Villainy
Villainy is a game about aspiring super villains competing to be the first to enact their evil plans and overcome Fantastiman, that pesky superhero who watches over the city day and night. It is a fun card-driven character building game featuring a hilarious uncontrolled narrative that unfolds differently every time.
As an aspiring super villain, you are trying to make your mark in the world. In Villainy you are trying to be the first villain to complete 3 plans beat Fantastiman (the pesky super-hero who watches over the city day and night). You must hire minions to aid you in your quest for world domination. You will have to do crimes and go to work as your alter ego to learn the skills necessary and the gain the cars requires to see your great plans through to their triumphant end.
Today is the day that Fantastiman will fall.
User Reviews (2)
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I tried this game out at the games workshop for the dealers a while back. It was a very fun game.
The game is where you play a minor villain who wishes to become a well known super villain that can take on the Superhero of the city.
Everyone gets a dial to represent you villain’s level of abilities. There are three abilities that help you perform tasks within the game.
The first fun thing is to name your villain. You can use the name given on the card or use the many words on small tiles to help create a name. The last option is to just come up with a name on your own. This can be funny and fun to create.
Next you take on cards to play the game. The cards can have secret identity to work and earn money to help purchase items for you criminal activities. You can also take on criminal activities such as putting kittens in trees or robbing banks. The putting kittens in trees is a funny action, but some how all those kittens get in trees for the hero to rescue.
You complete levels of actions to prepare yourself for the fight against the superhero. This can be easy if you have the right skill levels and weapons, but there some challenges that can be defeated. If you fail you can attack the superhero again with an added bonus.
When a villain defeats the superhero, the game is over.
This is a different type of game which can let players get the badness out of there system when other games frustrate them.
So when I got this game I was really curious. The graphic design choices were quite awkward. The box itself is going for a super hero comic magazine and it sort of achieves its goal. The color choices are very dark and contrasty, which kind of distorts the art from coming out nicely. Add that to a box with low quality as expected from Mayfair, you get a pretty poor result.
Inside the box you’ll find dozens if not hundres of components which you have to punch out, and it takes quite a while to do so. You get a whole lot of useless counters with verbs on them, so that you can name your own villain. Oh yeah, you play as a super villain in this game, which is kind of nice. The first villain to defeat the cities superhero becomes the victor of the game. You can’t do it by yourself, however.
In order to win you need to start small, hire henchmen and work yourself up. You need money, so sometimes you just have to go to work. Even your henchmen can go to work. Each henchmen and yourself have three types of statistics: strength, charisma and dexterity – or something of the sorts. To keep track of the stats, you have some cardboard punch outs which functions as knobs that points at the right stat. This seems kind of smart at first, but it really doesn’t work well in the long run.
On your turn you can either do something yourself as the villain, or you can send a henchman to do it for you. When the action is done, you become tired and have to go to work in order to act again later. This is really clunky and seems very half arsed when looking at the whole picture. The mechanism is there to keep you from going berserk with actions, but the whole upkeep step and control of this just doesn’t work well. It feels very forced upon you and not a natural part of the game.
I could go on explaining all the different mechanisms, but they all come down to the same issue: it feels like a half baked game. There’s no polish on the surfaces and a lot of the game doesn’t flow well. You can initiate tons of fighting which easily could go to the strongest player each time. You draw random cards which also initiates fights a lot, and you have to pause the game to roll dice and check the winner. This happens all the time.
The theme is good and the humor is definitely there, but everything else is fiddly and doesn’t fit the games premise. Also, when facing the super hero after you have deleted the internet (and saved all the funny cat videos first), it’s easy to be knocked back to the stone age. The game lasts too long and before it’s done you probably just want it all to end anyway.
I cannot recommend this game. Fiddly, ugly and cheap components and it takes too long. It’s not easy to learn either, because the mechanisms doesn’t feel natural to the theme.