Sentinels of the Multiverse may be the best superhero board game, but its creator wants to do better

Greater Than Games founders Christopher Badell, Adam Rebottaro and Paul Bender first floated the idea of ​​a new version of their popular cooperative superhero comic card game Guardians of the Multiverse in a hotel room at PAX West in 2019. The 10th anniversary of the game that started their company in 2011 was approaching, and Rebottaro, who did all the card art, wanted a chance to show how his style had evolved. A reprint with new artwork seemed simple enough, but writer and designer Badell wanted to revise the flavor text to match the new images. He also wanted to make the rules clearer, and perhaps rebalance some characters, and improve the quality of the game’s tokens.

The team didn’t spend much time on the show floor, instead turning their hotel room window into a whiteboard. Their original game ended with the set in 2016 OblivAeona reality-hopping adventure similar to DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths. In retrospect, that was inevitable, Badell says Guardians of the Multiverse would follow the same trajectory as the comics it emulated through the reboot.

Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition was released in 2021 and improved almost every aspect of the core game. It was followed by 2023’s Smoke City Renegadesan update to the first expansion of the original game, Smoke cityand the project will continue in 2025 with the release of the world-hopping expansion Dispersion.

“The biggest mistake I made in 2010 when I started writing Guardians of the Multiverse didn’t have ten years of writing experience Sentinels of the Multiverse,” Badell jokes. “I would have written a much better game in the first place. That’s up to me.”

Guardians of the Multiverse first gained a strong following at a time when cooperative games were experiencing a renaissance thanks to titles like Pandemic And Space warningcharting a course independent of licensed competitive superhero games such as HeroClix. The game gained new popularity as the Marvel Cinematic Universe took off, allowing players to tap into their fantasies of playing characters reminiscent of heroes like Luke Cage and Doctor Strange and battling enemies similar to Kingpin or Ultron.

“It’s super fun to feel like a superhero and have all these cool powers and abilities and things you can do, except the bad guy is even scarier and there’s no way we can beat the bad guy unless we all work together,” Badell says. “We’re also doing it in a weird, strange environment that will somehow change the course of the fight.”

Forming teams of two to five heroes to battle a supervillain in environments ranging from the ruins of Atlantis to the crime-ridden streets of Rook City Guardians of the Multiverse a huge amount of replayability, but also makes the game so complex that it can be difficult to remember all the rules. Badell admits that during gameplay he often acts as a game master, managing the villain and the environment so that the other players can focus solely on their heroes. The new version makes things easier by having color-coded keywords to remind players when an effect occurs.

The decks have also been revised to ensure that luck doesn’t get in the way of a good playing experience. Heroes that rely heavily on getting specific cards in play, like the Batman-like Wraith, have more ways to search their decks and get them on the board. There are also new challenges, such as a ‘sudden’ mechanic that requires a card to be played as soon as it is drawn, which could mean a character losing control of their powers or even a ninja ambush.

“It’s such a cool new tool that can create a sense of duress or fear as this character is in the spotlight with his own personal issues,” Badell says.

Even more than being a superhero game, Guardians of the Multiverse is about superhero comics. Badell jokes that he and Rebottaro are “cosplaying like they’re making comics,” detailing decades of Sentinels Comics history through different eras and styles in their art, flavor text, and the Letters Page podcast they launched in 2017. That interest in the evolution of heroes is paramount Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Editionwhere each hero has both a modern art style version and a “first appearance” version dating back to the golden age of comic books with their own look and style. Their evolution is reflected in a hero’s card game, with references to numerous different comic lines that Badell and Rebottaro came up with.

“We work hard to make it feel like it’s made by a lot of people, but it’s made by two people,” Badell says. “There’s going to be a story happening in Megalopolis and here the cops come to help us, and next week I’m telling a story in Rook City and all the cops are bad. I love all those tone switches, but they drive me crazy.”

Episodes of the podcast provide in-depth insights into various heroes, villains, and comic book events, and the way fans responded helped shape what made it into the new version of the game. Badell loved Werewolf at nightbut says his decision to add the werewolf hero Alpha Smoke City Renegades was more informed by an interest in werewolves as he discussed their origins along with other supernatural elements from Sentinel Comics, such as the vampires of the Court of Blood.

“We have a super cool, excited fandom that really connects with the things we talk about and I really appreciate that,” Badell says.

The new version also draws inspiration from Sentinel Comics: The Role Playing Gamethat Greater Than Games launched in 2021. The RPG evokes the feeling that the stakes increase as a battle progresses, by allowing characters to unlock more powerful abilities as they get injured. That same mechanic is at the heart of a new version of the angelic warrior Fanatic, who can actually start the game with critically low health, allowing her to fully unleash her religious passion.

“I’ve played so much with finding a way to slightly lower her strength level without making her too vulnerable,” Badell says. “She’s a little too powerful, but it’s so damn cool and that’s fine in a cooperative game.”

While the backs of each deck’s cards originally only featured generic comic panels and the hero’s name, the new versions use the space to tell a bit of their backstory. Bunker enlists in the army, drives a tank and gets into his armored suit. The back of the deck for the speedster Tachyon shows super scientist Meredith Stinson at work and hugging her friend, Dana Bertrand. Badell has made up a whole story for their relationship that led to a big marriage problem.

“Sentinels Comics says, ‘There’s absolutely no weird stuff going on,’ but the writers are just going to sneak this in here,” Badell says. ‘They were ‘housemates’. The fandom defined their headcanon and a decade and a half later, that audience is the writers of the comics. Subversive things happened in comics before it became mainstream.

Greater Than Games plans to continue revising the game through a new version of OblivAeon, but Badell isn’t sure what comes next.

“This is my life’s work and I don’t regret it, but it’s definitely weird,” Badell says. “I don’t know what the future holds for me, but we love doing it and it’s amazing that anyone is interested in what we do.”