Villainous Review

Some days you just want to come home and relax, have a nice dinner, and watch your favorite television program. What about those days though? You know the days I’m talking about. The kind of day that makes you wish you could punish someone or something, the kind of day where you may wish some evil doings or spell, the kind of day where you may dream of doing….Villainous things. Enter the world of Walt Disney, on the evil side. Muahahahaha *cough* *cough* ….sorry, I choked on a pretzel.

Villainous is a 2-6 player game released by Wonder Forge. This game will allow you to take out your frustrations on your friends while disguised as a Disney villain. Each player will choose to play as one of the available characters moving an action selection marker across a personal player board and drawing cards from their own character deck.

Getting Into Character

There are 6 characters included in the game with plans already to expand and start offering new characters. You can actually be part of the voting for which characters might be included in further releases by visiting the Wonder Forge website. The current cast of characters include Jafar, The Queen of Hearts, Maleficent, Ursula, Prince John, and Captain Hook.

Each character has their own unique win condition, which can be achieved by selecting actions, and obtaining and playing the correct cards from their deck. Jafar must hypnotize Genie and obtain the magic lamp. Captain Hook must encounter Peter Pan at Hangman’s Tree and move him to the Jolly Roger to defeat him. These are just a couple of the unique win conditions.

Moving the action selection marker will allow you to do things like play cards from your hand to add allies to help your villain, attach items, play events, and, the most evil of all things, Fate another player. By selecting the Fate action, you will be able to choose another player, draw two cards from their Hero deck, and play those Heroes against them. Jafar will see Aladdin and Princess Jasmine, Prince John will see Robin Hood, Ursula will see King Triton, etc., and the villains may have to fight or bring these heroes under their control based on the win condition of that character.

The artwork and components in Villainous are absolutely beautiful. It is a very good-looking card game. The 3D action selection markers are great looking and specific to each character. There are a couple things that could have used a slight upgrade in material such as the cauldron and the power tokens that are used to purchase cards from your hand, but this in no way deters from the theme or gameplay.

Speaking of theme, this game is chock full of it. I was thoroughly impressed with the design of the win conditions of each character and how it felt like I was playing out the movie. After playing each character, I wanted to go back and watch the movie associated with that character. If you are a Disney fan and a board gamer, you can’t go wrong with Villainous, but you can do wrong with Villainous!

You can pick up a copy of Villainous at your local game store, at Target stores or online at Amazon.

Highs

• Asymmetric gameplay allows everyone a slightly different way of playing
• Fantastic theme and use of the Disney licenses
• Supports up to 6 players
• Gorgeous artwork

Lows

• Not really a kids game even though it’s Disney
• A couple cheap components, thankfully don’t hinder great gameplay