The villains in the various Disney films have a wide variety of personalities, goals, and motivations. Some of them mean well and use methods that are sketchy to go about achieving their goals. Others are generally viewed as downright evil. Regardless of the motivation, my general experience has been to root for the protagonists of the films, and hope for the villains to lose out in the end.
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Short Explanation of How to Play
Villainous flips the script on the films it represents. The player takes on the role of the villain, trying to defeat the heroes of their respective films. The game centers around Disney properties, with the original version being Disney classic cartoon movies, and different versions for Marvel and Star Wars. The mechanics of all games and all characters are the same. Each character gets a board where they can move the character between 4 different locations, allowing for different combinations of moves each turn. While the general mechanics for each character are the same, each character plays differently since they have different goals, so each player’s experience is unique. Players mostly move toward their own goals, but they can also use a “fate deck” of heroes to impact the progress of their opponents. The Marvel version of this game has more interaction, as a few of the characters can send their own minions onto their opponent’s board. For example: Thanos wants to collect the infinity stones, which can end up in anyone’s possession. Thanos needs to use his minions to collect those infinity stones. The Disney and Star Wars versions are more like individual solitaire with some interruptions by their opponents using fate cards to slow them down.
Why it Works/Doesn't Work For Our Family
What Worked: The themes of these games are excellent. My kids had seen many of the Star Wars and Disney films that are represented in the game, and I have lots of friends who are interested in Marvel. When we want a very interactive game, we can play the Marvel game, but if we want to mostly do our own thing, we can play the original Disney version. It is helpful that the mechanics of each game are different, but each game has a few unique aspects so there is lots of variety in the gameplay and goals.
What Was Challenging: This game seems like it is going to be a short game, but our experience has been that we need to take a longer time to play it than we anticipated. It seems like we are playing for a couple of hours. The variety of characters and options is great, but the differing goals, and the differing decks for each character, slows the game down as players need to familiarize themselves with each card in their deck and how that card impacts the player’s chance of winning.
Why it Works/Doesn't Work With Friends
I played Marvel Villainous with some friends, and after a learning curve, I finished games with a couple of different groups of friends. The sense that I got from them was that it was an ok game session, but the time spent playing the game could have been better used playing something else. In context with other options, this one was a decent game, but there were better options. Balance in this game is also tenuous, as some of the characters have an easier path to victory than others. In a competitive group this could mess up the balance between players, but this could actually be a positive when playing with a group of players at different levels, as a learner can have an easier character, whereas an expert can use one of the challenging characters.
Teacher's Corner
There is a lot of strategy in this game, but pinpointing a particular skill to teach through the game would not be a beneficial teaching strategy. Some of the characters require a lot of forward thinking and planning to execute their goals. The one thing I would emphasize to young kids is that the game is for fun, and we don’t want to promote being the villain in real life.
Overall opinion, rating, and recommendation
6 year old son - My son loves the Star Wars version, but he has started the Disney version and lost interest multiple times.
9 year old daughter - My daughter enjoys playing this game from beginning to end. She has been very resilient to play through the entire game and wanting to come back to play again. The challenge has been when we pull it out to play an hour long game, and we don’t have time to finish because it takes more time to play out than we have allotted. She is very disappointed when we have to put the game away when we aren’t finished. She loves learning new characters to play and figuring out how to maximize her strategies.
Mine - I will rate this game Heavy Family. The actions that you take in the game are easy to teach and learn. The reasons I call it Heavy as opposed to casual are twofold: (1) the game takes longer than anticipated when playing with kids, and (2) the variety of the game that is an asset means that learning rules can take a long time. If I am teaching my kids how to play their characters, I have to learn completely different sets of rules and goals to help them understand. While this is doable and the rules are very clear and efficient for each character, every character played adds to the learn time. The game is fun, and Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars fans can enjoy some time with friends and family playing this game in the evening or on the weekend, so long as they master the rules and goals. Additionally, there is a lot of variety with expansions with different playable characters. If you buy a 3 character expansion without the base game, you can still play the game. On the other hand, If long game times and learning and tracking many rules are the biggest hesitations that someone has with playing a game, they should be cautious with this one.
Games with similarities with this one at each rating level:
Casual Family: -
Heavy Family: - Root / My Little Scythe
Casual Adult: -
Heavy Adult: - Hegemony / Scythe
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