We’ve assembled the greatest names in superhero team history. Can you name the following teams in the order of when they first appeared?
Archives: Projects
Quiz Answers: Superhero Teams
Were you shocked by some of these answers? Yes, no?
What you should be shocked by is that despite their popularity, X-Men started as a rip-off of Doom Patrol. Notice the taglines at the top of the comic books: “The World’s Strangest Heroes!” (Doom Patrol) versus “The Strangest Super-Heroes of All!” (X-Men). Doom Patrol had Beast Boy, and X-Men had Beast. Both teams were composed of four males and one female. We don’t really need any more do we?
We do? Okay. Brotherhood of Evil (Doom Patrol), Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (X-Men). Chief is the Doom Patrol’s redheaded and bearded, wheelchair-bound leader with a superior intellect. Professor X is the X-Men’s bald, clean-shaven, wheelchair-bound leader with telepathic powers and a superior intellect.
Enough of that. Let’s see how we did.
All 6 correct) With your superior intellect and telepathic powers, you knew the answers to this quiz before this quiz was created. Cheater!
4-5 correct) You may not have telepathic powers, but you’re so brave and bold that there’s no way Starro could take over your mind.
2-3 correct) The ground shakes, but you can’t tell if it’s caused by Mole Man’s Monsters or if the Thing is passing gas again.
0-1 correct) No one thawed you out properly. Stick the turkey back in the oven until it’s fully cooked.
Ticket to Ride
Designer: Alan R. Moon
Publisher: Days of Wonder
Date Released: 2004
Number of Players: 2-5
Age Range: 8 and up
Setup Time: 5-10 minutes
Play Time: 45 minutes or less
Game Mechanics:
Hand Management
Route/Network Building
Set Collection
Game Flow and Review:
Take a cross-country train adventure. Collect and play matching train cards to claim railways across North America.
This simple premise and core gameplay has resulted in a new renaissance of U.S. board games. Ticket to Ride exploded into game stores in 2004, ten years prior to this review, spawned over ten spin-offs and expansions to date and fueled its publisher Days of Wonder to become one of the modern board game industry’s giants.
The rules are easily learned in minutes. Each player begins the game with a collection of adorable, colored, plastic train pieces (each player chooses their color), a hand of four train cards (color-coded to match the point-to-point routes between the cities on the game board), and five destination ticket cards. Five train cards are dealt face-up for a draw pile.
At the start of the game, players keep which destinations they have in their hand that they think they can complete in the game, and return the rest of the cards to the ticket pile. A destination ticket has two cities printed on it, and if the player chooses to complete the ticket, earning the points indicated on the card, they must construct a continuous route with their plastic train pieces across North America from one of the two cities to the other. Obviously, a route from New York to Los Angeles would be worth more points than a route from Vancouver, Canada to Portland, Oregon. But you lose points, equal to the points you would’ve gained, for every ticket you don’t complete.
Each connection between the two cities has a color-coded route, and players must match the colored route with the same colored train cards in their hand. Locomotive cards are wild and extremely valuable.
A player can do one of three things on their turn: claim a route with their train pieces, draw more train cards from either the draw pile or the deck, or draw more destination tickets (they have to keep at least one ticket). Play continues until someone runs out of train pieces.
Those are the rules. Well, I should mention that each route you claim has its own point value, and the longer the individual route (from city to city), the more points you receive. You don’t necessarily have to complete all the tickets you have. You could build one continuous route across the entire country, blocking off your opponents and earning the longest continuous route bonus. You also have to be sneaky.
Since you can only claim one route at a time, cross-country destination tickets are difficult to claim. Your opponents can see which direction you’re headed and they can cut you off from your goal. If you take train cards from the face-up pile, your opponents can also glean which route you’re eyeing.
Ticket to Ride is simple, elegant and difficult to master. All of these characteristics result in an evergreen, a game that never loses the green it earns.
Verdict:
A must play for any designer game (a game that puts its designer’s name in a place of honor like an author of a book) enthusiast. You can learn the rules to Ticket to Ride in minutes, but it’ll take you a long to time to master them.
Say What Quiz: Week of September 29, 2014
So many quotes, so little time. Here are some more quotes by comic book characters. Can you match the quote to the character who said it?
Quotes:
1) Things: somehow we always manage to hold on to things, while men sink, doomed around us.
2) Once you find an excuse for killing, you will never lack one.
3) You just made the biggest mistake of your life. And the last.
4) The paths are less clear now, for a man whose chief pleasure is shattering mirrors.
5) Please be kind. Be gentle.
6) Insanity is defined by its cultural milieu.
Characters:
A) Black Canary
B) Doctor Doom
C) Man-Thing
D) Phantom Stranger
E) Spider-man
F) Wolverine
Quiz Answers: Say What Week of September 29, 2014
1: E (Spider-man); 2: D (Phantom Stranger); 3: F (Wolverine); 4: B (Doctor Doom); 5: A (Black Canary); 6: C (Man-Thing)
Things: somehow we always manage to hold on to things, while men sink, doomed around us.
Once you find an excuse for killing, you will never lack one.
You just made the biggest mistake of your life. And the last.
The paths are less clear now, for a man whose chief pleasure is shattering mirrors.
Please be kind. Be gentle.
Insanity is defined by its cultural milieu.
Spotlight: The Wraith
First Appearance: Sentinels of the Multiverse: Base Game
Who she is: She’s the Batman of the Sentinels of the Multiverse’s main superhero team, the Freedom Five
Innate Power: Stealth: Prevent the next 2 damage that would be dealt to the Wraith.
Primary Damage Type: Projectile
Secondary Damage Type: Melee
Nemesis: Spite
Deck Concept: Quite possibly the most versatile of all hero decks, the Wraith deck can do pretty much anything: damage or control.
Deck Strength: Like the major influence of her deck the Wraith doesn’t really need a team to kick some serious tail. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t have hidden records and plans to neutralize her teammates a la the Justice League story arc, Tower of Babel.
Best Team Support Card: Infrared Eyepiece: Look at the top 2 cards of the villain deck. Put 1 of them on top of the villain deck and the other on the bottom of the villain deck. Draw a card.
Best Personal Support Card: Impromptu Invention: Draw a card. Search your deck for an equipment card and either put it into play or your hand. Shuffle your deck. You may play a card.
Best Attack: Throat Jab: The Wraith deals 1 target 2 melee damage. That target cannot deal damage until the start of your next turn.
Deck Weakness: Not much. There are some cards you wish might be stronger or last longer but that’s nit-picky. The set up for her abilities can be slow because she uses a lot of equipment cards (like Batman), and she hates it when villain and environment decks destroy her equipment cards. But let’s be honest, even the Wraith’s weakest card isn’t that bad.
Worst Card: Combat Stance: The first time the Wraith is dealt damage by a target each turn, the Wraith deals that target 2 melee damage.
Ultimate Team-up: The Wraith doesn’t need any stinking teammates; she’s a wrecking machine onto herself. In all seriousness she works well with, or rather independently from anyone, but there is one notable anti-team-up. The Wraith doesn’t jive well with Ra’s Imbued Fire, which changes all hero damage to fire type damage. The Wraith doesn’t do fire well. She pumps up her projectile damage and that doesn’t do you any good if she doesn’t deal projectile damage.
The Wraith’s Smoke Bombs card can redirect damage which works well with heroes sporting damage immunity or damage negation like Legacy, Visionary, Nightmist, or the Scholar. The villain deck control component of the Wraith’s deck, Infrared Eyepiece, works in concert with the Visionary, Nightmist and Tempest decks, allowing the heroes to lockdown their foes abilities.
Geekly TV: September 26, 2014
Gotham
Kyle’s Review
The creative team behind Gotham has some good ideas, but they squeeze them into the blender that is the pilot episode and hit frappe. Watching the seedy streets of Gotham through the eyes of a tweenage Catwoman is fun for a while (before you find out that all she does is prowl Gotham when she isn’t Bruce’s creepy stalker). Then we get the Wayne death scene which feels robotic. There are a few reasons for this: uneven acting, sudden shifts in POV between the aforementioned Catwoman and Bruce Wayne, and slowing down the moment so it has an other-worldly feel when the scene occurs in real time instead of flashback. (If you wanted to show this scene in flashback form, you should have given us an adult Bruce Wayne as Batman.)
But the clunky life-altering scenes don’t stop with the Waynes’ death. A ten-year-old or so Ivy Pepper (AKA Poison Ivy AKA Pamela Isley) watches the GCPD invade her home as she tends to her plants. Ivy suffers from Gotham’s interlocking origins as her story arc ties closely with Bruce’s storyline, but she isn’t the only one. The Penguin actually takes the plunge into supervillainhood by episode’s end, and it feels rushed. Cobblepot’s cohorts tease him with a nickname, Penguin, that isn’t explained or earned (he looks more like a weasel), and his arc ties into Gordon’s and Bullock’s. You can feel The Penguin, and most other characters, getting shoehorned into the episode. Slow down, Gotham. You have an entire season to introduce these villains or the people who will become Batman’s rogue’s gallery.
Speaking of Batman’s rogues, Edward Nygma fumbles his way on-screen for a half a minute as an annoying crime scene investigator who asks too many questions or riddles, while a comedian with a love of gory jokes sweats his bodyweight on the stage in front of Fish Mooney. Could he become The Joker? Groan.
The dichotomy of Gordon’s clean cop and Bullock’s not-so-clean cop works well, but that’s mostly because of the engaging Bullock not Gordon. While Bullock brings his patented style of moral ambiguity, perfect for Gotham’s mean streets, Detective Gordon struts around stiff, making questionable decisions. Many of Gordon’s choices are unwise (telling multiple people inside and outside of his department that they killed an innocent man and yet not filling a report), others are obtuse (anytime he speaks with Bruce Wayne: especially after the Wayne death scene), and some are flat out stupid (confronting Mooney without any back-up).
Despite all these issues, the city of Gotham feels like it should, Carmine Falcone adds a dash of pepper in the scene he has, and Bullock should be a fan favorite by season’s end.
Verdict: I remain cautiously optimistic
Jim’s take:
Kyle and I are pretty much in agreement on this one. Gotham is neither as good as I hoped, nor as bad as I feared. There are some instances of cringe-worthy dialogue (the references to Penguin, and a cliche war analogy), and there are far too many characters in this episode with nothing to do. The decision to have all these characters’ origins interconnect feels contrived, but for all its faults, there are signs of promise. Gotham feels like its own city here, not just New York with a paint-job, and Donal Logue as Harvey Bullock is definitely the high point. The show might improve, and it will need to if it’s going to hold my interest, but the pilot did its job. I’ll check out the next episode.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Season 2 Premiere
Jim’s Review
Let me come clean. I’ve got a thing for Hayley Atwell; an unwavering, and mildly alarming thing. With that said, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (AoS) kicked off season 2 with a bit of a tease. A flashback to 1945 set up the plot with a cameo from Peggy Carter (Atwell), Dum Dum Dugan (Neal McDonough), and The Howling Commandos, but it’s short-lived. This first arc is a familiar one. There’s a super-powered villain and another “084” in play. Both of these remain factors at the close of the episode, so we can assume this thread will carry through at least part of the season. It’s a little formulaic at this point, but the real aim of the opener is to reacquaint us with the state of the Marvel universe as we left it. This is done somewhat effectively, and we start to see how the characters have evolved over the break, but the developments aren’t always believable. As usual, the team’s plans come together a bit too easily, and I’m left with the feeling that outsmarting the bad guys ought to be more complicated, otherwise having them in the lead is no small embarrassment. The show’s big reveal at the end of the episode (no spoilers) isn’t so much a shocker as it is a groaner. It has potential for a major character development, but it was used more as fodder for one of Coulson’s speeches about “why we fight,” and it appears at least for now like it’s going to be used as another heavy-handed example of how good the “good guys” really are. Some of the lapses in subtlety and logic have carried over from season 1, but the improvements we saw following The Winter Soldier are still there. This is a much better debut than we saw last season.
Verdict: Not bad.
The Awesomes
Kyle’s Review
This week’s episode was a lot better than the previous week’s. The story progressed because there was no possible way that the creative team would create and introduce yet another character, and this season’s loose strands of a story came together for the most part. The people of the city reinstated “Awesomes Day” for all the great deeds the Awesomes had done over the past year—even though most of their accomplishments occurred away from home, so Perfect Man (ugh) could have his bits where he wandered Awesome Mountain alone, and the times where the action occurred at home Metal Fella (Hot Wire) saved the day in lieu of the team. Reinstating Awesomes Day made little to no sense but at least some laughs ensued and the season appears to have gotten back on the track. The characters are back. The laughs have returned. Even Perfect Man’s bits had a little payoff and some chuckles this week. Finish strong, Awesomes. Finish strong.
Verdict: Worth a look
Comic Book Reviews for the Week of 9/24/2014
Superman: Future’s End #1
DC Comics
Jurgens/Weeks
In case you haven’t caught on yet, I’m not really enthusiastic about the Future’s End tie-ins, but for better or worse, that’s really what DC’s been up to this month. My problem with this issue, as was the case with Justice League’s last Future’s End tie-in, is that this is a bit of misdirection. It’s really not a Superman book. It’s not just that Superman is absent here. Lots of titles move away from their main characters now and again, but what this issue does is offer a replacement, someone posing as the man of steel. To clarify, I’ll need to give a small something away, so this is a MINOR SPOILER ALERT: Billy Batson/Shazam has taken up the identity of Superman to close the gap caused by Clark Kent’s absence. It’s an interesting look at an older, war-weary Billy, and fans of the Shazam character may enjoy that, but it feels like a cheat for anyone hoping this issue would shed some light on Clark’s status. SPOILER FREE: With all that said, this issue does offer something of a nice, self-contained story, and it does offer a small piece of development for Lois Lane.
Verdict: Not bad
Superman: Doomed #2
DC Comics
Pak/Soule/Lashley/Kudranski/Bullock/Chruchill/Quintana
Superman: Doomed has been a bit flat for me. Part of that has been because so many of the tie-ins have made the narrative a convoluted one, but it’s also been because this feels too much like the “repeat” section of the wash/rinse process. Doomsday and Brainiac feel like the burger and fries of Superman’s part of the DC Universe, and it seems like there just isn’t much new ground being covered. #2 has made itself a small exception. In this issue, the (rather large) team manages to make these confrontations feel a little fresher than before, and I’m impressed to see such a large creative team able to blend so well. With the mind-jumping that comes with any story that involves Brainiac, Martian Manhunter, and a telepathic Lois Lane, the layout of the art sometimes makes it difficult to follow who is connected to whom, but aesthetically speaking, the art is sound.
Verdict: Worth a look.
Harley Quinn: Future’s End #1
DC Comics
Palmiotti/Conner/Hardin
It may sound weird to say it, but of all the Future’s End titles I’ve been reading, I had possibly the highest hopes for this one. That’s partly because unlike so many of the others, Harley Quinn’s tie-in is written by the series regulars, but also the nature of the title itself makes it somewhat immune to the things that impact the other books in DC’s domain. That is to say, Harley’s book can’t really be folded in with the rest of the DC universe. That’s to say that when you read her solo title, you have to go into it expecting that the 4th wall may be broken, she may have a slumber party with Poison Ivy, or that one day, she just may give Darkseid a wedgie. We don’t quite get that here, but this issue involves a romp on a deserted island that doesn’t necessarily have to impact the continuity of anything at all. That’s a bit refreshing, but some of the humor that makes Harley Quinn a fun break from the ordinary DC universe just isn’t working in this issue. It’s not bad. It’s just that it tends to go for the predictable, and while there’s a guest appearance from a significant figure (I won’t spoil it, but you really should be able to figure it out here), there’s not a whole lot about their encounter that makes this book a must-read.
Verdict: Not bad
Deadpool #35
Marvel Comics
Posehn/Duggan/Hawthorne
After the break featuring one of their “lost in the vault” issues, we get back to business with the newly-married Deadpool and his newly-discovered daughter. This is basically a business-as-usual Deadpool book. We get the all-too-easy, Deadpool in his undies panels, and a run-in with an old nemesis whom Deadpool reminds us is actually pretty ridiculous. What really works with this issue is the line between funny and sincere that Wade walks where his daughter is concerned. We also see Deadpool continue trying to find help for Kim and company, though there isn’t a lot of movement in the story. What this issue does offer are some decent quips, and the sort of sight-gag panels we appreciate and expect from the title.
Verdict: Worth a look
Quiz Answers: Collectible Card Games
Pokemon may be the youngest game of the six listed here, but it isn’t that much younger than the CCG that started it all. Did you know your Squirtles from your Mox Rubies? Let’s see how we did.
All 6 correct) Take that, Ash. You are the very best/the best that ever was or will be. You caught ’em all.
4-5 correct) You missed so few of these that I smell a conspiracy. Did your internet signal pass through the Bermuda Triangle? Or did the Gnomes of Zurich have a hand in this result.
2-3 correct) Good news: you pulled a chaos orb. Bad news: you ripped your chaos orb card into a hundred pieces, threw the confetti into the air and only hit two of your opponents cards. Easy come, easy go.
0-1 correct) Your a Dragon clan tattooed monk of the highest order. Too bad you were serving a vow of solitude, living under a rock in the nineties.
Timeline: Collectible Card Games
Remember the surge of collectible card games, also known as CCGs, in the early to mid nineties? This golden age of CCGs saw a lot of great and not-so-great games. Do you think you can name these early CCGs in the order in which they were released?
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