Marvel Villainous wants you to be Villainous in the Marvel Universe…
I can do that…
Dominate the Marvel universe as an iconic comic book villain! Each villain follows a unique path to victory; each uses different abilities to face other villains and mighty heroes from across the universe.
Marvel Villainous Game Play
The main thing to the game is that each player plays as a different Marvel villain and each has its own unique goal. The first player to achieve it wins, simple.
Each villain gets a board (their Domain) a big plastic mover thing, a deck of cards unique to that villain and a unique fate deck. Each of the villain’s fate decks are shuffled with a set of common fate cards to create the “Fate Deck”.
These decks have event cards which the rulebook advised to leave out of the first game so I did so I won’t mention them here. I also heard they made the game longer…
Players take turns following 3 phases until one player wins so here they are!
Actions
1 – Move Villain – The player moves their mover from one area of the Domain to a different one. Yep, that’s phase 1 complete.
2 – Perform Actions – All visible actions on the selected area of the player’s domain will activate in any order, and are optional. Here is a quick run through…
Gain Power – Gain power tokens equal to the number shown in the circle
Play Card – Pay the cost in power in the top left of a card and play it, there are a few different types of cards:
Ally: Play under any location in the domain
Item: Play under any location too but some attach to an ally
Effect: These are cards to resolve and discard
Speciality: Played to the right of the Domain unless stated, these are generally powerful cards that can be activated in future actions
Relocate – Move items and/or allies to a different location within your domain. Allies can move to the top of a location in another players domain, covering action symbols on that location.
Activate – Pay the cost in power if any to activate an ally, item or speciality.
Fate – Draw from the fate card and assign to another player, if you can’t discard it. These can be Superheroes that will slow down your opponent and other stuff. If the event has a Villain logo in the bottom left, assign it to that player.
Fighting
Vanquish – Defeat Hero (Heros are drawn from the fate deck) or an opponents ally in your domain. Your allies must have combined power equal to or higher than the defender. If they do, the defender and all of the attackers are discarded.
Discard Cards – Any number of cards, boring but useful because…
3 – Draw Cards – Draw up to 4 cards in hand.
Play continues clockwise and as soon as a player completes their objective, they win.
Theme
I like Marvel and I like the idea of playing as the bad guy. The different win conditions are really fun and they make sense. I’m sure Hela would love the Infinity Stones (If she could hold them, that’s a debate for another time) but that’s Thanos’ thing…
I like the Heroes buzzing around being a nuisance…
Setup & Rulebook
Setup is fine… You just need to get the bits out for each player then shuffle the white cards together.
The rulebook… not so straight forward. It’s laid out very well in its individual segments… But those segments are spread out around the book.
For example, they explain the actions and one of those is how to play cards. In a later section, there are further rules for cards with additional information… then this happens TWO FURTHER TIMES!
With it spread out like this it’s really frustrating to learn. You get rules on top of rules on top of rules… You learn, relearn and then receive further reading… Not good.
Components & Artwork
I really like the art, especially for the characters. It’s really well done and great to look at.
The components are also well done and feel really nice, except for the card quality. The big dobber movers are nice as are the boards and player guides which are really handy.
The box fits everything very well if you don’t sleeve your cards. Sadly, the card quality just is not good enough to play un-sleeved. Another wasted insert.
The bowl that comes with the tokens is unneeded but a nice touch.
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
The base rules are easy to teach. But the rest of the game is quite complicated really. The number of cards in the game plus the fact that each player has a completely different deck and win condition is a lot to take in.
Marvel Villainous Summary
There are a lot of Marvel games, good ones too. Marvel Champions is a good co-op, Marvel United too although that’s still new to me at the time of writing. Legendary is also fun but again, a co-op… Legendary Villains is semi-coop and you play as the Villains so it’s closer…
So I like the idea of this game. The asynchronistic aspect is really good because it makes sense that these villains have their own very different schemes. They’re not just trying to get some kind of track to 10 either!
The issue is that because it’s so different and everyone has a different deck of cards it’s hard to keep track. There are a lot of things going on, not just the multiple goals, so it’s hard to keep track.
For example, Taskmaster had a tonne of Allies and Items and it was tough for that player to keep track of it all never mind us! It also relies on players sacrificing moving towards their goal to stop someone else… Never a good thing.
You can also get really screwed by the Fate deck if your cards are drawn out…
So, I like the game but I would have liked it to be simpler (and shorter) to play so it’s more fun and less of a chore.
Jesta ThaRogue