not likely to take that approach. Therefore my plan is basically to end the first round with 2 Hammers and sitting on at least three Secures, and then ride out the game from there.

Extraction: Fear Grips World As ‘Worthy’ Terrorise Cities
Secure: Superpowered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate
Threat: 19
My team: Kingpin, Bullseye, Black Cat, Rhino, Ulik, Toad
My cards: All According To Plan, Brace For Impact, Indomitable, Mission Objective, This Is A Robbery
Ross’s team: Storm, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Psylocke, Rogue
Ross’s cards: Children Of The Atom, First Class, Pardon Me Sugah, Patch Up, Psionic Constructs

Round 1: Ross plays First Class. Storm takes the left Hammer and Ulik takes the one on the right. Jean collects the rear Hammer and strolls over to the back left Secure, where honestly I’ll be quite happy if she stays all game. Toad pushes Storm further away from my left Secure and Cyclops takes a desultory shot at Ulik from the comfort of the rear right Secure. Rhino takes the final Hammer and ends up on the central point along with Rogue and Kingpin. Bullseye and Psylocke take short walks onto their nearest Secure points while Black Cat takes a rather over optimistic run across the board to sit next to Jean Grey. She might live through Jean’s attacks and then can run away with her Hammer. The score is 6 – 3 to me.

Round 2: Apart from possibly relieving Jean or Storm of a Hammer with either Rhino or Black Cat as required, my plan this turn is just to keep scoring the central and near Secures. Rogue punches Kingpin and he hits her back and throws her into Jean Grey. My hopes of Black Cat doing something cheeky into Jean Grey are dashed when the latter completely obliterates her! Sadly for Ross those are basically the last good dice he’ll get all game, as is demonstrated when Bullseye dazes Psylocke in one go. Cyclops again bounces off Ulik who leaps over and pushes the poor chap across the board to where Rhino can use him as a jumping off point en route to Jean. Storm tickles Toad who pushes her away again. Finally Rhino dazes Cyclops, attacks Jean Grey and then punts her away with This Is A Robbery so he can collect her Hammer. The score is 14 – 4 now.

Round 3: I think it’s basically impossible for Ross to overhaul me from here, but I suppose I ought to make it certain. I play All According To Plan and Rhino leaps over to Storm (dazing her to add insult) and legs it for the corner with her Hammer added to his collection. With his 3 points out of Ross’s reach it’s definitely over now. Rogue hurts Black Cat but Jean somehow fails to finish her off, while on the other side of the board Ulik KOs Cyclops. Not surprisingly, Ross has had enough of his dice and we agree to call it there with a 22 – 5 result.

Thanks to Ross for playing but unfortunately the dice made it not even a game. His team was definitely picked with fun In mind rather than being really competitive so between that and the gap in our experience it would perhaps have been a bit of an uphill struggle for him anyway; I flatter myself that I could have beaten Ross here even without the stupid dice. Gareth also got the win against Kai while Scott, who we’d ‘thrown under the bus’ was overcome by Stu. So as a team we take the win by 2 – 1.

Game 2: Sam playing Guardians of the Galaxy

Next up is my pick for expected winners, Warlords of the Nine Realms and I get paired into Sam’s Guardians. This is where the match-up process works for us as I don’t particularly want to play into Martin’s X-Men so we take advantage of the system to make sure to avoid that; I actually think that the reverse is probably true too, so Martin may have been pleased to dodge me. Sam wins priority and chooses his Extractions, I choose the lower threat value this time as Black Cat fits more neatly at 16 than 17. For once I don’t take All According To Plan as I’m expecting to be taller than Sam’s team; instead I pick Shadow Organisation to reduce the impact of some of the Guardians’ long range attacks for a round. Losing priority is a bit annoying in this match up as I’m sure that Sam will do the Eyes On The Prize safe extract with Beta Ray Bill, while if I have priority I would get to do that with Ulik and then sit on my points while making Sam do all the running. As it is I’ll have to cross the board and try to relieve him of at least one Book.

Extraction: The Montesi Formula Found
Secure: Cosmic Invasion! Black Order Descends On Earth
Threat: 16
My team: Kingpin, Black Cat, Rhino, Ulik
My cards: Brace For Impact, Indomitable, Mission Objective, Shadow Organisation, This Is A Robbery
Sam’s team: Star Lord, Agent Venom, Beta Ray Bill, Groot, Rocket Raccoon
Sam’s cards: Crew Of The Milano, Eyes On The Prize, Foreign Assignment, Lovable Misfits, Mission Objective

Round 1: I think that I’ll need to hang Rhino out in the middle here at the end of the turn as he’ll be needed to take one of Sam’s Books. Agent Venom, Groot and Rocket get Winging It tokens. Predictably Bill gets us underway by playing Eyes On The Prize, collecting the central Book and retreating to safety. Ulik moves over to the right. Star Lord and Black Cat pick up the remaining Books and sit on the rear points. Groot and Rocket go on the left with Kingpin while Rhino ends up mid-board, kind of hanging out in the middle of nowhere. Venom puts Incinerate on him and I use Aggressive to get to the Portal on the far side of the board. The score is 3 – 3.

Round 2: I think that Sam might have left me a small opening here on the left as Rocket is vulnerable to Kingpin if I can throw Groot away. If I can make that work I might possibly just retreat with Rhino and take a small but safe lead on the Secures. Beta Ray Bill, Groot and Rocket get Winging It tokens. Kingpin throws Groot down the board but then fails to hurt Rocket at all; dazing him (which I think is quite likely) really changes this game. I make a bit of a mistake and push him clear of the building so he has a shot at Rhino; I should actually have sent him into the building so he has no choice but to shoot Kingpin. Groot moves back to the point. Rhino can’t play This Is A Robbery as Mission Objective turns it off, so he Stampedes and eventually dazes Star Lord with a throw and is able to collect his book. Credit to Sam here too – I initially misplaced Rhino after one of his attacks and Sam kindly let me reposition him to a less silly place. Sam plays Lovable Misfits which ends up not doing much apart from putting Stun on Kingpin (which admittedly is quite annoying) and then plays Crew Of The Milano to remove Stun from his team. Rocket shoots Rhino and moves back to the Secure with Groot. I move Black Cat over to the left to score that point; I’m not sure if that was the right move or not; I figure that at least it got her to be relevant. Bill dazes Rhino then Ulik leaps over and achieves nothing whatsoever – I was hoping to generate power to move to pick up that fallen Book. Venom tickles Ulik right back then collects the Book. The score is 6 – 5 to me.

Round 3: Rhino is powered right up so I should expect to him to KO Star Lord here and then throw Bill away with This Is A Robbery once there is no-one left to Mission Objective it to. On the left, I can probably take my time with Kingpin as the same move is online again and it’s not likely that Rocket or Groot can take him out in one go; in addition they both want to go after him to recover from any displacement. Agent Venom, Beta Ray Bill and Star Lord get Winging It tokens. Rhino throws a size 3 at Star Lord, dropping a couple of wound off him, then Stampedes and attacks twice. Annoyingly my dice totally fail me here and I manage just two successes off both attacks which isn’t enough to finish off the legendary outlaw. He does at least use This Is A Robbery on Bill. That’s annoying, but even worse Star Lord rolls like a hero and dazes Ulik in one go. Kingpin throws Groot into Bill and dazes Rocket before Venom and Bill combine to KO Rhino. Black Cat moves into the fray and Groot gives up on Rocket and collects Rhino’s book. The score goes to 8 – 7 to me, but that turn has broken my effort and it’ll take an absolute miracle for me to come back from here.

Round 4: There’s not much that I can do here that will actually impact the game so I just make some spite attacks. Agent Venom, Beta Ray Bill and Groot get Winging It tokens. Ulik continues my dice from last turn by failing to do even a single point of damage to Bill, though he does at least finally polish off Star Lord by throwing something at him. Groot one-shots Black Cat. Agent Venom and Rocket just run for the various Secures to guarantee that I’ll never get them next turn; the score is now 13 – 9 to Sam.  I think that the below photo is from after we did the Cosmic Portal pushes.

Round 5: For the second turn in the game Ulik fails to even put a single point of damage into Bill. Bill leaves Black Cat on a single point of health and she relieves him of his Book and runs away. Kingpin moves to my near objective and throws Rocket just to deny that single point and we finish up at 17 – 12 in Sam’s favour.

I love playing MCP with Sam, he’s such a lovely fun opponent and he’s really good. I have to apologise to him here as I think that I was very moany about my dice, especially in round 3, and I’m sorry that he had to listen to my frustration. I will admit that this defeat hurts though; I really felt that I had a decent chance to take this game either through dealing with Rocket in round 2 or by KOing Star Lord in round 3 but my dice just said ‘no’. Star Lord was especially annoying as not only did he survive but he also put down Ulik with some really brutal dice rolls that made it impossible to recover from. In retrospect I wonder if I could have just played on the three nearer objectives and let Sam have his home one with the two Books and just seen out the game 4 – 3 each round. At least that way he’s the one who has to do all the running. I don’t want to take anything away from Sam though – he played a very tight game (especially denying me This Is A Robbery in round 2) and was a total gentleman throughout. In the other games Gareth had a nice win against the always-excellent Martin while Scott and Thomas played out surely the most brutal game ever seen – the only piece left was Thomas’s Malekith with a single remaining wound. Well done to the Warlords of the Nine Realms for beating us 2 -1 and also eventually winning the whole event.

Game 3: Stevie playing X-Force

For our final game we’re up against one of the Glasgow-based teams in Team Gambit. We’re both out of the running to win and our team composition is quite similar in that we both have a Criminal Syndicate, Web Warriors and X-people rosters (though the rosters themselves aren’t very alike) so we agree to forgo the proper pairing process and just set up games that aren’t tedious mirror matches. I end up last with Stevie’s X-Force. I win priority this time and pick my Secures as I don’t really hate any of Stevie’s Extraction cards and Stevie chooses the higher threat level so, as he put it, ‘we can have more toys.’ With no normal Extractions in play I feel that Rhino is less useful so I replace him with Daredevil as the Ninjas can be quite annoying on the Research Station. I haven’t put Black Widow in this list for ages so I gave her a run out just for a sense of completeness more than anything else, though being able to cheaply sit and score an edge point should be quite useful. With 3 of my cards being specific to Extractions I was running a bit short on options so for the first time in a long time I had to include Versatile Strategy.

Extraction: Research Station Attacked!
Secure: Riots Spark Over Extremis 3.0
Threat: 17
My team: Kingpin, Bullseye, Shadowland Daredevil, Ulik, Black Widow
My cards: All According To Plan, Brace For Impact, Indomitable, Shadow Organisation, Versatile Strategy
Stevie’s team: Cable, Domino, Psylocke, Magik, Toad
Stevie’s cards: Cat And Mouse, Disarm, Indomitable, Journey Through Limbo, One-Two Punch

Round 1: Thanks to the Ninjas I have an extra body to work with on the Researcher so my plan is to get out wide and score those points while leveraging Kingpin’s leadership so I don’t have to commit so hard to the centre. Psylocke starts us out with Cat and Mouse on the left; the photo above was taken after this was played. Bullseye goes on the back point, where he plans to sit and be annoying for the whole game. Domino goes in the middle and the Ninjas join her while Daredevil takes the right Secure. Toad drops the Ninjas then Black Widow goes to hide on the left point and Magik joins Domino in the centre, where Ulik and Kingpin will eventually score this for me. My dice let me know that their run from the previous game isn’t over as Psylocke one-shots Black Widow and Cable pumps a five damage into Ulik with a single shot. The score is 4 – 2 to me.

Round 2: I’m never really sure what to do with the Researcher now that the scoring for getting her to the far side is less generous so I just move it a bit back towards my team to make Stevie do the running. I need to clear out the centre here as unbelievably I’m way down on attrition and I haven’t even made a single attack yet. Ulik gives Domino an Activated token with Shatter Mountains, Shatter Bones (note that I think that I incorrectly played it that she got the Stagger token as well when it should be instead – sorry Stevie!) and dazes Magik. Psylocke KOs Black Widow with a single attack. Cable Body Slides into the action and throws terrain at Ulik which I have to use Brace For Impact on, then dazes him anyway and pays to Disarm Kingpin. Toad delivers a nasty hit to Kingpin who pushes Cable away and throws Domino into Toad. The score goes to 8 – 4 in my favour.

Round 3: I need to get try to displace some of Stevie’s team away from the Researcher so I can keep scoring it but it’s proving hard with the speed at which my team is being beaten up. I play All According To Plan to get back priority. Ulik leaps to the far point and dazes Toad but still can’t finish off Domino, leaving her on one. I will note at this point that I felt in good company as the next table over was Adam from Midlife Crisis Protocol whose catchphrase might as well be ‘so I’ll leave them on one.’ Magik does Journey Through Limbo to send Kingpin away from the action, she then Limbo steps forward and one-shots Bullseye. Daredevil leaves Cable on one and gets dazed in two attacks in return before Cable goes down to Bleed. Kingpin throws Domino and it’s blocked with Indomitable and the Psylocke drops him from full health. The score is now 8 – 7 to me.

Round 4: I’ll be lucky to end this game without getting tabled at this rate! I play Versatile Strategy as Kingpin’s leadership no longer provides my benefits. Kingpin uses Hail To The King to keep Psylocke out of my face and then KOs Magik, while over on the other side of the board Ulik survives a round of shooting from Domino before finally dazing her and giving Toad an Activated token (though with only 3 health on his injured side I was really looking to KO him and get him out of my hair). Psylocke comes back into the action and heals off the objective which means that, of course, Bullseye leaves her on one wound. Good play by Stevie there to see that opportunity. Daredevil bounces off Cable but at least the Ninjas do some work by scampering over to tie us up on the Researcher and buy me a bit of time. We go to 9 – 8 to me.

Round 5: Psylocke drops Bullseye in one and hurts Kingpin. Ulik KOs Domino in return but Toad, still on one wound, manages to dodge the only piece of terrain around to throw at him, a size 1 lamppost. Cable finishes Kingpin and Daredevil does another single point of damage to him while the Ninjas also fail to deal the one remaining point of damage to Psylocke. Toad flails about a bit with Ulik; this activation also marks the first time that Stevie hasn’t converted a miss into a success with the X-Force reroll. Everything is a tie so we stay at 9 – 8!

Round 6: I’m in the hands of the dice now – basically if the Ninjas can deal one damage to Psylocke then I probably win, otherwise I almost certainly lose. Fortunately they do finally manage a point of damage (on the fourth attempt, with a reroll each time) and Daredevil wakes up and KOs Cable at least. Toad has an absolutely insane turn against Ulik, leaving him on a single wound left before the return swing does the remaining one damage to finish the mutant. The final score is 14 – 9.

Many thanks again to Stevie for being a wonderful opponent and, just like Sam before him, having to put up with my moaning about awful dice. Perhaps my expectation of what ‘normal’ looks like for MCP dice needs some adjustment? As mentioned above I also think I cheated him in round 2 by having Ulik give both Stagger and Activated to Domino – sorry Stevie! Luckily there was nothing riding on this game, not only because we were both midtable anyway but also because Adam and Ben had defeated Gareth and Scott respectively. In general I think that my strategy was broadly OK at the start; I thought that Black Widow facing off against Psylocke would last a bit longer as she counts blanks against energy (admittedly only with two dice) and had a tolerable 3 dice against mystic attacks. Even just not going down to a single shot in round 1 would have score me one more point and Stevie one less! Possibly I would have been better off with Daredevil in the middle and Ulik on the right in round 1 as the latter can reposition much more effectively; Daredevil ended up with not a lot to do on round 2. I also wonder if I was relying too much on displacement from Kingpin and Ulik as none of my other characters brought much other than damage.

When the final scores come in we’re in 5th place out of the 8 teams which I think is perhaps a little better than I expected considering how the games all shook out. Overall I have much to ponder, probably mainly about my own attitude and how much fun I’m making the game for my friends. All three games the dice were a far bigger factor than I felt that they ought to be and it was just as unsatisfactory to have a total non-game against Ross due to my amazing rolls as it was to be on the wrong end of it against Sam and Stevie. Many thanks to Gareth and Scott for being fun team-mates, Ross, Sam and Stevie for fun games (and/or putting up with me!) and of course to Allan for doing all the work to run the whole thing. I did enjoy myself a lot, and I’ll be back… but not for a few months as I’m busy for at least the next two events. Criminal Syndicate are going back in the box for now and I’m going to play around with some of the factions I haven’t used in a while.