This is exactly what I wanted. All of you, against all of me! How can you possibly hope to stop me?

Ultron, Age of Ultron

Ultron just levelled up. Atomic Mass Games have announced and published free rules for playing a “raid” against a much more powerful Ultron.

“Raids” are a 1 vs many event typical in MMOs where several players join together to fight a boss type encounter. This is similar, designed for 1 vs 2.

Two players each build 15 threat teams with no duplicated alter egos allowed – sorry, you can’t both have Zemo – and fight together against a single Uber-powered Ultron. Those quick with maths will have realised that without Ultron, there are exactly 30 threat of characters in the core set.

This is one of the great features of the company: they appear to be really thinking about the game creatively and from a player’s-eye view.

Activations have changed slightly. The “Crisis team” (people trying to stop Ultron) always activate first and choose three of their models to activate, from either crisis team. Then Ultron goes. Then three more of the crisis team. Then Ultron again. A final three of the crisis team and one last Ultron activation before cleanup and scoring. That does mean there may be a character that doesn’t activate at all, but after turn 1, you are very likely to have dazed characters so you won’t notice.

As ever, you can win by just KOing the opponents – though you do need to bust through Ultron’s beefy defenses and 8 health five times to win – but that isn’t the primary win condition.

Ultron is trying to destroy the city and has a doomsday device ready to do it. If he ever gets it online (controls all 4 objectives) he wins. There are also extract type objectives in terrified citizens which you can go looking for hidden in terrain. The Crisis team is trying to get them to safety and score VPs for doing so or controlling the Doomsday Consoles. Ultron scores VPs for destroying the citizens or KOing a crisis team member. First to 12 wins.

While the crisis teams are trying to deal with the situation, the doomsday device is wreaking havoc in some really fun ways, from gaining power to taking out terrified citizens for you to dealing damage to the opposing team. It’s a bit reminiscent of lair effects in D&D 5e.

The scenario has a range of difficulties which will be fun to experiment with.

I really like how they’ve used the idea of Corrupted Firmware to make Ultron hard to kill, but make the damage he is taking have consequences. His energy blast attack gets weaker, but eventually his The Rage if Ultron attack becomes a truly scary A2! It also acts as milestones, so the crisis team feels like their attacks are being effective, rather than slowly chipping away at a mountain of health.

I’m super excited to play this. It is a great USP for the game to draw in more players in a local community and having alternate game modes for the models you already have is something that can really set a game apart.

Good job AMG!