Ok, we are going to do something different with our next review. We’re going to take a look at a surprisingly strategic card/board game from Ravensburger called Villainous. We know what you are thinking… it’s Disney. How good can it really be? We’ve played our fair amount of property tie-in games, and you’d be right in thinking most aren’t very good. 

Villainous is a bit different. What makes the game better than most is its variable win conditions. You choose to play 1 of 6 Disney Villains in the core game, and each Villain wins differently. The trick is to know what it will take to succeed and understand what it will take for your opponents to win. 

Let’s dig into this game and see if it’s worth playing an IP-based game. 

Villainous – Game Overview

In Villainous, you take on the role of a Disney animated film Villain. Each of these six villains has its own game-ending goal. Each player has two decks, a Villain and Fate deck, and a realm board to achieve your goal. Each realm is unique to that Villain, with four locations appropriate to their story. The other villains never visit your realm but can influence your board by placing fate cards covering up the top two actions at a location and otherwise making it difficult to complete your objective. 

A player moves their Villain to a new location on each turn and can take all actions printed at that location. These actions include gaining power, playing a card (Ally, Item, Effect, or Condition cards), Activating a card in your realm, Fate another player, moving an item, ally or Hero, or Vanquish an opponent. Not all of these actions are available for each Villain as they may or may not be necessary for that Villain.

Game Components

Overall, the game components are exciting and authentic to the Disney stories. The boards and the cards are full of Disney animation stills and look great. The villain’s realm board is long and narrow and folds almost in half. A character image appears with its objective at one end when the board is folded shut. Besides the boards and the cards, the game comes with some excellent plastic Villain movers. These are abstract renditions of each Villain and look fantastic. The game also has a large fate token that is only used in a 5 or 6 person game and keeps a single player from being fated multiple times in a round (no ganging up on a player). We’ll get to what “fating” is in a moment.

We would call out one component, the Cauldron, where the players store the power tokens. Unfortunately, this is a somewhat flimsy plastic piece, and compared to the quality of everything else, it seems like a much lower quality. We would have preferred a cauldron that you constructed from something like the game board material. We’ve seen this done in other games, and the added benefit is that you can add more design elements.

Game Setup

Villainous was pretty easy to get set up and get going. The first decision everyone needs to take is which Villain to play. There are 6 Villains in the core game (Captain Hook, Maleficent, Ursula, Queen of Hearts, Prince John, and Jafar). 

Next, each player takes the correct realm board, Villain mover, Villain, and Fate decks unique to their Villain. 

Game Play

The gameplay for Villainous is quite fun and dynamic. The players take turns to move their Villain around their board to complete any of the actions that appear there. Typically there are four actions in each location; however, this varies by Villain. Prince John is an excellent example of this exception – one of his locations, the Jail, only has two actions.

You can take many actions, but a player is limited to taking actions in their location AND are visible. Your opponent can “fate” you and place a hero in a location that will cover up the top two actions or, in some cases, more actions. If the action is covered up, you can’t take those actions until you remove the Hero or Heroes in that space by defeating them. 

Ok, we know that is a little more detail than in a regular review, but we wanted to illustrate how much detail and depth of strategy this game actually has. The gameplay is not your typical “tie-in” game. Each of the Allies, Items, Heroes also have specific rules printed on their cards. So you have to figure out when to play each card to have the most effect.

The other pretty fantastic thing about the game is that the objective of each Villain is different. Here’s a quick rundown on each Villain’s objective.

Prince John – craves power, so at the beginning of a round, if he has 20 power tokens, he wins. Gaining power tokens is easier said than done because you have to spend enough power to place an Allies to fend off the Heros.

Queen of Hearts – have a wicket at each location and successfully take a shot. To create a wicket, you need an Ally at a location and then “Activate” them to turn them into a wicket. Then a player needs to take cards off their Villain deck and have a higher strength than the wickets to succeed.

Ursula – Start her turn with the Trident and Crown and be at her Lair. These items are only available after she defeats King Triton by making him sign a contract.

Jafar– must start his turn with the magic lamp at the “Sultan’s Palace” location with the Genie under his control. To do this, he first needs to unlock the Cave of Wonders, find the Genie hero in the Fate deck and defeat the Genie and move him to the Sultan’s Palace.

Captain Hook – Defeat Peter Pan at the Jolly Roger location, which requires the player to find the Neverland Map in their deck, find Peter Pan in the Fate Deck, and then move him to the Jolly Roger.

The trick to the game is working towards your objective. At the same time, a player needs to keep an eye on their opponent’s progress towards their goal.

A player can hinder their opponent’s progress through the Fate action. To Fate an opponent, they first choose which other player they are going to Fate and then draw two cards from their opponent’s fate deck (specific to the animated movie the opponent’s Villain is in) and choose one to put into play and the other to discard. These fate cards represent heroes and items that will help those heroes defeat the Villain. 

Overall Impressions

Villainous is a lot of fun. The overall usage of the Disney Animation stills on the cards and the stylized villain mover component make this game feel enjoyable. The fact that the objective for each Villain is different is refreshing to see in an IP-based game. It’s not common to find unique IP games that are also a lot of fun.

As we said before, we think this game could be better in the quality of the components—specifically the Cauldron.  If this could be constructed out of different material it would probably be better.

That said, this is overall, a fun and engaging game. What’s even more fun is that this game has a number of expansions and they all work similarly but with other Villains. You actually don’t need the core game to play the expansions.

We also like to play this game as a tournament for two players. In the tournament, we have one specific rule to keep things fair. If a Villain wins their game, the other player must play them in the next game. That doesn’t work all the time, but it does help balance out the tournament and means one player won’t dominate with a single Villain.