Sentinels of the Multiverse

I have a soft spot for games that respect the player's brain, and Sentinels of the Multiverse does exactly that. Handelabra's PC port of the long-running cooperative card game strips away all the fiddly HP tracking and shuffle overhead that slows down the physical version, leaving you with nothing but the decisions. Each session asks you to pick a team of three to five heroes, a villain, and an environment, and those three elements combine to produce a surprisingly different fight every time. The hero roster is where the real strategy lives. Legacy plays like a support anchor, spending his turns powering up allies rather than dealing damage himself. Bunker is a slow build who needs several turns to get his loadout on the table before he becomes a wrecking machine in the late game. The Wraith leans on Item cards, weapons and gadgets that stay in play and compound across rounds. Absolute Zero is all about managing his suit's charge state. Each hero deck is asymmetric by design, which means picking your party is already a meaningful decision before the first card flips. A damage-heavy lineup that ignores healing will crumble against certain villains; a well-balanced team that covers mitigation, ongoing removal, and burst damage has a real shot even on harder matchups. The villain and environment layers are what keep the game honest. Villains have two-sided character cards, flipping mid-fight to escalate their threat, and some have mechanics that punish specific strategies entirely. The Dreamer, for instance, inverts the win condition: instead of beating her down, you are trying to eliminate her psychic projections without hurting an innocent. Environments add a third autonomous deck to the mix, cards that trigger on their own turn and can benefit either side. Insula Primalis will throw dinosaur attacks at everyone indiscriminately; other environments stack incremental damage that snowballs if your team does not clean the board. The three-deck interaction produces genuinely emergent situations that no amount of planning fully anticipates, and that is a quality I look for in any strategy title. The tutorial does honest work. It holds your hand through the turn structure, play-power-draw, then villain phase, then environment phase, without assuming you have read the rulebook. Crucially, you can lose the tutorial, which is the correct design choice. The UI has attracted fair criticism over the years: card text can feel cramped when multiple ongoing effects pile up, and new players tracking interactions across three separate decks will occasionally misread the board state. The game also lacks a persistent campaign mode, which feels like a gap given how much narrative potential the original card game's lore carries. What you get instead is a skirmish-style format, pick your configuration and fight, with unlockable hero and villain variants gating some replay depth behind hidden objectives. Hot-seat local co-op is available, and the game supports online co-op through a cross-platform pass-and-play style implementation, which means getting three to five people coordinated in real time requires some social effort. Solo play is where this version genuinely shines: controlling the full hero party yourself means you own every decision, no quarterbacking arguments, just you against the escalating chaos of a villain deck that does not care about your carefully laid plans. If you have any tolerance for cooperative card game mechanics and want a low-overhead way to explore them across many hero combinations, the decision-space here holds up well past the tutorial.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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