Somewhere in the middle of the Egyptian desert, Apocalypse slumbers within his Rejuvenation Chamber awaiting the time when his Horsemen awaken him to herald in a new age – the Age of Apocalypse! Powered by ancient Celestial Technology, the Rejuvenation Chamber rebuilds Apocalypse as he awaits a time when can finally rule the world and remake it in his image. Will the Crisis Team stop the process in time and keep Apocalypse’s plans from coming to fruition or will his Horsemen defend the Rejuvenation Chamber long enough for Apocalypse to come to full power?
The new Survival of the Fittest Ultimate Encounter comes packaged within the Rejuvenation Chamber terrain set. As long as you also have the character miniature for Apocalypse too, this game mode is playable out of the box (after assembly, of course). It comes with tokens to represent all of the other Celestial Technology terrain pieces that are being released alongside Apocalypse, but, if you want to go all in you can also use the Dark Future Terrain and the treasure chests from the Shrine of En Sabah Nur terrain pack to really bling out your gaming experience.
During this encounter, the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse are tasked with protecting the Celestial Technology surrounding the Rejuvenation Chamber itself, while the Crisis Team does their best to sabotage as much as possible. Depending on how well the Crisis Team does, Apocalypse will come into play at one of four different power levels. Each of these power levels are represented by a different, stronger, Ultimate Encounter exclusive character card.
The Crisis Team consists of two players, each bringing their own Squad made up of 17 Threat worth of character models. Players are allowed to use any models in their collection for their Squad. The Crisis Team Squads may not use characters that share an Alter Ego, so no doubling up on variants of James Logan Howlett or Peter Parker for example. Standard Affiliation rules also apply, so you still gain access to things like Leaderships and faction-based Team Tactics cards. Speaking of Team Tactics cards, each player may bring 0-3 cards each, depending on which difficulty level is chosen for the encounter.
The players will want to balance out their character choices between people who can move around quickly to place Sabotage tokens and folks who can dish out some damage to thin out Horsemen and handle Apocalypse later in the game.
Due to the way rounds are set up in Ultimate Encounters, the Crisis Team will get a total of 9 Activations per round. If the Crisis Team has more than nine characters, some of them might not see action each round, but you’ll have options for different tricks later. If they have fewer than nine characters, they might be shorting themselves on Sabotage token opportunities which could give the Cosmic Threat player extra points in the long run.
It’s a very interesting choice. Do you stack up on big beaters for late-game knuckle dusting? Or do you spread it out with smaller Threat value characters in order to score more activations and Sabotage tokens?
The Cosmic Threat player’s team consists of four characters that can equal 12-20 threat, depending on the difficulty mode selected, each of which are assigned a Horsemen card. Like the Crisis Team, the Comic Threat player can also choose to use any characters in their collection and are not limited to staying within the Servants of the Apocalypse Affiliation. The characters you include have to stay within a hard threat value cap, depending on difficulty setting. The games we played were under Normal difficulty, which limited the maximum threat value of any one character to 4. This can make for some very interesting choices of characters chosen and which role they are tied to. In our games I had to hit a total threat value of 14 with four characters and tried to stay on theme. So, I stuck to mutants only and decided on Psylocke as Death, Iceman as Famine, Pyro as Pestilence and Wolverine as War.
The Cosmic Threat player does not have access to normal Team Tactics cards and is instead given three Ploy cards that allow them to do some fun things relating to the Celestial Technology on the table such as healing Horsemen or teleporting them around the table. Each Ploy card is reusable too, as long as certain criteria are met during the clean-up phase.
The meat and potatoes of this scenario is the destruction of the terrain surrounding the Rejuvenation Chamber in order to keep Apocalypse from reviving at higher power levels. The Celestial Technology terrain pieces cannot be destroyed by normal means, instead any action that would normally affect terrain, such as throws, instead applies a Sabotage token to it. Terrain in this scenario is essentially indestructible until round 3, when it becomes Depowered Technology. The Crisis Team may also Interact with terrain once per turn to apply a Sabotage token as well. Piling Sabotage tokens onto terrain pieces is a huge deal for the Crisis Team.
During the clean-up phase of round 1 and round 2 a die is rolled for each Sabotage token on the board and, if it comes up as a crit or a wild, the piece of terrain associated with the token that was rolled for is removed from the table. After completing rolls for each piece, the Cosmic Threat player tallies up how many pieces are left and score Evolution Points accordingly.
Meet the Evolution Abacus. Evolution Points are how Apocalypse is revived, the more points accrued the stronger Apocalypse will be when he comes into play at the end of round two.
Along with scoring points for intact Celestial Technology, each Horseman has a way to score Evolution Points. For example, the Horseman of War scores points the first time they deal or suffer damage during each turn, while the Horseman of Pestilence scores points once per turn when they inflict a status effect on another character. The Cosmic Threat player wants to play into each Horseman’s gimmick in order to score as many points as possible. Big points means a bigger and badder Apocalypse for the Crisis Team to deal with. When the time comes to bring forth Apocalypse into the game, he will come into play in one of four flavors based on the number of points scored on the Evolution Tracker.
If the Crisis Team was very successful in their attempts at deleting Celestial Technology and dazing the Death character, Apocalypse will come into play in his weakest form. But if they are not, will come into play at either evolution levels 2-4. Each version of Apocalypse comes with a slightly better kit, gaining better defenses, some new superpowers and some of his attacks change slightly.
In the games we’ve played I was able to get either the level 2 or 3 version of Apocalypse to the table. In my experience these versions of Apocalypse are strong, but his arrival isn’t going to instantly win you the game. He will wreck face though with his attacks, possibly deleting a character per activation. The defenses on level 3 Apocalypse helped him weather some major attacks.
All versions of Apocalypse come stock with a self-heal and he is immune to all status effects and he has another self-heal related to being hit with any status effect he is immune to. Both versions I’ve played with felt powerful, especially level 3 Apocalypse. I can only imagine how much hurt a fully powered Apocalypse would put on people, especially in the normal difficulty setting.
I feel like this set up, with the varying strength of the big bad, is a really smart move. It made the game feel like a close fight until the end, without the Crisis Team feeling like they were fighting insurmountable odds in order to win. Only having to interact with objectives for the first two rounds is nice as well, it splits the game into two different phases. In the first phase, just focus on limiting Evolution Point opportunities and then in the end it all comes down to a big slobber knocker with either Apocalypse defeated or the Crisis Team is down to fewer than three characters.
Of course, all of this content does come at a cost. The Rejuvenation Chamber and Apocalypse together clock in at nearly $200 U.S. dollars, which could be a turn off for some folks just to play an Ultimate Encounter. It does come with tokens to represent the various pieces of Celestial Technology needed for gameplay, which means you don’t necessarily need the other terrain packs. If you did go all in, you’d be looking at roughly $340 U.S. dollars total for the three boxes of terrain and the big man.
Is it all worth it? Maybe. If you’re going to get a lot of use out of the terrain for your regular games, it is very nice having terrain options that aren’t just city streets. But if you’re only interested in using it for the encounter itself, the value might not be there. Overall, this is a very good addition to Marvel: Crisis Protocol family of Ultimate Encounters and my group has talked multiple times about bringing it to the table again because we had a lot of fun with it. So in that case, it has a lot of replay value for us. Only you can decide if the cost of entry has enough value to make it worthwhile in the long run.
Special thanks to Atomic Mass Games for providing Goonhammer with these terrain sets. Apocalypse and his terrain are slated for release in September, ask your friendly local game store for availability or they are also available for pre-order on the Asmodee web shop now. Will you be picking up these? If you do, hit me up on Twitter/X (brushwizard), Instagram (brushwizardry), or if you’re a member of the Goonhammer Discord server share them on the dedicated Marvel: Crisis Protocol channel.
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