Other games played at the TableTop event:

- Sentinels of the Multiverse, a pure co-op card game in which up to 5 players each pick a Hero, then collectively choose a Villain to beat up and an Environment in which to battle. Each character/environment has its own non-customizable deck with its own theme and play style or mechanic.

- Samurai Sword (or as I call it, Nihongo Bangu!), a redesigned, Japanese-themed version of Bang!. This redesign strips out a lot of the more complex cards and removes player elimination entirely. The increased lethality of weapons and built-in clock based on deck reshuffles speed up the game while a new defensive rule offers more strategy.

- Sentinels of the Multiverse

- The Walking Dead card game, a themed version of Category 5, Slide 6, etc. Players choose numbered cards and place them face-down, then place them lowest-to-highest on the row with the next-lowest end card, scoring a row when it has 6 cards. In the “classic” survival mode, players want to take the fewest points; in hero mode, players can play one or two cards and want to take the most points.

- so much Sentinels of the Multiverse

I find the play time of 30 minutes from the box a bit optimistic; if players spend a lot of time re-reading the Kingdom cards and mulling over their choices, which they will if you have new players, a game can easily take an hour or more.

The rules support only 2-4 if you only have one of the two core boxes (base game and Intrigue). Intrigue has rules for 5-6 players, if you have both (or, I suppose, one plus a base card box), but I really don’t recommend it. You’ll have a far better experience breaking into two separate games. Bigger games take proportionally longer between turns and make it harder to buy good combos, as you might only get 1-2 of a desired Kingdom card vs. getting 2-3 or more.

As for buying, I recommend starting with the base game (or Intrigue, if you really like attacks) over the base cards + expansion route. The base game especially has a well-rounded set of cards that mixes well with any combination of expansions. You could also try to find the Big Box, which contains the base game, big expansion Prosperity, small expansion Alchemy, and two promo card packs. Also, strongly consider sleeving your cards, as the basic money and victory points cards will get shuffled so many times that the edges will quickly show wear. The game takes “Euro” size sleeves; I find the thinner sleeves in the 100-count packs work well, and you’ll need 5 packs for the base sets, with 2-5 for each expansion depending on card count.