Review: Street Masters:: Advanced Gameplay Reviews - Streets of the Multiverse : Rise of the Sentinels

by throughtheages56

Street Masters is a beat’em up co-op with miniatures. It owes its theme and retro feel to fighting games such as Double Dragon, Streets of Rage or Street Fighter. Created by pop culture masters Adam and Brady Sadler, it is teeming with references, from Bruce Lee to Negan’s baseball bat in The Walking Dead, almost to a fault. For example, the Kyoryu figure is in a Hadoken/Kamehameha pose, while none of Kyoryu’s moves throws a fireball.

A fun nod to the baseball bat affectionately known as Lucille in The Walking Dead

Mechanically, the game is admittedly inspired by games such as Sentinels of the Multiverse. The comparison between both games will be running through this review like a red thread, as it provides a convenient frame of reference for where Street Masters stands in terms of weight.

This review covers the base game and the expansions of the 1st Kickstarter. The boxes will be designated by the following acronyms :

BG: Base Game
SG: Stretch Goals
TT: Twin Tiger Expansion
LO: Legend of Oni Expansion
RP: Redemption Pack

A gameplay of balancing acts

Like in Sentinels of the Multiverse, players create a game by combining player decks, an Enemy faction and a Stage deck (accompanied by a matching map tile).

The Enemy deck provides the win condition, which is to defeat the Boss who starts the game on the map along with the player-controlled characters (which I’ll call “Fighters” in the remainder of this review, as opposed to the “Enemies”).

The Stage deck provides the loss condition. It can be seen as a thematic timer that the players can influence. The loss condition prevents the players from ganging up on the Boss. It usually coerces players into spending their actions on something thematic, such as deactivating doomsday devices, assisting civilians, putting out fire, etc. Since a player only gets to perform 1 action and play 1 card per turn à la Sentinels of the Multiverse, spending an action on the stage is conceptually “throwing away” half of a Fighter turn to not lose.

The theme of the defense tokens

A core concept of Street Masters is damage type (punch, grapple, kick, general, direct). But unlike most games where defense is a stat modified by effects, defense is temporary and is represented by defense tokens. A defense token may only block 1 damage of the matching type, or 1 general damage.

By blocking damage with their defense tokens, the Fighters (but not the Enemies) gain power tokens. If Ying Hua (BG) ever gains 4 or more power tokens, she flips to her charged side (her “super saiyan” side if you will).

Even the game’s iconography is thematic. Note how the guy on the left (Anthopants) plays Streets of Rage with a power icon T-shirt.

Defense tokens dispense with the need to keep track of a defense stat and its modifiers. The defensive prowess of a figure is apparent in the defense tokens placed on their card. This effectively fixes a common issue in Sentinels of the Multiverse, which is that attack and defense modifiers are all over the place and can easily be missed or miscounted. By contrast, there are only a handful of cards in Street Masters with a constant effect affecting other cards.

Lucille (with the card text “Enemies adjacent to Lucille are immune to direct damage”), the N-40 Punisher’s +1 modifier to all of Dmitri’s attacks, and a stage rule of the Out of Time stage (SG), are rare instances of constant effects that can be missed. The Out of Time one is especially annoying, as you need to remember that your figure is on a chasm space (whose icon is hidden by the figure’s base, by the way) each time your figure might gain defense tokens.

The defense token system opens up the design space. On the surface, the system creates simple tactical choices for the players.

Anastasia (BG) starts with 1 grapple token and 1 kick token. To get around her defense, the Megan (BG) player could play a punch attack card.

But the designer have proven to be extremely creative with their use of the defense tokens. Nowhere else is it more evident than in the stage designs. Part of the game’s balancing act is the consumption of defense tokens for other uses than blocking damage.

On the Compromised stage (BG), players may spend defense tokens to rescue a Scared Staff. Each spent defense token may either move the Scared Staff to a safe space in the center of the board, or reduce their Fear (represented by power tokens). A Scared Staff is rescued when they’re in a safe space with no Fear on them. The players lose if 2 Scared Staff are ever defeated before being rescued. Here, the Megan player could spend an action to spend 3 defense tokens to remove 2 Fear tokens from the Scared Staff and move it to a safe space.

On the Cashed Out stage (BG), players protect Frightened Gamblers in a casino. Frightened Gamblers are burdens assigned to Fighters who need to both allocate enough defense tokens to the Frightened Gamblers and move into designated spaces on the board in order to unload them, thereby delaying the stage timer. Here, the Frightened Gambler has the required 3 defense tokens. Ying Hua may advance 3 spaces to the space where she may unload the Frightened Gambler, which would cost her an action. Failing to do so in a timely manner, she may lose the Frightened Gambler, which would advance the timer. Your Frightened Gamblers is lost if your Fighter takes damage, unless you discard 1 defense token from the Frightened Gambler. Most stage deck events conspire to make the players lose Frightened Gamblers, e.g., inflicting direct damage (Armed Dealers) or removing defense tokens from Frightened Gamblers (Collateral Damage).

The Under Destruction stage (TT) sees you trying to defuse time bombs in a push-your-luck mini-game. When on a bomb space, a Fighter may spend defense tokens : for each spent defense token, they draw a card from the stage deck, trying to match a pair of wire icons (A, B, or C). They lose if 3 bombs ever go off. Here the player managed to match 2 B wire icons.

From a simple concept, the defense token system was built up into a cornerstone of not only highly thematic stage designs, but also a wide range of Fighter deck designs.

The fighter deck designs. The power curve and the power loop. The Feint mechanism

It is widely assumed that reading a game’s rules is enough to provide a good idea of the game. That would apply for a game like Pandemic, but for card games where most of the fun is the text on the cards, rules reading is not enough. One of the main criticisms one can level at Sentinels of the Multiverse is not the rules framework, but rather the fact that it is easy to get stuck with obvious and/or poor choices. How many Sentinels players played a character such as Legacy in a 4-player game where all you do turn after turn is play a damage-dealing card, then activate his starting power that gives +1 damage to the other heroes (cf. Shut Up and Sit Down’s review for a similar point of view) ? Unless you play multiple characters, bland card play gets old quickly.

At least in Wave 1, the Street Masters designers chose to go with a roster of well-balanced, solo-viable characters : all characters have ways to extend their range (whether through additional movement or ranged attacks), all characters have alternate ways of gaining defense tokens besides rolling misses on the attack dice, all characters can muster at least decent damage output, and all characters can deal all 3 types of damage (punch, kick, grapple).

The gameplay of Street Masters builds on the classic dilemma of playing a card for its one-time effect versus building up a tableau of “Tactic” support cards.

Megan (BG) may choose to either attack an engaged Enemy now, or play the Tactic card Stage Dive into her tableau (where she already played Barrier of Will). The latter would add +1 kick damage to ALL her future attacks.

The build-up toward a Fighter’s ultimate form could be represented by a “power curve.” But where Sentinels of Multiverse’s power curve is monotonic for most characters, in Street Masters a Fighter’s ultimate form is meta-stable. It is a “power loop” dealing with the transitions to and from their charged side.

Upon hitting a fighter-specific number of power tokens, fighters consume those tokens and flip to their charged side. They flip back to their charging side after they perform the action listed on their charged side, unless they have enough power tokens to trigger their charged side again. Gaining power tokens is often achieved by blocking damage.

In contrast to Fighter attack dice, the damage type of enemy attack dice is random and may bypass the defense tokens. Tyrone rolled 2 punch tokens inflicting 2 damage, and 1 grapple token which gets blocked, giving Ying Hua 1 power token.

Players may rely on blocking general damage, e.g., from events, to flip to their charged side, as blocking general damage is guaranteed. Here, Brandon may voluntarily choose to suffer 3 general damage. Since he already has 2 power tokens and can block using 3 defense tokens, this would flip him to his charged side, which is almost always where he wants to be.

In order to sustain a power loop, the players need to ensure a steady income of defense tokens, which may happen in mainly 2 ways : they generate defense tokens as they perform the attack of their charged side, or they have built up a reliable source of income “on the side.” The basic algorithm for a power loop looks as follows :

Fighter gains defense tokens -> Fighter blocks damage and gains power tokens -> Fighter flips to their charged side -> Fighter uses their character card action, which may generate more defense tokens, and flips them back to their charging side -> Enemies attack, Fighter blocks, generating more power tokens -> And so on.

Axel (TT) is probably the most direct implementation of a power loop. The character card action on his charged side rolls more attack dice and gains more defense tokens than the action on the charging side.

Shadow (RP)’s multi-use of his illusions illustrates the transition into his power loop. At first he may use his illusions as resources. After placing his illusion tokens on the board, he may discard them by playing One With the Dark, gaining defense tokens and drawing cards for him and all the other Fighters. Then, in a second phase, he may use his illusions offensively through the action on his charged side, which allows him to attack with his illusions while gaining defense tokens.

Brandon (BG) is another good example of a Fighter whose charged side improves the charging side across the board. He rolls 3 attack dice instead of 1, and resolves the Combo effect of each card in hand instead of only 1. We see that many Combo effects gain defense tokens from engaged Enemies while keeping a bunch of them exhausted (“exhausting an enemy” means that the enemy must skip their next activation), and if that wasn’t enough, they inflict damage too. The defense token gains mean that the unexhausted enemies that attack him will keep feeding him power tokens so that he may keep chaining Combo effects turn after turn.

Gabriel’s way of life is to gain defense tokens, independently of whether he’s charged or not. His character card action allows him to steal the defense tokens used to block his grapple damage. But when coupled with the Tactic card Gracie Master (which is not unique, so there can multiples copies in his tableau), he can convert the grapple damage to general damage, which basically means he can ultimately choose which defense token he steals from the Enemy, as Enemies always blocks general damage when they can, but the player chooses which defense token is used to block the damage.

A notable exception to the basic power loop is the beginner-friendly Kyoryu (BG). He’s one of the few fighters who can directly accrue power tokens. He is also the only fighter able to convert power tokens directly into defense tokens through The Eye of the Storm.

The fighters’ approach to defense tokens and the power loop is not homogenous across the roster. Some are actually better off on their charging side, and only seek to go into a power loop until late in the game. Juan is such a Fighter.

Juan (RP)’s gameplay revolves around reloading his 2 shell tokens to buff his attacks. He only needs 3 power tokens to flip to his charged side, but an issue with his charged side is that it can only consume his shell tokens, while the action on his charging side is the only repeatable action that can reload them. So instead of blocking damage, he is often better off healing damage or canceling Enemy attacks using Street Tough in the early game.

Natalia (BG) is one Fighter who doesn’t want to flip flop in a power loop. She is better off not using her character card action and would rather stay on her charged side, which provides her with constant boosts to her movement and her attacks. The attack boosts, combined with the additional die of the Commando Tactic card, synergize with her multi-attack cards. For example, her Snap Kick first perform a 1-die attack, then follows it with another attack. For each attack, Commando adds 1 die, and her charged side adds +1 direct damage. The damage adds up pretty quickly.

Another wrinkle to the power loop formula is the transition to “Finish the Boss” time, when you throw everything at the Boss. No other mechanism illustrates this better than the “Feint” mechanism. Fighters may discard a Tactic card in their tableau to activate their Feint effect. Since you typically keep Tactic cards around, you would only Feint for special occasions such as saving your butt or wrapping up the game. Feint also allows to play a Tactic card like an Event. When you have the option to Feint, there is no such thing as unique Tactic cards clogging up your hand (only one copy of a unique Tactic card may be played in a tableau, so without Feint, duplicates would typically sit in your hand the whole game). Instead, you may Feint a Tactic card and then play another copy in your tableau.

At the start of her turn, Natalia may Feint the Commando card she played in a previous turn, triggering a Snap Kick from the discard pile. Then she may play another copy of Commando, and do another Feint for a second Snap Kick. Note that the first Commando card now buffs the second Snap Kick. When all is said and done, Natalia can dish out 20+ damage in a give-it-all turn.

In addition to 1 copy of Provide Cover in play, Juan (RP) has another copy in hand. He can Feint the in-play copy to reload both shell tokens, trigger his character card action to unload his shell tokens for 8 guaranteed general damage, then play the other copy of Provide Cover in preparation for next turn, guaranteeing 16 general damage in 2 turns, which is probably the most devastating guaranteed damage sequence in the game.

Jackal (RP) can rely on Growing Presence in the early game to build up a pool of defense tokens stolen from a “possessed” Enemy every turn while keeping the Enemy away. It so happens that, when this Enemy can’t attack, he gains 1 defense token that she can steal next turn. And since Growing Presence is not unique, she could benefit from its effects multiple times each turn.

If Jackal gets the opportunity to possess a powerful Enemy such as Wan Bo who rolls 5 attack dice, she may possess them, move them into range using some effect, and then Feint all the copies of Growing Presence to deal massive damage to the Boss in a single turn. The advantage of using Enemy attacks against them is that it is guaranteed damage : only the damage types are random.

Fighter playstyle lends flavor to the power loop through various deckbuilder tropes. Those include : tableau building (Megan), playing from the discard pile (Natalia), Enemy deck scrying (Ying Hua), playing from hand (Brandon), enemy attachments (Ah Long (RP)), resource management (Dmitri (RP), Kemono (RP), Juan (RP)), and more. Even if two Fighter designs are functionally similar, playstyle can make them feel very different.

Gabriel and Axel could both be labelled as defensive specialists, yet their approach to the defense tokens could hardly feel more different. Axel can turn his defense tokens directly into offense through Calculated Kick or Dropping Guard. On the other hand, Gabriel has more of a grinding playstyle. He steals the defense tokens used to block his damage, and gains bonuses when the targets of his attacks has little or no defense tokens. For example, he can exhaust enemies with no defense token with Wristlock, or play the “Knifehand strike” attack card and immediately get it back if the target of his attack has no defense token.

Co-op play and turn order. Playing out-of-turn. About the simultaneous play variant

The player draws from the enemy deck before their Fighter’s turn. Curiously enough, this is the one rule I have missed about once every game (cf. also the Shut Up and Sit Down video playthrough for similar oversights). Part of it is psychological. The pace sometimes does feel furious, especially when you draw Enemy upon Enemy. So I imagine the natural predisposition is to “forget” to draw. Another part of missing Enemy draws is habit. I’m used to games such as The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game or even Sentinels of the Multiverse, where the enemy card draws are not interlocking with the player turns.

Rules relevant to co-op play are that an Enemy only activates after the player who drew them has played their turn, and that the players choose player turn order.

The Natalia player drew Dao and therefore, Dao will only activate after this player’s turn. However, Dao is engaged with the Megan player due to board positioning. If the players start with Natalia and Natalia can’t get rid of Dao during her turn, then Dao will have a free shot at Megan. On the other hand, if Megan starts before Natalia, then the players will have 2 shots at Dao before he gets to activate.

Part of what makes the game meatier than Sentinels of the Multiverse is not only arbitrary turn order, but also the ability to play out-of-turn via the Exhaust ability of Tactic cards. A Tactic card in a player’s tableau may be tapped to the side to perform its Exhaust effect. This may happen anytime outside the player’s turn.

Clint (SG)’s Steely Gaze may be used to buff his or other Fighters’ attacks by adding 1 attack die. On turn 1, he could play this card, but he couldn’t use its effect for himself as it would require discarding a damage token that isn’t there yet (damage may only placed there at the start of next turn, or after performing his character card action). Instead, he can play the card (1), then place a damage token on it through his character card action (2), and after finishing his turn, exhaust the card (3) to support the Tiger Azules’ attack (4).

On the Suply and Demand stage (BG), Juan could prevent the Enemies from picking up the green objective by occupying its space. However, doing so would expose him to Stage events punishing Fighters out of cover (spaces with the wall icon). What he can do though is occupy the objective space (1) to prevent a pick-up during the Stage phase, and just before resolving the next Stage card, exhaust Juan’s Con Artist to move him 2 spaces to cover (2).

Out-of-turn play makes a Fighter turn more interesting than the average Sentinels of the Multiverse Hero turn. But it is also more prone to analysis paralysis, which gets worse as the player count increases. Out-of-turn play considerations are also why the simultaneous play variant that will be introduced by the Aftershock expansion might not be the panacea, as min-maxing play requires sequencing all the Fighters’ actions carefully anyway.

The bugs

The designers of Street Masters didn’t just stop at the theme and concepts when taking inspiration from their favorite video games. They also imported the bugs .

The most obvious bug (not technically a bug, but feels like it) is erratic enemy behaviour due to the interaction between the Enemy AI and the stages. Enemies typically have a zombie-like AI : they move then attack. However, stages may move them too, making them yo-yo between the Fighters and the stage objectives.

On the Supply and Demand stage (BG), Enemies try to pick up contraband and carry it toward the exits. Here, the Enemy moves 3 spaces toward the Fighter and then attacks if he can. However, after movement, he is still 1 space short. Then, during the next stage phase, he moves 3 spaces back toward the unclaimed objective, away from the Fighter, but can’t quite reach the objective. In the end, he accomplishes nothing and the players can almost ignore his existence.

See other threads talking about it : https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1996255/Boss-yo-yo or
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2084545/confused-supply-dem...

The reaction of the designers to this issue is rather disappointing :

strayknife wrote:

Yeah, you could consider those "yo yo" situations to be a bit of a "wart" on the stage design, but I'd prefer that over more rules complexities required to avoid them.

We continue to refine the stage design, so you'll probably have less situations like this, but with completely modular games sometimes it's hard to avoid some weird situations unless you get overly verbose on the card text.

I'd rather just keep the game flowing and take those "yo yo" effects as tactical strategies

(https://boardgamegeek.com/article/29355076#29355076)

The issue is that this happens even when the players didn’t intend it to. All it does is make an easy stage become even easier by nullifying Enemies.

strayknife wrote:

Typically, some of these situations are tricky to define across the board because it would require tons of extra game language. I prefer to put a little power in the players' hands on how they would prefer to interpret each given situation; although as a rules lawyer myself, I can understand this not being ideal.

(https://boardgamegeek.com/article/29440608#29440608)

Apart from the last sentence being self-contradictory (if you’re really a rules lawyer, you certainly don’t prefer to put a little power in the players’ hands), I would respectfully disagree with “tons of extra language.” I just think it’s a cop-out type of answer. The designers have certainly shown an ability to solve such problems in very creative ways. In fact, on the Supply and Demand stage itself, Enemies that do pick up an objective become exhausted. Exhausted enemies skip their next turn, which guarantees that they won’t move to attack other Fighters and will instead focus on carrying their objectives to the exits. So Enemies that do manage to pick up objectives don’t yo-yo. Similarly, Enemies chasing after objectives could have been exhausted, at very little cost in terms of verbosity. As another example, on the One Step Ahead stage (LO), the Enemies try to exit the stage, and, to this effect, “treat the Exit space as the nearest Fighter”. This ensures that not only the Stage effects, but also their own stage-agnostic activation effects can move the Enemies toward the exit, effectively solving the yo-yo issue.

Some stages suffer from lazy wording, and end up being too easy as a result.

In The Right To Remain Silent stage (BG), Enemies seek to interrogate prisoners. They move toward them via stage effects that tell the players “for each inactive objective, [to] choose a different enemy that is nearest that objective. Move each chosen enemy 3 spaces toward the nearest objective. Then, each enemy picks up an objective in an adjacent space.” Here, the players could just purposefully choose “different” “nearest” Enemies for the purple, green and yellow objectives. Their nearest enemies won’t reach them and will yo-yo as a result, instead of seizing the 2 objectives right in front of them (the red and blue objectives).

I don’t mind gaming a system, but only if it feels clever to do so. Sometimes it feels more like taking candy from a baby, and the fact that it’s possible is kind of embarassing.

Fighter cards suffer from inconsistent language from time to time, though not to a game-breaking degree. Just don’t expect the level of rigor of a Competitive Card Game. For example, some effects tell a player to “Do X, then Y”. According to a video playthrough by the designers, you can actually do Y even if you didn’t/can’t do X. In Competitive Card Games (CCG) or even Living Card Games (LCG), terms like “then” are very strictly defined. In A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition), it requires X to be fully resolved before Y. From the rules reference :

The word “Then”

If the effect text of an ability includes the word “then,” the text preceding the word “then” must be successfully resolved in full (i.e. the game state changes to reflect the intent of the pre-then aspect of the effect in its entirety) before the remainder of the effect described after the word “then” can be resolved.

In contrast, the use of the word “then” in Street Masters is very informal. There is no difference with a period or the word “and” (which is sometimes used instead). You may also see “after this attack”, and some players read that like the word “then” too. This can have important gameplay ramifications. For example, some Fighters greatly benefit from this interpretation.

Even if Dmitri (RP) can’t attack an Enemy (e.g., because he is out of range), he still greatly benefits from resolving the second half of his character card action.

That the designers didn’t take the extra step to clarify all the terms is a bit disappointing, as I’m sure they’re aware of the technical issues of game language (they did work for Fantasy Flight Games which is the publisher of A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) among other card games they probably played). They did clarify situations and terms such as “reveal” and “immune” on page 14 of the rulebook, but it’s half a page and doesn’t cover much.

Other “bugs” are fighter-specific bugs, which is expected (you can’t have this level of content without a few errata).

One “bug” particularly annoyed me because it slows the pace down from fast to deliberate, meticulous, and above all, unintuitive. I might be wrong (I actually hope I’m wrong) though. Some Fighter cards have post-attack effects that reference the target of the attack. However, if the target is defeated and therefore removed from the game, then the effect shouldn’t apply by any logic.

Megan (BG)’s Flying Knee positions her after her attack. But if the “target” is defeated, the “target” doesn’t exist anymore, so the re-positioning doesn’t occur.

In the NES classic Double Dragon II, Billy’s a flying knee doesn’t stop mid-animation just because the enemy is defeated.

Other Fighters affected by this include Tiger Azules (SG) with Rolling Suplex or Dmitri (RP) with Rearm.

The target disappearing from his grasp would prevent Tiger Azules to complete his Thin the Herd move which sends the Enemy flying into the crowd, causing collateral damage to all Enemies around him.

What the quirk implies is that in some cases, you’ll pray you won’t hit too hard because in some cases, such as Tiger Azules’ Thin The Herd move, the second part of the effect is actually more important than the attack that precedes it.

A justification for the quirk would be that it’s part of the game balancing. It’s difficult to believe this argument when some Fighters can inflict 20+ damage in a single turn (Natalia), attack every enemy within 4 spaces for 9+ damage (Kemono), or have amazing crowd control (Brandon). Would a Fighter break the game from being able to reposition themselves ? Whatever the answer might be, it is nullified because of the nature of a modular system. Let’s talk a bit about it.

What modularity doesn’t do for you. Challenge versus theme. House-ruling. The meta-game and the potential for anti-climactic games

A lot of fuss is made about modular systems, and people really like to throw numbers around to back up their claims. Psychologically speaking, it doesn’t matter whether the game can have trillions versus millions of unique setups. It’s psychologically the same.

In terms of pure replayability, you’ll be more than happy if you can replay any game 100 times. I never heard anybody say that Chess is not replayable, and it has exactly 1 setup.

The strength modular systems do offer is, more than replayability, thematic encounters. You may want to set up a showdown between your favorite Fighters and their nemesis on a certain stage in the context of a campaign. In fact, the game has a story mode that links such encounters. I call the Fighter/Enemy/Stage selection process the meta-game.

The issue is that theme alone doesn’t correlate to consistency in challenge or anything else really. There are many subjective criteria that can go into the meaning of “working setup”. Mine are : (1) can the theme of stage express itself ? (2) Is the encounter going to be challenging enough ? Yours could be different. A number of factors go into deciding how the encounter shapes out :

- Player count
- Fighters
- Enemy faction
- Stage
- Use of allies/rivals to lower/increase the difficulty respectively

Variance hints at a bigger issue with modular systems. Recombinability doesn’t mean that all combinations are equally interesting, equally challenging, equally thematic, or even equally playtested. For example, some stages (for example, Gone Ballistic (BG), One Step Ahead (LO), Supply and Demand (BG) at low player counts) won’t “work” against experienced players no matter which Fighters and Enemy faction they choose. In fact, variance might just mean the setup will need tweaking until you find your sweet spot in terms of theme and challenge. Think about it : what was the last game in which you were willing to fine-tune the setup until the experience was satisfying ? In general, games that we consider great stay consistently so, you don’t need to tweak them by adding/removing modules. Here modularity takes a reverse approach : you are in effect playtesting the game to maximize your enjoyment of the game, and this can take time.

My personal gripe with variance is that encounters are usually too easy. I read that one of the designer and a playtester win a little over 50% of their games (source: https://boardgamegeek.com/article/29075049#29075049). I don’t have a problem claiming that my win percentage is closer to 70%, 80% actually if you don’t count the games spent to switch to a new character and get (re)acclimated to a stage. FYI, I played almost all of my games 2-handed solo, playing through all the stages many times, and running the following pairs through at least 3 stages each :

- Kyoryu (BG)/Ying Hua (BG)
- Brandon (BG)/Gabriel (BG)
- Megan (BG)/Natalia (BG)
- Tiger Azules (SG)/Clint (SG)
- Axel (TT)/Rhys (TT)
- Juan (RP)/Dmitri (RP)
- Shadow (RP)/Jackal (RP)
- Kemono (RP)/Jackal (RP)
- Ah Long (RP)/Jackal (RP)

One of the few things that Street Masters lacks compared to Sentinels of the Multiverse is an Advanced mode. From the Sentinels of the Multiverse Enhanced Edition rulebook :

The characters and environments in the game create a wide variety of replay opportunities. However, advanced players may seek even greater challenges. The villain character cards have an advanced section en each side which gives the villains notable advantages, forcing the heroes to fight harder than ever. Note that the advanced rules are not considered “balanced” play.

Built-in advanced activation effects would be nice for both the enemies and the stages, even if neither thoroughly playtested nor “balanced”, which is okay because the game is generally too easy. Apparently, the Aftershock expansion addresses some of the concerns with the Showdown decks, but as far as I know, they only apply to the Enemy factions.

Story mode is an example of stage tweaking, adding setup rules. But those are more theme- than balance-oriented. Noticeably, some of the adjustments don’t scale. Here the setup adds 2 rivals, independently of player count.

I could see my win percentage drop if I played the harder stages more often, or played at different player counts. My observation is that my few losses have come against the few stages that are consistently difficult due to a reliable form of timer. I can think of a few :

On the Cashed out (BG) stage, the first turn immediately sets the tone. The Boss starts right next to the purple objective and can activate it by stepping into it. After this, he is in range of the green objective. If he can get that objective too, that will be 2 active objectives by the end of turn 2. The only way to prevent him would be to sacrifice Fighters to occupy objective spaces, in range of the Boss’ attacks. Each objective adds a token to The House during the Stage phase. 10 tokens and the Fighters lose. If that wasn’t enough, there are other reliable ways of adding tokens, such as losing a Frightened Gambler by taking damage (each Fighter starts the game with 1 Frightened Gambler).

On the Original Copy stage (BG), the Enemies want to put Enemies called “Clones” in play by activating objectives, thereby attaching a Vandal Serum card to them. Then, the out-of-play Clones with a Vandal Serum are put into play when they have 3 power tokens on them. Not only does each active objective add a power token at the start of the stage phase, 8 out of the 14 cards of the stage deck add power tokens to each Clone with a Vandal Serum.

In contrast to stages with a reliable timer, stages that rely on AI choreographies are too ambitious for their own good, and need everything to line up perfectly for the stage to express its potential (Supply and Demand, One Step Ahead, A Rude Awakening, etc.). You know it’s bad when you’re cheering for the enemy to manage anything threatening.

On the One Step Ahead stage (LO), Enemies race you to the top, where the Boss awaits. The stage promises epic battles to lay claim to the summit, but note how the Strong Winds event affect each figure in play. The Boss himself, who starts on top, has issues staying up there. For Bosses such as Mack the sharpshooter of The Onyx League (TT), who prefers to keep away and harass the Fighters from a distance, falling couldn’t be more unthematic.

Problematic stages just beg you to house-rule them. A fix can be as simple as lowering the threshold for the loss condition. For example, the loss condition for the Supply and Demand stage requires the Enemies to carry 5 objectives to the exits. At low player counts, it can be a long time before there will even be 5 objectives on the board, let alone 5 enemies able to carry them unharmed to the exits. As an example of more elaborate house-rules, mine for One Step Ahead looked like this : Enemies (including the Boss) enter play with a grapple token in addition to their other starting defense tokens, and are considered to have climbing gear as long as they have a grapple token. This means they are less likely to fall and be distracted by objectives on their way to the top. They also consider the exit space to be the nearest fighter as long as they are not engaged with a fighter (instead of as long as they are on the same cliff).

What the variance implies in practice, is that you may be perfectly happy with a 2-fighter setup, and not be sure the game won’t flop when you take it to your weekly game group for a 4-player game. In other words, the game has a potential for anticlimactic gameplay. The sweet spot is an elusive target :

- When the game is easy, it is usually because the stage couldn’t get its agenda going or whiffed too much, and the players could gang up on the Boss relatively unimpeded. Then the stage theme doesn’t really come out, as the players can brush its effects off.
- When the game is hard, it’s because the balancing act forced the players to go out of their way, thereby increasing the playtime. There’s a curse built into the attritional nature of chipping away at the Boss’ health. That is, when the stages have an impact, the game has a tendency to drag out. Why ? As the players deal with side issues, the enemy Boss accrues defense tokens that quickly become huge piles that are going to delay the end-game.

While you’re doing other things, the Boss accrues piles of defense tokens, guaranteeing the game is going to last a while.

The variety of the modular system. Standalone modules versus synergistic modules

Like Sentinels of the Multiverse, the game works if you favor variety over consistent challenge, i.e., if you like “seeing how it goes”. The game does reward you with unexpected moments and interactions, some cool, some not so cool, depending on your predispositions. For example, with his amazing crowd control, Brandon seems invincible in the hands of an experienced player, but against The Nahualli (SG)’s zombie crowds which don’t have defense tokens to steal from and few minions to exhaust (instead of Minions, the faction relies on “Affliction” cards), he might get overwhelmed in ways that wouldn’t happen against other Enemy factions.

Most of the Enemy Minions of The Kingdom (BG) (which the “Rise of the Kingdom” subtitle would suggest as the most fearsome faction in the game) are surprisingly tame : their stats are best-in-class, but unlike the other Factions, their prevalent behaviour pattern is to attack adjacent Fighters and THEN move. So just stay out of the way, and they’ll just follow you around. On most stages, they are simply underwhelming, but in the right tower defense-style situation, they could be impactful. On the Original Copy stage (BG), Enemies can trigger a loss if they can put into play all 5 “clones” with a Vandal Serum attached, which may only happen by moving into an inactive objective space and activating them. Therefore, one way to avoid loss by stage is to sit on an inactive objective while the 4 others are active. As shown in the picture, the Enemies will tend to gather around Fighters defending the objective. Here, Brandon, on the left, is trying to repel a mob from the last inactive objective. Minions with an attack-then-move pattern are here in a better position to make their attack stat felt.

Clint’s Laying Down the Law is underwhelming in most situations, but it can be amazing in the right ones. Here, the Afflicted Altars objectives of the Out of Time stage (SG) spawn Enemies each turn, but they can be deactivated by inflicting damage to them. By playing Laying Down the Law, Clint may deactivate as many as 4 of them on turn 1.

Juan, the Boss of the Cartel Enemy faction, is vulnerable once cornered by Fighters. Getaway is his get-out-of-jail card, allowing him to teleport to safety. On the Steel Memories stage where many 1-hit point Enemies (called “Recruits”) tend to flood the board, his teleport can have the effect of putting him on the other side of a sea of Recruits. The Fighters then have to fight their way through the crowd to reach the Boss. (Note that I use defense tokens instead of arbitrary figures to represent the Recruits. It makes the board situation much clearer, setup/teardown much quicker, and can also help track activation state by flipping the token, which is very helpful when you activate so many of them.)

On the Ashes of the Eternal (LO) stage, the Fighters carry urns and leave a trail of fire when they move. They lose if there’s too much fire on the board. Contrary to most Enemies, Kitsune tends to move the Fighters instead of advancing on them, thereby helping the stage theme come alive.

The variety gets better and better with each expansion, but the sure, fully playtested winning combinations depend on how hard the designers will be pushing toward more synergistic setups (The Oni (LO) on the Ashes of the Eternal stage (LO), The Nahualli (SG) on the Out of Time stage (SG)). Synergistic designs could revive old material. For example, one could certainly design an Enemy faction that would make the Gone Ballistic stage (BG) (the “tutorial” stage) relevant again. Or make Natalia (BG)’s ability to discard Enemy Gear cards less of a gimmick (currently, only the Brotherhood faction (BG) has Gear cards).

Final thoughts

In the context of game nights at high player count, where first impressions are the deciding factor in determining a game’s success and whether it will ever be unboxed again (with most gaming groups, a game only gets 1 or 2 tries to catch on), the lack of official recommendations for setups at specific player counts and difficulty levels is only magnified by the unpredictability of the setups.

On the other hand, Street Masters will reveal its full potential as a lifestyle classic if you or your gaming group don’t have a problem fine-tuning setups, even house-ruling, over repeated plays. From the thematic brilliance of the defense token system (the Sadlers basically struck gold with the concept), to the masterful display of know-how in designing the many fighter decks around popular deckbuilding tropes, Street Masters certainly has the foundations of a classic, and now, with the upcoming Aftershock expansion, the wealth of content of a lifestyle game.