Achievement League: A New Way To Play

One of my local players came up with the idea of a Challenge/Achievement based League for our weekly play.  The whole idea was to get players creative juices flowing.  Sure, you could beat your opponent over the head with the latest T3K Team… but where is the fun in that?

The concept was simple:  you got points for winning games, but you got even more points for meeting the challenges outlined for the League.  We even awarded points just for walking in the door (we are trying to grow the game here).  Each week, in addition to our regular store entry fee, we would put $2 into a pot.  This money grew until we had enough to purchase a Gravity Feed for prizing.  Once we hit that number, this round of the League would be over.  The more you showed up, the faster the pot built and the more points you earned.

Each challenge was assigned a point value (10).  However, this was a floating value.  The more people who completed the challenge would decrease the point value proportionally.  You may have earned a whopping 10 points right off the bat, but by the end of the League that challenge may only be worth 1 point.

The challenges were broken up into three categories:

1. Win Based Challenges
2. Build Based Challenges
3. Gameplay Based Challenges

Win Based Challenges

• Win a game only with combat damage, without using Overcrush.
• Win a game through non-combat (direct) damage only, without using and Super Rares, Rare Cosmic Cube, or Vicious Struggle.
• Win a game using only cards with blank text boxes.

Build Based Challenges

• Create a Team using only cards from Organized Play (Blue Stripes).  No alternate art character cards allowed.
• Create a Team consisting only of Common Cards.
• Create a Team consisting only of Uncommon Cards (No Gorilla Grodd).
• Create a Team consisting only of Rare Cards.
• Create a Team consisting only of Super Rare Cards.
• Create a Team that is Modern legal.
• Create a single Affiliation Team using only Spider-Friends, Defenders, JSA, or Team Arrow.
• Create a Team where all 10 cards must have a Global Ability, and you must use each Global at least once in a game.
• Create a Team where all of your dice share a single colour.
• Create a Team with no 0 cost fielding characters and no way to field characters for free.
• Create a Team using only unaffiliated characters.
• Create a Team using only 8 dice and no Super Rares.
• Create a Team using only characters with a purchase cost of 6 or higher.  You cannot use PXG, Collector, or Limited Wish.
• Create a Team where all of your cards share a single energy type.

Gameplay Challenges

• Purchase all of your dice.  You must have a 20 dice Team.
• Play an entire game where every one of your characters is assigned to attack every turn.
• Play an entire game without ever re-rolling your dice.
• Play an entire game where you field every die that rolls on a character face.
• Play an entire game without using any Action Dice.
• Play an entire game without adding dice to your Prep Area.  This excludes dice that are KO’ed.
• Purchase all of your dice in numerical order.  (All 2’s, then 3’s, then 4’s… You do not have to buy all of your dice.)
• Roll 10 dice at once in the Roll & Re-roll Step.  No PXG or Darkseid SR allowed.
• Have 8 different dice (not including Sidekicks) in your Field Zone.
• Have all 8 of your Sidekick dice in the Field at the same time.
• Play an entire game without fielding a Sidekick.
• Play an entire game without using a Global Ability.  Your Team must include at least one Global.

I will be 100% honest here, and say that early on in this League I chose to play the Teams I wanted to.  Yes, I was winning games, but I quickly realized that I was behind in the points standings because I was not meeting the build challenges.  For the latter half of the League I focused on building.  The fun part was trying design a Team that would check off as many boxes at one time as possible.  Focusing on this allowed my standing to improve very quickly.  It was a completely different mindset than the usually “kill all the things” mentality you normally have.  In the end, I managed to score in 20/29 of the Challenges.  I lost out big time on the Building Challenges due to my choices early on in the League.

I have to admit that this was an incredibly fun way to play the game.  You were trying to build the best machine to solve a puzzle.  How efficiently could you accomplish that?  Like I said, this was a completely different mindset.  I do not remember how many times I chose to pass on the “correct” gameplay move in order to accomplish one of the challenges. We finished this round of the League this last week and will be starting up another Round right away.

New challenges await.  Will you take the easy win or accept the limitations?  Post your comments and let me know what you think of this type of Dice Masters Variant.

Thanks!