Wherein Jon Chronicles the Unthinkable

As I have a faintly ridiculous job, I find myself with Mondays off. Some might find that a blessing, but they're wrong and stupid and I hate them - Mondays are some kind of horrible purgatory where all of your friends are working at their real people grown-up jobs and you are left to your own devices until Jeopardy! comes on at seven-thirty. I've tried watching TV prior to that point, but TV saves its absolute worst for the middle of the day, foisting a non-stop buffet of men overjoyed to find that they are not the father and History Channel specials about Jesus' magic hidden bloodline being carted off by UFOs that we would have known about if only we had understood the impenetrable medieval poetry Nostradamus hid Scooby-Doo-like clues in. I've tried aimlessly wandering the streets, but the only people out there are other people in the same boat; all of us floating from place to place like so many ennui-fueled ghosts.

And so it's come to this - I am so incredibly bored I just played Heroclix against myself.

I picked up the Fantastic Four starter the other day but hadn't had a chance to bust the poor thing out as yet, see, and... well, Hell, there's really no good way to rationalize such a shamefully nerdy endeavor, is there? May as well give you an after-action report.

The set's made up of the FF, two Doombots and Doctor Doom. There's a new map - a four-player one, which kind've surprised me - and your standard tokens, too, as well as the newest iterations of the Powers and Abilities card and rulebook. I think the biggest changes are that Flight is now Outwittable (and Carry is a seperate ability, as near as I can tell) and Perplex now works 'til the beginning of your next turn. Which is how I've been playing Perplex at home for, like, a year. Oh, and Feat cards can now only make up ten percent of your build total.

For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, the starter pack completely fails to break down into two even teams. This is in spite of the fact that each member of the FF weighs in at a hundred points apiece and Doom's two hundred on his own. The Doombots are thirty and forty points, so I'd hoped there'd be a feat card or something to drag Team Doom up to at least 300 points total, but no dice. I tossed Brilliant Tactician and Dissent onto Doom and had him team up with yellow-ring Kang from the Supernova set - those two occasionally think they're the same person because Stan Lee is effing crazy*, plus their color schemes work out pretty well.

Anyway, I played on the Baxter Building map. The FF went first - Johnny carried Ben and Sue carried Reed, which marked the exact last point where they weren't getting their asses kicked. Some of you have played this stupid game with me before, and I think, if you have, you may have noticed that I have the least-lucky dice in the history of freaking ever. This, apparently, only holds true if I'm playing as good guys. Villains get the hot dice. Or, at least, they did today.

One of the Doombots has first-click Enhancement. Doom has one of those ridiculous I Can Use Either Outwit Or Perplex special powers (and also has a fifty-percent chance to Outwit a power on someone located, oh, anywhere on the map). Kang has a stupid high attack value to begin with. The other Doombot has... well, he has Willpower, I guess, and that's... good for him.

Thing missed an attack that should've utterly laid out Kang, thanks to Reed's crazy plus-two Perplex upping Ben's damage to something retarded like six. The FF burned one of their theme-team-bonus Probability Controls on that little disaster, but to no avail. Johnny critically missed a Running Shot because my dice are filled with tiny demons that hate heroism, but at least bought that click back on the next turn when the FF team ability kicked in after the Thing's brutal murder. That TA, incidentally, never came into play again - after the first time, Doom'd just Outwit the stupid thing with Dissent and have his cronies kill people dead with no consequences.

Torch ain't a bad ranged guy, but Kang and that Enhancement-bot coupled with Johnny's defense powers getting Outwitted by a half-a-fucking-mile-away Doom meant that he was getting shot in the face by magic time bullets every other turn.

Mr Fantastic's super-Perplex is solid, but the fact that there's no room to toss Brilliant Tactician on him in a 400 point game meant that he was stuck upping one guy's stats at a time while Doom was feeding his whole team horse growth hormones and the finest drugs villainy can buy.

Invisible Woman's impossible to target at range, unless she's facing Doom's super-outwit and the occassional ability to roll dice for values higher than three. That power kills Sue's Barriers and Invisibility dead, at which time she's down to an okay-to-high defense value.

Kang's the only guy on Team Doom to take any damage, which isn't shocking - he was the one running out front to shoot at people while Doom hid behind two robots, after all. Doom's got an amazing first click, but he still feels a little bit overpriced.

So, in summation: things went bad for the FF. The new Heroclix starter's okay. I'm still bored. The end.

*Seriously, the first time Doom and Rama-Tut meet, Doom pulls a gun and Rama-Tut (which is to say, Kang in a Pharaoh Costume) basically goes "well, what if we're the same guy? You'd be killing yourself!" Doom considers this for a minute and totally buys it. This is in spite of the fact that Kang's not wearing a mask. So, either Kang looks and sounds exactly like Doctor Doom to the point at which Doom thinks he's looking at and speaking to himself in a slightly gayer outfit or Doctor Doom is stupid as Hell. Beautiful.