Bad Is Bad

One of the more buzzed-about board games this year was Villainous, in which up to six players each take on the role of a Disney movie villain and try to spoil the day before any of their competitors. From details I'd heard when it was selling fast at GenCon, it didn't sound like the type of game I'd enjoy much, and I put it out of my mind. But a friend recent picked up a copy and I got a chance to try it out.

Unfortunately, the nice things I can say are pretty much cosmetic. The core idea itself of playing a Disney villain is wonderful. Everyone loves the villains best. A game where Ursula, Jafar, Prince John, Captain Hook, the Queen of Hearts, and Maleficent can all compete? Great idea. The components are pretty good too, with hefty molded plastic pieces to represent the players. And the cards are all illustrated with new paintings of key frames from the six featured movies -- done perhaps to "equalize" the quality between newer and older films? This could have gone wrong easily, but the cards actually look great.

The game is steeped in flavor. Each character has their own goal to pursue, essentially playing out the plot of their movie. Hook has to find and defeat Peter Pan, Prince John has to amass tons of gold, and so on. But this fidelity comes at a high price in terms of ease of play. The six characters' victory conditions are so profoundly asynchronous that you really can't wrap your head around what anyone else is trying to do. Malificent's "curse all four of your locations" is easy enough to remember, but what's this nonsense the Queen of Hearts is doing with her sideways cards? And what are the steps involved in Jafar capturing the lamp and enslaving the Genie?

The result is a massive "take that" game, where everybody tries to stop the leader from winning until enough people are finally in a "close to winning" second place status that one person sneaks through. But as no one can quite understand all the other objectives, you end up doing a lot of asking "What are you trying to do? How close are you? Would you stop you right now if you were me?" You basically have to enlist the other players in the process of you picking on them. It makes it not much more fun for the picker than the pickee.

It's pretty much a disaster as a 6-player game. You have tons of down time between your turns. And while 5- and 6-player add a band-aid of a rule that the same player can't be picked on twice in a row, you still basically have 5 opponents trying to gang up on you with the "take that" mechanics. Lots and lots of bellyaching about who is closer to winning, who deserves a setback, and so on.

Disney villains could have made for a great gateway game into more advanced fare than Monopoly and the like, but the asynchronous victory conditions feel to me like they make the game quite inaccessible for new gamers, no matter how much they like the subject. As for veterans? Well, maybe you're into "take that," but my group isn't much (and maybe me least of all). This game just isn't for me, and I don't ever care to play it again. Under duress, I'd consider maybe a 3-player attempt, but that would be about it.

I'd give Villainous a D. They had a prime target, I think, but completely missed it.