Review: DISNEY VILLAINOUS: TREACHEROUS TIDES is Mid-Tide Fun

Disney Villainous is a fun board game that lets you and your friends prove which villain truly is the baddest of them all. Recently, Ravensburger released the latest standalone expansion, Disney Villainous: Treacherous Tides, bringing Davy Jones (The Pirates of the Caribbean) and Tamatoa (Moana) from the high seas into the fray.

Ravensburger was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the expansion to review, but all thoughts below are my own. Treacherous Tides is now available at retailers and local game stores with an MSRP of $19.99.

Before I get too far into my thoughts I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the new characters. Davy Jones is attempting to collect 5 Treasure Tokens which must be attached to Heroes, revealed, and then collected by defeating the Hero.

Tamatoa is trying to obtain the Heart of Te Fiti from Moana while preventing Maui from reclaiming the Hook. As you can tell, these are similar objectives but they do play wildly differently (as they should).

I also want to disclaim that I’ve only played these decks in 2-player games with Davy Jones only going against Tamatoa and Tamatoa got one game against Hades to test something.

Honestly, my wife and I both disliked Tamatoa (each character won a game in our playtests). For starters, he has a third deck (the Maui deck) which is fun flavor but annoying from a gameplay design as it increases the random number generator aspect of the game significantly.

Sometimes the Maui deck can be helpful by boosting Ally cards or allowing Tamatoa to stay in the same location and other times it sucks because it boosts Heroes or shuffles up your Allies. In a game that already has a fairly significant amount of RNG, having a third deck is not helpful.

In addition, it’s very difficult to actually get the Heart of Te Fiti into your realm! There’s one copy in your Fate Deck and while there are cards that are designed to help you go through your Fate Deck, if your opponent is the lucky one that flips up the Heart of Te Fiti, they can just discard it or it can get discarded via Reindeer Maui.

If it gets discarded, you do have three cards that let you choose to shuffle your Fate discard pile back into your deck and then go four deep, but it just felt bad to me. Even when I got the Heart of Te Fiti pretty early on in the game because it just felt like luck with no real skill or strategy involved. It’s probably just a playstyle thing.

I will say that Tamatoa is a beast when it comes to generating Power, but I feel like it’s wasteful since there are only two cards in the Villain Deck that can really make use of the Power and they just pay Power to defeat Heroes of which there are only three in your Fate Deck (two of which aren’t that bad to deal with). Thematically, Tamatoa is really well done. I just really found his objective to be more frustrating than fun as I often felt like I was doing nothing productive.

Davy Jones is a different story though. His objective is a little different since you have to do the same four-step process five times: get a Hero in your Realm, attach a Treasure Token to them, reveal the Treasure Token (each has a unique ability), and then defeat the Hero to claim the Treasure Token.

It sounds cumbersome and sometimes it does feel that way, but overall it’s a decent gameplay loop. Honestly, I found the hard part to be revealing the Treasure Tokens as there are only three cards in the deck that can do that.

Once they were revealed though, it was usually pretty easy to vanquish the Heroes. There are cards that help you get the Kraken out which does genuinely feel unfair at times since it has 8 strength and doesn’t get discarded meaning it can take most things out and be used repeatedly.

There are also really strong cards like The Flying Dutchman that lets Davy Jones take non-Fate actions at other locations if they have The Crew of the Flying Dutchman and Clanker is a strong Ally that gives a location the Vanquish action.

I did find that generating Power was a little difficult with Davy Jones as everything costs at least one Power to play (outside of Conditions) and many of the cards you need to play for placing or revealing Treasure Tokens cost two.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the only ways to accrue Power are by vanquishing James Norrington or by going to the two locations in your Realm which often severely limits your gameplay options. That said, Davy Jones is fun to play.

Overall, the presentation for Treacherous Tides continues to be consistent with other expansions. I personally love the art used on the cards (both front and back), the box art is really well done, the insert is designed well, and the character sculpts are cool. I especially love Davy Jones’ design. Honestly, I think that Davy Jones and Tamatoa actually have some of the better looking sculpts in the entire game.

At the end of the day, Treacherous Tides is a mixed bag for me. Davy Jones is fun and his objective feels doable and in your control. Tamatoa can feel fun for a minute with how much Power you generate, but actually completing his objective feels too random and out of your control.

If you’re just a collector of the game or if you’re a huge fan of either of these characters then it might be worth getting at MSRP, but I do think that for most people, I would wait to get it on sale.