Review: MARVEL VILLAINOUS Introduces Disappointing Changes

EDIT: There was a paragraph discussing a change I thought had taken place due to the rules being a little confusing. I was mistaken about the rule change, but the ruling that caused my confusion could easily have simply been put in the appropriate Villain Guides (it only pertains to 2 villains) instead and does not change the score.

Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power is officially out from Ravensburger. The premise is the same as Disney Villainous where you take on the role of your favorite villains and try to complete your wicked goal. In fact, if you’ve played Disney Villainous, you’ll already know a lot of the rules. Ravensburger was kind enough to send me a copy, and I’ve been able to play it a few times now although due to the COVID-19 pandemic I have only been able to play 2-player games. I imagine that playing with more players provides a much more satisfying experience though.

As I mentioned, Marvel Villainous has a similar premise and idea to its Disney counterpart, but there are a lot of differences to make the games very unique. One of the first changes you’ll come across is that while characters have unique Fate Cards, all characters share a common Fate Deck. There are some common Fate Cards that get shuffled along with all the Fate Cards from each individual character playing to create a common Fate Deck. This is one of the biggest problems with the game in my opinion. Each character’s Fate Cards are designed to specifically hinder them, but when shuffled up, you never know whose Fate Card you’ll draw and play against your opponents, and in fact this decreases the chances of you drawing a Fate Card that you really need to hinder your opponent. It also just doesn’t make sense thematically as when playing as Killmonger, my wife would draw Heroes like Shuri for me, playing as Hela, to deal with. I understand that there’s crossover in Marvel comics, but a lot of this just doesn’t make sense.

I do like the idea of having a common Fate Deck with cards designed to be generically annoying like Captain America or Iron Man, but I would either have it in addition to each character’s Fate Deck and you get to draw the top card of both and choose one to play or have you divide up the common Fate Cards between all the players. I think that would’ve worked a lot better without diluting the Fate Decks so much.

Another new thing that players will notice is the addition of Event Cards. These are Fate Cards that have a lasting impact until enough minions are sent to the Event Card to deal with it. There are Global Events from the common Fate Cards and then each player adds an Event Card specific to them. I actually think that Event cards are a pretty cool addition. However, they do not work very well in 2-player games. They take too much time to take care of and may not have enough motivation for one of the players to deal with it. For example, I was playing as Thanos and had no motivation to deal with an Event that raised the cost of Item Cards as I had already played most of my Items.

Another point I want to bring up is that the rules for some villains are not explained well. For example, Ultron has a tile that simply says remove 2 Sentries to flip it over. However, I had to look up on BoardGameGeek that this doesn’t require any kind of tile or card. You just do it. That was not made very clear. Also, Thanos can move his Allies to other Domains in order to collect the Infinity Stones. There is literally nowhere that explains where to put these cards when you move them. My inclination was that you put them up top where Heroes go, but that also makes things very difficult for opponents as you can move Allies to where a Stone is and then the Ally just stays there for a while blocking abilities until they are moved or defeated. It serves the purpose of using Heroes from the Fate Deck while providing huge bonuses to Thanos.

This leads me to my next point. I don’t think the villains are balanced in the slightest. Killmonger at first glance may seem like he’s hard to pull off, but it was so easy for my wife to win with him. He has to move Explosives to other Domains, but there’s no way to remove the Explosives once they’re in your Domain. Thanos is ridiculously overpowered as well as he has a lot of cards that help him not only retrieve but also activate the Infinity Stones that are super strong. Meanwhile, Ultron gets left behind a little as one of his upgrades allows you to use “Play Card” spaces as “Relocate” tiles which is not very helpful for him. I think they should’ve made them “Activate” tiles instead.

Finally, I was disappointed in the pawns. They’re larger than the Disney Villainous pawns and are opaque instead of translucent. This gives them a cheap look and feel in my opinion.

I didn’t hate Marvel Villainous, but I was disappointed by it. Most of the changes made felt like they were done to prevent people saying that it’s merely an expansion or reskin of Disney Villainous, but there’s nothing wrong with either of those things. I was looking forward to combining the two games, but I don’t see that being a possibility. Now, as I said at the beginning, I think that simply having 3-4 (don’t know why you can’t have 5) players would drastically improve the experience, but due to the pandemic, I was unable to test this.