Heroclix Scenario: Survivor

My last post poked fun at an episode of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. Aside from the ridiculousness of the plot, and the nostalgia value of 1980's cheaply made cartoon series, Seven Little Superheroes actually makes for a great 3 round Heroclix scenario.



Survivor (or Seven Little Superheroes)
Build: a 700 point, 7 figure team - no more, no less than 7.
Golden Age or Modern Age (doesn't matter - venue's choice)
3 actions per turn (keeps the game moving fast, and makes powers like Leadership or free move TA's relevant)

Important: Before each round of the tournament, including the first round, one of your figures will get selected by your opponent to be voted off your team for the entire tournament (and vice versa). No Victory Points are awarded in this manner.

So for instance, while a team comes to the map with 7 members, the first round will be 6 figures on 6. The second game will be 5 on 5, and the last battle will be 4 on 4.

Survivor forces a player to build comprehensively, and not rely on one given strategy. Players are encouraged to avoid using Tentpoles - Cosmic Spider-Man would never see the map in this event.

Survivor also allows opponents to pick off the figure they think will give them the most trouble - OOTS Batman always a bother? Say Bye-Bye Bruce. Is Kid Zoom going to mess with your Nightcrawler? Kick the 'kid back to the future (but don't expect Kurt to stick around either!).

A well rounded build doesn't need to feature seven figures each exactly at 100 points - Gamora and Annihilus, for example, roughly total 200, as do Edward Nigma and Noh-Var (@ 201).

Depending on structure (Golden Age v. Modern Age) Feats are allowed to round out a team, though like any event individual feats can't be transferred to another figure. Should a feat require two people to work (ICWO, Sidekick) both must be on the board for the card to be in play.

I've run this event in the past, and seen some great teams. One player brought 5 War Skrulls, filling out the team with other Skrull Invaders. Another player fielded seven 100-point Sentinels, only to loose to the starter Fantastic Four (and their LEs).

Survivor is a fun exercise in team building, that offers plenty of room for comic accurate teams, with the JLA, Titans, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Inhumans, and many others featuring a number of competitive characters ~ 100 points.

For those really obsessed (like me) with the Seven Little Super-Heroes, here's a team you can build featuring the episode's line-up (with a substitution for the missing Shanna)

78 WS007 Spider-Man 81 WS020 Firestar 100 MU029 Iceman 103 UL066 Captain America 150 SI045 Namor 149 SI033 Dr. Strange 39 SN216 Kraven the Spider (as Shanna) 700

Seven Little Superheroes

Seven little superheroes
will vanish one by one,
Seven little superheroes,
soon there will be none...

So chortled the Chameleon in an episode of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. Loosely based off Agatha Christie's 10 little Indians, Seven Little Superheroes follows the exploits of Spider-Man, Iceman and Firestar as they travel to mysterious Wolf Island, meeting up with Dr. Strange, Namor, Captain America, and Shanna the She-Devil, all of whom received cryptic invitations to spend the weekend at a resort turned death camp, a sort of Club Med meets Club Dead.



Throughout the course of the episode, Chameleon uses an array of death traps, eliminating the heroes one at a time, occasionally taking their place in disguise to keep the heroes fighting amongst themselves. Namor falls first, tricked into swimming in alcohol (drying out his skin).

Namor = Whiner

"It's not water..."

...the Sub-Mariner cries in an incredibly campy moment - as though the Prince of Atlantis idiotically blundered into the trap because he was unable to smell a FULL SWIMMING POOL of Alcohol. This from a guy who spent 20+ years as an alcoholic in a wharfside tavern, before Johnny Storm sobered him up with a hot shave.


The episode is full of unintentionally funny Saturday morning cartoon cliches including annoying animal side-kicks, nonsensical death traps and a villain who talks to himself too much, using no logic whatsoever in his revenge attempts.

For instance, Captain America seemingly drowns early in the episode, showing up later caged in a prison, along with the rest of the heroes who were thought dead. Rather than kill off the heroes in the initial traps, Chameleon brings them all together to die at the hands of a giant bomb - he's wired the whole island to explode.

I'm sorry, but if Dr. Strange can't escape a simple cage,
he needs to hang up his cape.

Of course the Continental's master plan doesn't work - and why should it? As explained in the story each of the heroes had individually defeated the master of disguise in the past, so why Chameleon thought bringing them all together would result in anything buy a 7x whupping is a mystery.



From the beginning where Spider-Man finds his invitation taped to a random NYC skyscraper ledge (Chameleon obviously *knew* the Wall-Crawler would find it), to the number of times Chameleon chooses to impersonate scantily clad woman (he's got issues I tell you), this episode's got it all.