Palatinus' OverPower Forum

Hi all,

Happy to see some people are still playing OverPower. I love the game. I played all the time from the release of DC all the way through Image and X-Men. We had a small group of about eight friends and family that would get together and play all the time.

I was lucky to obtain a full collection of my own from a friend who got out of the game after Classic was released. He actually gave me this large collection as payment for helping him sell some collectables, so I lucked out as he had multiples of every single card; from Beyonder to Leech to almost every character card, his collection was so large I was able to allocate a large number of cards to other friends and still had thousands left over.

The deck building and the playing was a ton of fun. Most of us didn't venture too deep into the tournament scene, especially since it was dominated by X-Babies/Vertigo themed decks which made the game too easy and not as much fun to play. I don't think the majority of people got into OverPower to use the X-Babies (there may be some exceptions, but still), and while it was fun to lay the smack down sometimes using the babies and four or five Vertigo's, we liked to try different combinations of characters to increase the fun (Darkseid was a personal favorite).

Well, eventually as we all know Image (Spawn!!! Malebolgia was a beast reserve character) and X-Men were released and The Marvels was next in line. I spent a ton of time in the chats that Jack has archived on his overpower.ca website, excited for The Marvels set. I had grand plans for Spider-Man and just about all the specials looked promising. There was also the tease of the set that was to come after The Marvels that would feature the villains and that had me as excited as can be. I was hoping for favorites like Kang, Zemo, Ultron, Annihilus and of course the Darkseid of Marvel; Thanos.

Those sets sadly never arrived. The game stopped production and while my group carried on for a year or two after the game 'died', creating specials and new characters (but without a good printer, it wasn't the same), eventually everyone left and sold their collections, including me. However, when I sold my collection, and I sold it for quite a bit of cash, so that was nice, I made sure to take out one of each character card, with the exception of Beyonder and the symbiote Spider-Man (only had one of those), which were sold with the rest of the collection. The collection was sold, and I put the character cards in plastic cases and into storage.

A couple years ago our area suffered a storm which knocked out all power for a couple days. During that time there wasn't a lot to do, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I had plenty of time to read, which was a delight, but I also reserved some time to clean out the boxes in storage, and that's when I discovered all of my character cards. I took them upstairs into my office and looked through the cards and realized that I missed playing the game. I didn't have any of the cards except for the characters, and no one was around who still played (let alone owned any of the cards), so I eventually devised a solitaire game using a deck of cards and assigned the four suits to match the four skill sets in OverPower and ended up really enjoying myself. The time flew right by and before you know it, the power was restored, and along with that, I discovered a use for the character cards I held onto. 

Flash forward to a couple months ago. I would sometimes look online or on youtube to see if anyone was still doing anything with the game of OverPower. Were people still creating custom sets with new characters, were there new strategies, or was the game dead and gone. I was happy to see the game was still alive for some, and I watched some of the Toronto OP videos online and that led me to discover Jack's site and this message board.

I read through the board and enjoyed the strategy talk and the deck building advice and seeing a tool that allows people to play OP online got me excited. I then read a thread where Jack posted his print setup and showed some samples of Daredevil and Galactus four stat. The samples blew my mind and I reached out to Jack via email and asked if he could craft some custom character cards for me. I already had the artwork and the grids but I didn't have the skillset to get it done. I had always wanted to add more DC and Bat-famly characters to the game. I also wanted to 'correct' some grids for DC (Superman should have always been 8-4-8-4 and Batman should be 1-8-4-7) and add those bad guys Marvel never got around to making. Thankfully, I reached Jack when I did, during a small gap when he had some extra time before work on The Marvels set got going and I got a batch of new characters added to my collection (for a very fair price). Many thanks again for helping me out Jack. 

Well, if anyone is still reading, I wanted to give you my OverPower life story, so to speak. I've read the forums for quite some time and decided to finally signup so that I can discuss the game I enjoyed for many years and who knows, maybe play an OverPower online game or two.

John

hey, welcome back!

the ol, going through the closet re-into, eh?...me too

couldn't agree more about superman deserving a double 8 (the vast majority here won't agree), but i also think bats should have the 8i too.

where abouts are you from?

I'm from the Western New York area; Depew to be exact (it's a suburb of Buffalo).

When I played in my group (and when I sent my grids to Jack for the custom cards), Superman was the only character in the game, with the exception of Galactus and Anti-Monitor (custom), who had more than one 8 on his grid. He's Superman, if anyone deserves more than one 8 it's him. At 24 points you would still be able to build a team with a 19 or 20 point character and two 16's or one 16 and one 17. From reading up on DC OverPower, I understand what they were trying to do to a point (pushing for DC vs DC; hero vs villain only), but you have to treat the top dogs like top dogs, and Superman is basically the original template for super powered heroes.

As for Batman; he's my all-time favorite superhero. I'm a Bat geek for sure. I love the work Grant Morrison has done on Batman over the last few years and I have custom cards of Dr. Hurt (5-3-3-7), the Bowie influenced design of Joker (2-6-3-7), Talia Al Ghul (3-7-3-7) and Damian Wayne (3-7-3-3). Batman for me should be a 1-8-4-7. I wouldn't fight giving Bats an 8 for intellect, but I think as a non-powered hero, he should only have one 8 on his grid and that should be for his fighting skill. 

iirc, larry van etten (aka the orange king) is also from the buffalo area.  he comes up to the toronto meet-ups occasionaly.  maybe you can get a car-pool going!

in fact, i think another poster might have mentioned being from around the buffalo area

way ta go TGW

Welcome to the forums, John! Great that you've found your way back to Overpower.

Really cool how you used a plain ol' deck of cards to play overpower with your character cards!