Perhaps unsurprisingly, my major stumbling block in this one-shot against Progeny, “Turning of the Seasons,” was failing to take into account the scions that Progeny had in play. Once I finally trained myself to check whether Scion of Frost was in play — and thus would negate or worse the damage a hero was about to deal — we were in the second Steam game.

Playing more conservatively helped as well on the second outing. Putting Captain Cosmic’s Vitality Conduits early, and then flicking their ears with Guise’s Tough Choices helped keep hero HPs above 0. I still lost Cosmic himself in this round, but he’d helped Skyscraper and Guise keep back incapacitation long enough, and then Skyscraper’s Thorathian Monoliths, with some Rest and Recovery action in between, kept the damage at bay, and then Compulsion Canisters got most of the work done. As it was, it was the Freedom Fighters that took Progeny down completely, because it turns out that if Guise is immune to damage, he doesn’t have the opportunity to redirect it with Total Beefcake.

Citizen Dawn has a rightful reputation as a difficult villain if you aren’t specifically arming against her with techniques to take citizens out of her trash or mitigating her one-shot surprises. With the line-up offered in A Simple Plan, those tactics aren’t really options.

I’ve been practicing against one-shots on iOS and then taking what I’ve learned there to go for mint on Steam. In this game’s case, it took me five or six plays before I even beat Dawn at all. Some of the strategies I tried included:

• Using Wrathful Retribution on turn one to get Citizen Anvil’s blanket damage reduction off the board.
• Allowing multiple copies of Return with the Dawn to keep citizens out of the trash — worked okay, but wound up flooding the board with more villain damage than I could handle.
• Directing Citizen Hammer’s first damage instance to Absolute Zero, who reacts with Isothermic Transducer and saves everyone else from getting toasted.
• Banking on Citizens Summer and Hammer recurring and then using Flesh of the Sun Good to prevent their fire damage, thus allowing heroes to focus their damage where it was most pressing.
• Getting rid of Dawn’s ongoings as soon as Absolute Zero could play Fueled Freeze. Several games, I ignored them to capitalize on Drawn on the Flame, but her cranking out minions was more trouble than 4-5 points of damage to non-hero targets was worth.

And a lot of it was just luck. Return with the Dawn could be kind or cruel, depending on whether it resurrected someone like Anvil, who’s just doing damage, or Truth, who’s stopping you from dealing your team’s own damage where it really matters. Citizen Dawn may go nova and stay that way for turns on end while you have to suffer the slings and arrows of a trickle of citizens, or immediately flip back on the very same turn because there were enough citizens in play and in the trash to satisfy both conditions. I’d like to say I plan things like that out, but it really is just luck.

After a test run of this week’s Sentinels of the Multiverse one-shot on iOS, I thought my “for reals” playthrough on Steam was going to be relatively straightforward. I forgot, though, that my first play ended in a mint thanks to a great deal of luck, climaxing in an Inventory Barrage that did just enough damage to Gloomweaver to end the game.

For the Steam playthrough, I lost the first attempt and squeaked by on the second, resulting in a near mint issue. From my recollection, the main differences in the Steam games were not spamming Stun Bolts as heavily against Gloomweaver, never making use of Thorathian Monolith and shifting from using Super Scientific Tachyon’s Experiment to the more safe Research Grant.

For a villain that never destroys hero ongoings or equipment, this felt weirdly like an instance of having a hard time gaining traction. Once Skinwalker Gloomweaver flips, he’s gaining HP back every time a target is destroyed and playing a card when cultists are destroyed. There was plenty of damage options among the heroes in play — except when fricking Profane Zealot pops out yet again — but it’s hard to feel like one’s making progress when Gloomweaver’s playing yet more cards and healing up past where he was when the attack began.

In that regard, the Skinwalker variant is a nice upgrade from the original Gloomweaver, who’s kind of a cakewalk. This one keeps churning out minions, and some of his cultists are true pains in the ass, like the aforementioned Profane Zealot, as well as Cursed Acolyte.

And interestingly, last week’s Harbinger of Melancholy pairs with this week’s one-shot to mimic a challenge mode, in which the group plays against Spite, Agent of Gloom and, on victory, immediately plays against Skinwalker Gloomweaver with their present card set-ups and HP values. Fun, right? Personally, I’m a little nervous of when Handelabra implements challenge mode. Is that the future of weekly one-shots?