SUMMARY:

Ages: 10+
Players: 2-6
Est. Length: 60 Minutes
Game Design: Prospero Hall
Publisher: Ravensburger
Genre: Family
Mechanics: Hand Management, Variable Player Powers

Reviewer: Lex Judge

INTRODUCTION

As the title suggests, Villainous is for any Disney fans who are tired of always being a goody two-shoes. This game lets you embody a classic villain from the Disney universe, and get your hands dirty as you play cards representing their henchmen, items, and powers from the movies. The goal is to be the first villain to achieve their unique sinister scheme and triumph over good, once and for all.

Prospero Hall, a team of designers who work hand-in-hand with the publisher Ravensburger, are known for creating games that not only use well known intellectual properties, but are also engaging and fun. They’ve made board games based off of popular movies like Jaws, Harry Potter, and even TWO games about Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting. They released the first edition of Villainous: The Worst Takes It All back in 2018 and have already released three stand-alone Disney themed versions, as well as a Marvel themed one. Each version comes with 3-6 Villains to play as, and you can mix-and-match the them, depending on which version you have on hand.

To begin the game, each player decides which villain they would like to play as, and takes the corresponding player board, Villain Deck, Hero Deck, and player pawn. Each Villain has unique cards, locations on their player boards, and goals to win the game. The Villains also come with a small booklet which explains your goal and how to accomplish it.
On each players turn, they will begin by moving their player pawn to a new location. Each location has symbols describing the actions that you can take there.

The actions include:

• Gaining Power tokens

• Spending Power tokens to play a card from your hand

• Discarding multiple cards from your hand

• Activating cards on your player board

• Moving cards around your player board

• Vanquishing Heroes

• Playing cards from your opponents Hero’s Deck; hopefully delaying them from reaching their goal.

At the end of your turn, you draw back up to four cards. The first player to meet their personal objective wins the game!

THE MOMENT THE GAME “CLICKED”

Unlike watching television or reading a book, board games inherently have a learning curve. Every time you want to play a new game, you first have to learn how to play it. Games vary in difficulty and complexity, but every game has a moment where it just “clicks”. Once this moment happens, you’re able to fully grasp how the game is played, and what the goal is. This moment happens at different times for different people, but having an idea of when it can happen is a good indicator of whether or not you’ll enjoy learning and playing a game.

Being a game about Disney movies, I assumed that it was made for a younger audience and would be simple, something you could teach to a 6 year old. As you might have guessed from my very brief rules explanation above, there is a lot more going on with the mechanics of this game than one would expect. It took reading the 10+ page rule book a few times before I had a good understanding of all the rules. Even once the rules are understood by everyone, each player then needs to learn how their unique Villain works and how they win. Although this game was more complex than I had anticipated, it shouldn’t take more than one playthrough for the game to click with the average player.

SHOULD YOU PLAY IT?

If you consider yourself an avid Disney fan, you should absolutely give this game a try. My favorite thing about this game is how the theme is wonderfully incorporated into the mechanics. Every single card in every single deck makes very clever references to the source material, while adding interesting game play that make each villain feel unique. Nothing really feels forced and every time we play, I want to go back and re-watch whatever movie my villain was from. It makes me feel nostalgic for the nights long past, watching VHS tapes on our Mickey Mouse themed TV with mouse ears for speakers.

Surprisingly, the artwork for all the cards aren’t just stills from the movies. A team of artists did a truly impressive job emulating the movies with consistency and reverence. Out of the 15 Disney villains published so far, there hasn’t been a single piece of artwork that I didn’t think matched the art style of the movies precisely. The cards and player boards are elegantly detailed and well designed. Traveling to different locations on your player board really does feel like going from scene to scene in a Disney film. Vanquishing Heroes really does feel like the moments in Disney movies where the villain has the upper hand and all hope seems lost. For me personally, the theme is so well executed that I’m willing to forgive some of the criticisms there are of the game play:

Like most deck based games, Villainous has a lot of luck involved, and the Villains that can more quickly draw through their deck are clearly better than the ones that can’t. If you are competitive and looking for a well balanced game, you may be a tad disappointed with that aspect. There is also very little interacting with other players. You are only really encouraged to draw from another players Hero deck when that player is close to winning. Which is unfortunate, because the Hero decks are delightful. Navigating around them is one of the challenging and interesting parts of the game. For a game about Disney Villains, you think there would be ways to be a little bit more mean to each other.

If you aren’t a Disney fan, it might be a little bit more difficult to get into this game. But there is also Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power to try if that’s more your speed!

Happy Gaming!