Review: STAR WARS VILLAINOUS is Slowed by Ambitious Changes
Ravensburger recently launched Star Wars Power of the Dark Side Villainous. The game takes the popular board game Villainous, puts a few twists in there, and makes it Star Wars with the inclusion of Darth Vader, General Grievous, Asajj Ventress, Kylo Ren, and Moff Gideon. Ravensburger was kind enough to send me a copy to review, but you can grab your own copy from Amazon, Target, or your friendly local game store. All the thoughts below are my own.
I was very excited for Star Wars Villainous. I love both Star Wars and Villainous, so I was hoping for a slam dunk. I was a little worried since I didn’t like Marvel Villainous very much due to the changes they made, but I was holding out all hope. I got the game and I love the set pieces for this game. Each sculpt is really cool, the boards (called Sectors in this game) look nice, and the box art itself is just perfection. I read through the rules and there were some changes, but the changes seemed really cool like the addition of a second currency called Ambition and Vehicle cards. I really like Ravensburger, but they need to stop making changes to Villainous.
Ambition is a mechanic that sounds cool thematically. The idea is that sometimes your reputation gets you further than money. It’s very fitting. However, in practice, Ambition falls apart. At the start of each player’s turn, they take 1 Ambition from the center. There are only 25 Ambition tokens and there are also cards that help you get more Ambition. Once the stock is empty, you have to wait until people use Ambition and hope it gets back to you. This has potential to not be such a problem, but there are characters like Kylo Ren that rely on Ambition to do just about anything while other characters have very few cards that use Ambition. This means that there are characters that are literally stockpiling and hoarding Ambition just because the game gives them an Ambition at the start of their turn. They then have next to no use for said Ambition which greatly hinders other players and doesn’t even really benefit them. It was an idea that sounds good but isn’t implemented well. In a game I played, General Grievous never had a need to use Ambition so that player had a ton of it while other characters that needed the Ambition like Kylo Ren and Asajj Ventress were struggling to get enough Ambition to do anything to move them toward their goals. It’s also annoying that Ambition requires the use of a different symbol in your Location than normal cards. In addition, Ambition greatly slows the game down. It took us roughly 3 hours for a 4-person game. According to the box, it should’ve been about 1 hour and 20 minutes. When you factor in that two of the players were new to Villainous, you can tack on about 5-10 minutes for rules explanation and then about 10-20 for just general slower gameplay which still puts you at under 2 hours!
Vehicles were also a cool idea that fell flat in my experience. Vehicles can be used to slow your opponents by reducing their hand sizes or to help you by giving you another location. They cost enough currency and took an action just to play that they never seemed worth it. Some of the Fate versions like the Millennium Falcon are definitely annoying, but it also just adds what feels like unnecessary complexity. I’m sure this one is definitely going to be more of a matter of taste, but my group and I found them to be pretty useless.
On to the positives. It’s fun to play Villainous with Star Wars characters. A lot of the art is great to look at. They chose phenomenal villains to lead with. The objectives for each character were very appropriate. It didn’t have the group quest mechanic from Marvel Villainous that I abhorred. I also appreciated how there was a character from pretty much every era of Star Wars so all fans had a character they knew.
Star Wars Villainous tried some new things and really struck out. I wish the new mechanics were optional so I could play these characters with the original game. I’d love to have Yzma, Darth Vader, and Thanos all trying to prove their the biggest bad around. Sadly, that’s not the case. My group did consider tweaking the way Ambition is handled (making it work more like Credits) but were unable to test that before writing this review.
