Commander Rook

Apocalypse introduces the infamous Lose Condition of “If one of each Horseman Villain reaches the Escaped Villains pile, the players lose.” To clarify, this is in addition to the normal Scheme’s Lose Condition, and Hero Deck exhaustion.

As more players increase the potential number of Villains to be placed and moved each round (and more individual player turns stuck with starting hands and incapable of fighting said Horsemen), I recommend fighting him with the fewest number of players possible- 3 at the very most- if you’re looking to win this fight. He’s hard enough on his own, and his Horsemen are powerful; do you really want to tilt the odds in his favor while juggling Scheme Twists and Master Strokes?

Secondarily and equally important; I have found Apocalypse to be the only Mastermind to force a cooperative game between players. Do with this information as you will. Good luck, and go get ’em!

This is a combination of design-flaw break-down and heart-felt advice.
Firstly, let’s break down the problem we’re hoping to avoid:

1) Every player’s starting hand can have a maximum of four Fight power, a minimum of zero, and an average of two. As there are twelve cards total, and six cards per hand, it takes two full rounds of play (each player revealing the top card of the Villain Deck, placing any Villains or Bystanders, resolving Master Strokes/Scheme Twists, fighting Villains, buying Heroes, and passing the turn) before you will draw or play anything that will change these numbers.

2) Without the expansions, the weakest villain in the deck requires 3 Fight power to defeat. There are five City locations and an Escaped Villains pile. Every turn, the top card of the Villain Deck is flipped, and Villains are placed in the right-most City location, pushing any previously-revealed villains to the left, towards the Escape pile.

3) If all three players draw the statistically-likely “Two Fight, Four Buy” starting hand, it will take six turns (two rounds) before the first player has a chance to actually fight a villain and twelve turns (four rounds) before they are actually guaranteed to draw something they didn’t start with. With four players, the initial dry spell is eight turns. With five, it’s ten.

4) Some of the Villains, Schemes, and Master Strokes deal heavily in “Escaping Villains” and may introduce a “Lose Condition” if too many are pushed off of the City before the Mastermind is defeated. Even without those effects, each escaping villain forces you to KO a Hero card and discard a card from hand if they had a Bystander hostage. This puts strain on the Hero Deck(which forces a team loss if it is exhausted, and the size of which does not reflect the number of people playing).

The end result is:
Having more players in the game increases the difficulty immensely, sometimes to an insurmountable degree.

My recommendation to counter this is:
After becoming familiar with the ebb and flow of the game, each group should read the Mastermind and Scheme very carefully before deciding how many players should participate, and how many should sit out for a session. Alternatively, you could increase the number of players to challenge yourselves on any particular Mastermind or Scheme, in addition to the other difficulty options.