Marvel Crisis Protocol Battle report: Ultron ultimate encounter!

Alright, so in keeping with my catching up to several weeks ago thing, I present you the second game me and Jeremy played.

This time we threw down in some Marvel Crisis Protocol, but in a twist we opted to try out one of the ultimate encounters the game does. For those unaware, these ultimate encounters are designed to be played either co-op with two players vs. an AI controlled baddie, or as three player games with one person playing the baddie. Since we just had the two of us, we teamed up to take on Ultron is his ultimate encounter.

So full disclosure before I get into this: we cocked up. We're two college educated adults with some two plus decades of gaming experience between us, and we can't read at a third grade level it would seem. See, the encounter is supposed to work like so: we activate three characters, Ultron goes, we do another three characters, Ultron goes and then we do another three and Ultron takes his last activation of the turn. For the first half of the game, at least, us two dumbasses played it as we activate a character, and then Ultron goes until we've activated three characters and end of turn. So we probably made the first half of the game way harder than it needed to be. So yeah: we cocked up.

Anywho, our teams! We ran 17 points, I brought Hawkeye, Hela, Black Panther and Vision. Jeremy ran Star Lord, Gamora, Nebula, Rocket Racoon and Ronan.

Jeremy's Crisis Team

My hodgepodge of "I like that character"

So we deployed on one side of the table, near two of the doomsday devices that Ultron was trying to activate and spreading out to cover as much ground as we could. Ultron deployed on the other side, as one might guess, and the stage was set.

Crisis Teams deployed and ready for action

We started moving up, trying to find the terrified civilians to keep Ultron from ganking them and scoring early victory points. Sadly, due to our ineptitude in the world of reading basic English, Ultron started moving up too, and quickly activated two of the doomsday devices. So now he was rolling a healthy number of dice each round to determine what he was going to do, and it ended up being bad for us. 

Gamora and Hawkeye were both able to find civilians pretty early on, and Gamora was able to rush up to the center and get hers to safety. Hawkeye wasn't quite so fortunate.

Hawkeye has a civilian, and a heap of trouble

Ultron quickly moved up the board, more or less ignoring the rest of the heroes to bum-rush Hawkeye and try to take out the civilian he was escorting. Due to how we played early we didn't move enough heroes up to screen for Hawkeye and so he earned Ultron's ire pretty quickly. Sadly this ended up resulting in Hawkeye taking a lot of damage pretty early on.

Insert witty quip about fighting robots with a bow here

So with Hawkeye getting pummeled without mercy, the rest of the team needed to move up and try and draw Ultron's attention. Hawkeye was able to get away, eventually, but lost his civilian in the process. Hela moved up and grabbed a civilian (because that's not terrifying or anything), but was quickly lost it to Ultron's devious plans. So we decided that the heroes on Jeremy's side of the table would start grabbing civilians if they could (when Ultron wasn't blowing up all the terrain they were hiding in) and everyone else would go on the offensive.

Hela moves in to lay some hurt on Ultron and draw his attention.

This actually worked fairly well for a bit, and we were able to put an impressive amount of damage on Ultron and stun him a couple of times fairly quickly. But he was still rolling tons of dice because of those doomsday devices. Hakweye, now having excused himself from the festivities, was sitting on a stockpile of power tokens and was able to use his hook arrow to move about quickly and turn off both doomsday devices. Gamora and Star Lord continued searching for civilians, Vision moved to engage Ultron as did Black Panther and Ronan. Nebula took a lot of damage from Ultron's rolls and was in bad shape. Rocket, on the other hand, basically hadn't moved yet.

Hawkeye pulling his weight in the backfield

With Ultron's devices all off, we went on a total offensive. Nebula moved up and began the attack, dealing some damage to the raging robot. Black Panther was able to use his speed to quickly get into the fray and start tossing dice, but Ultron was getting some good defense rolls and was really putting up a fight.

The King moves in to lay down the pain

After a slew of attacks (and us finally realizing how the damn rules worked) Ultron was on the ropes. He was still hanging on, though, and we couldn't have that. Nebula was taken out of action, followed soon by Gamora. Ronan, as it turns out, would avenge them in spades as he moved up and used his Kree Justice power to bring the pain in a serious way. Through a stunning failure of his defense rolls, and Jeremy rolling better than I've ever seen him do before, Ronan managed to score eight hits on Ultron! He was practically dead, only needing to be stunned one more time for us to win the game.

There's no justice like Kree Justice

We continued on the attack, Ronan hitting again with Vision coming in to assist and take Ultron down a few pegs. Finding himself surrounded Ultron had all the squishy fools he could ever want (and one robot) to beat on. He thrashed out and did some damage, but not enough to pose a real threat in the moment. Then Hela, the bad-ass she is, moved in for the kill. Using the obscene amount of power tokens she had accumulated (for real, she had like 17 or something) and her three lost souls tokens she was able to unleash a devastating attack that, despite his best efforts, Ultron could not stop. And so the machine fell, and the heroes won the day.

Hela stands triumphant!

All in all, despite our best efforts to fail at reading, the game was damn fun. We figured it'd probably be better with a third person controlling Ultron, since we were able to, eventually, just sort of pen him in and manipulate the AI into not chasing down the heroes rescuing the civilians. It was still a good time, and we're anxious to try the Thanos encounter at some point down the road. This is a really cool feature that Atomic Mass have put into the game, and allows for a fun alternative to just constantly fighting each other.

I hope you've enjoyed this, and I apologize for not covering every move as I'm running on two week old memory at this point. I look forward to playing some more in the future, and bringing it to you guys.