The city has been irradiated with dangerous gamma radiation! Our brave and noble heroes are now terrorizing the city in fits of gamma-fueled rage. Now, the only one who has a chance to stop these rampaging heroes is the one and only, Incredible Hulk! Will he be victorious and save the city that hates him? Or will the heroes smash the smasher?
The Incredible Hulk Ultimate Encounter is a print and play scenario for Marvel: Crisis Protocol that is available to download directly from Atomic Mass Games’ website. This scenario uses the original objective tokens from the crisis cards, Infinity Formula Goes Missing! and Gamma Wave Sweeps Across the Midwest. If you do not have the originals tokens, you can use the generic objective tokens from the Earth’s Mightiest Core Box in place of them. Since we are reusing assets and printing things off at home, it gives us a super low cost of entry in order to play it. All you need to play are the printed cards and a Hulk miniature.
During this encounter it is the Incredible Hulk player’s job to subdue the gamma irradiated heroes and throw them into Gamma Absorbers. This will KO and remove them from the game and score the Hulk player points. Meanwhile, the Crisis Team must continually attempt to Daze the Hulk in order to accumulate Rage tokens on him to score points for their team. The first side to score 12 victory points is declared the winner!
The Crisis Team is comprised of two players, each bringing with them a squad with a threat value of 17. Affiliations and Leaderships are off the table for this scenario as it would seem that a group of enraged heroes can’t band together under a united leader. Depending on the difficulty that is selected, each Crisis Team player will have access to 0-3 Team Tactics cards. Since Affiliations aren’t being used, the Crisis Team is limited to Unaffiliated neutral and character specific cards only. Another thing to keep in mind, the Crisis Team may not double up on characters with the same Alter Ego, just like with regular squad building if a character has multiple versions – such as Steve Rogers’ three versions of Captain America – you can only include one Steve Rogers across both player’s squads.
Due to the way rounds are set up in Ultimate Encounters, the Crisis Team will get a total of 9 Activations per round. The team will choose three of their characters to activate, followed by a Cosmic Threat turn, at which point they will activate three more characters and so on until the Cosmic Threat player has had three activations. At which point, the round moves to the Clean Up phase and a new round begins.
If the Crisis Team has more than 9 characters, some of them might not see action each round, but it might give the team options for later. If they have fewer than 9 characters, the Crisis Team might be shorting themselves on opportunities which could give the Cosmic Threat player extra points in the long run or hinder the team if characters start being KO’d. I try to suggest that the Crisis Team always makes sure to take a minimum of 9 characters between the two players and try take advantage of every activation allowed to them.
The Crisis Team has a few special rules for this encounter. First off, they gain a new Superpower, Gamma Throw. This ability costs 2 power to activate and allows the character that uses it to throw a piece of terrain equal to or less than the Size of the character. So someone like the a Sentinel could throw a Size 5 building at the Hulk! Along with Gamma Throw, the Crisis Team characters also gain 2 additional power during the power phase to give them a boost. That should help them utilize it a bit more and dish out extra damage.
All of this new found power does come at a cost though. If a player character would normally be Dazed, it does not gain a Daze token and gains a Subdued token instead. While subdued, their movement becomes Short but unlike Dazed characters they may still make attacks and use superpowers. Subdued characters are susceptible to being KO’d by being thrown into the Gamma Absorbers and removed from the game. Since characters aren’t being Dazed, they will never flip to their injured side during the clean-up phase. They remain Subdued until they can remove the Subdued token by reaching the Booster Serum. Until then, they cannot suffer further damage or remove damage tokens. If they would suffer damage, they are instead pushed Short by the Cosmic Threat player.
In this scenario the Cosmic Threat player takes control of the Incredible Hulk, this is the only character they will be using this game. He is the Encounter Character and cannot be KO’d like a normal character. Instead, the Incredible Hulk has a special rule in which any time he would gain a Daze token, he gains a Rage token instead and removes all damage and status effects from himself. The more Rage tokens he has, the stronger his attacks will be. For each Rage token he has acquired, Hulk may reroll 1 die in his attack rolls. He can also gain 1 power per Rage token over the normal maximum of 10 power a character can gain. They definitely won’t like him when he’s angry.
The Incredible Hulk is seeping excess gamma radiation into the area. At the beginning of each of the Cosmic Threat player’s turns they must roll 1 die and compare it to the Gamma Aura table to see what effect it has. Based on the result one of three effects can happen, from gaining power to boosting physical attacks.
The game table is set up with a Booster Serum in the center surrounded by three Gamma Absorbers on the table. Any hero that has been Subdued may be pushed or +thrown by the Incredible Hulk into a Gamma Absorber and removed from the game. Any hero that has a Subdued token and begins the Clean Up phase within Range 1 of the Booster Serum are returned to full strength and removes all damage tokens from themselves.
It is suggested that the board be packed with terrain, there’s going to be a lot of destruction happening thanks to the Gamma Throw super power, alongside any other throw abilities the Crisis Team brings with them. I’d go as far as double the normally suggested amount of terrain and include multiple Size 5 terrain pieces, if someone is running a large model. Its always fun to see someone get the chance to toss an apartment building.
My groups tend to play on a congested terrain layout already because we are filthy casuals and don’t really worry too much about whether or not certain terrain favors certain characters or factions more. Which means we’re used to having a ton of terrain to work around. We still made sure the Gamma Absorbers and Serum are on the board itself, rather than on top of terrain just for ease of use.
This time around, rather than recruit some friends, we decided to play this one at home. I piloted the entire Crisis Team and made sure that I kept to the rules by picking two separate 17 Threat squads. That way everything was legitimate and I wasn’t sharing points here or there. I decided to go with models I don’t have a lot of play time with or rarely get to play. The squads I decided on were Hulkbuster, Namor, Crystal and Warlock, as well as another squad of Scarlet Witch, Rocket Raccoon, Groot, Lizard and Rhino. These lists allowed me to cover my 9 activations, and gave me some heavy hitters to use against the Hulk, a few status effects to throw at him, plus Warlock loves when terrain is destroyed.
My wife took control of Hulk, and we decided to use the Immortal Hulk model because he’s just to cool to pass up. How can you not? It’s a bad ass looking model.
So, is it fun? Is it worth it? Considering this game mode is a free to download print and play scenario, it’s hard to say it isn’t worth the investment. All you need to play is a Hulk model and some printed paperwork. So, in that sense, it’s an excellent bang for your buck. So that just leaves the fun factor…
We had a lot of fun with this scenario. We played on the Narrative difficulty setting, which starts the Hulk with 0 Rage Tokens and the Crisis Team with 0 Team Tactics cards. The Hulk subdued Rhino and Crystal right off the bat, and was able to knock out Rhino before I could get him healed back up at the Booster Serum. The Crisis team was otherwise starting off strong and I was leading in points for a while. Near the midway point, I lost Rhino, Crystal, Rocket, Scarlet Witch and Lizard and The Hulk was able to make a big comeback. Near the end it came down to whether or not the Hulk could KO 1 more character for the win, or if I could score 1 point from securing Gamma Absorbers. I plopped Groot and Hulkbuster onto the Gamma Absorbers and was able to clinch the win.
Overall, this was a fun scenario. The Hulk feels like a beefy character without feeling too overpowered. He’s able to hand out beat downs and move characters around pretty well to get them into the Gamma Absorbers, thanks to him having pushes built into his attacks, and the fact that subdued characters that would take damage get pushed instead. Having his superpowers and attacks slightly change based on the amount of Rage he has feels super thematic as well and the Gamma chart adds a bit of randomness into the game too.
We played with 19 pieces of terrain on the table and near the end of the game almost all of the size 1 and 2 terrain pieces were off the table. Most of the size 3 cargo containers were gone as well. Having a dense layout full of interactive terrain pieces helped a lot and gave both sides extra ammunition to use against each other. After all, it’s not a Hulk fight if there’s not objects getting flung around!
I can definitely see this scenario being played more regularly in my group. Next time, we might try out some of the harder difficulty levels and see how that goes too. Generally, we play Ultimate Encounters on Narrative difficulty for a chill afternoon of gaming. You can’t really go wrong with this one and a friend of mine mentioned that he felt it has a king of the ring, or battle royale feel to it.
Have you tried out the Incredible Hulk Ultimate Encounter? How do you like it? Was it a good fit for your gaming group? If you have, hit me up on Twitter/X (brushwizard), Bluesky (brushwizard.bsky.social), Instagram (brushwizardry), or if you’re a member of the Goonhammer Discord server share them on the dedicated Marvel: Crisis Protocol channel. I really enjoy hearing from the MCP Community!
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