You begin the game with a team of 3 warriors. A deck of 100 Power Cards is shuffled and you're dealt 9 cards to distribute equally to your warriors. Each Power has different strength, weakness, and abilities. There are six categories of Powers, including Gadgets, Bio-Mods, Skills, Mutations, Super-Powers, and Magic. The power types are Move, Strike, Defense, or Special. There is a color-coded frame on top of each card which makes it easy to recognize which type of warrior you're creating. If you have a lot of red cards for example, you're creating a heavy hitter that does mega damage. If a warrior has a lot of blue cards, he is specializing in movement which is useful when you capture an opponent's flag.
Strike powers can do either Hard, Sharp, Energy, Mental damage, or sometimes a combination of two types. There are several ranged powers like the Rifle, Psychic Blast, or Zorch Ball. Some of the more interesting and bizarre ways of causing pain include the Krypto-Curse, Wake the Dead to attack your opponent with a legion of zombies, or by Desecrating your opponent's base and make him "take 1 point of Mental damage from the shock and horror of seeing you there".
If you just want to annoy your opponent you can Freeze him in place, steal his gizmos with Magnetism, or turn Invisible and become virtually immune to attack.
There's also several creative ways of building up a character's defense like Acrobatic Evasion, Stunning Beauty, or Living Statue. If you have the Stupid power you become immune to Mental damage. Intelligence makes you immune to 1 damage type per turn. The card even says you can become Stupid AND Intelligent at the same time, thus preventing Mental and one other type of damage (they don't call it Strange Synergy for nothing). Some defensive powers can be used offensively like Smoke Bombs or Electro Zap.
Customizing your warriors is the real trick of the game since each player is trying to maximize their powers by combining them with other abilities. This is the most creative and strategic aspect to the game (and the most fun IMHO). After a quick look through the cards it seemed like there were some possibilities for broken combos but what are the odds of that happening right?
Apparently, the odds are VERY likely. Out of the three games we played, 2 ended in an unbeatable stalemate situation and the third involved such rules bickering that we ended the game early. I'll explain what happened in those games below but let's finish with the rules first.
After you assign your Power cards, you place your warriors on the board and begin to battle! On your turn, each of your warriors takes a turn. They can perform one strike and one move in any order. You can move up to two spaces orthogonally unless a special power modifies this. Obstacles and other warriors can hinder your movement but also provide cover from ranged attacks. But watch out for Knockback damage since it can hurt you even more if you bump into obstacles.
Each warrior can make one strike per turn. Melee attacks must be made in adjacent, non-diagonal spaces. Most Strikes require a D6 die roll to succeed. Each warrior has a basic strike that does 1 point of Hard damage with a successful die roll of 4 or higher. This is a very weak attack compared to most of the Strike power cards and is usually used only as a last resort. When a warrior takes enough damage to reduce its hits to zero, it dies and drops all of its Gadgets. This creates a treasure horde for other warriors to pick up.
In addition to your Power Cards, each of the four superhero teams has a permanent special ability. The Orcs start with 7 hits instead of the normal 6, Goths do 2 hits of damage from a basic strike, Cats have +1 movement unless they're carrying gadgets, and Mad Scientists may carry any number of gadgets instead of the normal limit of 3.
Basic combat is simple but can become rather complicated since several super powers modify the rules. The combat in Strange Synergy is very tactical and reminds me of HeroClix since it requires so many abilities comboing off other powers. There is such a large variety of super powers that you're not only comboing a character's abilities, but also comboing abilities from one character with powers from a different character. The person that runs around making straightforward attacks will not last very long in this game. It also requires you to carefully read all of your opponent's cards and constantly cross reference them with yours. Several powers are Secret and let you keep the card hidden until you use its ability. More often then not, a seemingly weak warrior becomes a major powerhouse with his hidden combo. This makes determining the real threats very tentative indeed!
You can win by either destroying all of your opponent's warriors, or by returning your flag and an opponent's flag back to your base. Sound pretty cool so far? Well, it is until you start running into rule conflicts and broken card combos.
Our first game featured a character with the Intangibility, Zorch Ball, and Tremor power. Intangibility is an automatic defense that makes your character immune to all Hard, Sharp, and Energy damage. Unfortunately the only character with a Mental strike died early which left the Intangible character totally invulnerable.
When you're Intangible you can't make any Hard, Sharp, or Energy attacks. This means that his Zorch Ball and even basic attack becomes useless since it's Hard damage. Now there's no way to kill the Intangible character and no way for him to attack! Sound like a stalemate situation? We thought so until one opponent had the idea of killing him with Glue. If a character can't move or strike for 3 turns in a row, he becomes Neutralized and dies. The Glue power allows you to hold a character in place with a die roll of 4 or more. So all you need to do is get lucky and Glue the Intangible character in place for 3 turns, right? This almost worked until the Intangible character used his Tremor ability. Tremor is a Super-Power Strike which makes everyone but yourself move in a random direction. Since it doesn't cause ANY damage it is a perfectly legal Strike even when you're Intangible. When the Neutralizing strategy became utterly useless the game really did become an stalemate (the worst possible thing to happen in any game) and both players conceded.
Intangibility seemed way too powerful so I looked through the deck to find other cards that might balance it out. To my dismay, I found even worse combos which could make a character completely invulnerable from EVERY type of damage. Such combos included mixing Intangibility with the Mirror, Stupid, Robot Body, Anti-Magic Aura, or Reaction power.
The next game ended with a similar stalemate situation. One of the cat characters had the Invisibility, Voodoo, and Healer power. Voodoo is an automatic ability that allows you to change any die roll by +1 or -1 but costs you 1 hit. Each time the cat used Voodoo, she would just use the Healer ability and gain the life back. When all the other cat characters were killed she quickly turned Invisible and took the flag her opponent needed to win. Her opponent's characters had the Pistol and Electo Zap power and proceeded to fire randomly in a vain attempt to hit something. This game dragged on until they realized how futile it was and finally conceded. Even if they got a lucky shot, which isn't easy with her Voodoo's -1 from a die roll ability, the cat could quickly restore her lives with the Healer power anyway.
The 3rd game almost came to blows when an orc character had the Teleportation, Minotaur, and The Moves power. Teleportation allows you to "move any number of squares in a straight line" and you can even ignore any obstacles in your path. Combine this with The Moves that allows you to take one extra move each turn and you can Teleport anywhere on the board! The Minotaur power lets you strike characters by moving into the same space and butting them. This does Hard damage equal to the spaces you moved in a straight line before hitting him. Basic characters have 6 life points so it's not too hard to Teleport at least 6 spaces and kill them. If this still isn't enough, the Minotaur's attack also does knock-back damage.
This lead to a heated debate since the Teleportation card says you ARE technically moving, you just "are not actually passing through those squares". The argument was intense enough to make both of the other players vow to never play the game again. It also scared everyone else away from even trying the game again. This is a real shame since I'd like to play a couple more games to redeem its reputation. Unfortunately, I doubt I'll be able to convince anyone to give it another chance until Steve Jackson posts some serious errata.
Besides the HeroClix fans in our group, most people had little interest in Strange Synergy. The hard-core miniature gamers were turned off by the combat's lack of strategic depth. The CCG gamers were turned off since only a fraction of the game involves customizing your warriors. Most of the CCG gamers I know like tweaking their decks more than actually playing them. And playing the game is merely a way of testing their deck for further tweaking. You could increase your options by dealing out more cards and choosing 9 of them, but this was still not enough to attract their attention.
If I had to rate Strange Synergy I'd give it 6 out of 10 stars. It's a cool concept but lacks any hint of game balance other than everyone ganging up on to take down the toughest warrior. Since there's no casting cost or upkeep, each of the card's power level is dependent on combos. Having an Anti-Magic Aura is completely useless if no one else has any Magic powers, while a card like Mind Control is totally devastating and even more dangerous with combos like the Enhancer Helmet or Sorcery.
I'm a fan of Phil Foglio and was very disappointed that he only made 12 pieces of art for the warrior cards. That's a total of 13 illustrations if you include the box cover. Even smaller companies like Z-Man games manages to scrounge up art for their cards. The components are on high quality paper stock but 100 cards and a handful of counter cut-outs seems a bit steep for $30. Strange Synergy can be a fun game if you don't take it too seriously. I would keep this far away from the reach of any hard-core gamer unless you're just looking for a fight.
Posted Tue Sep 16, 2003 1:53 pm
Result: dead kitty and game over.
