VILLAINOUS: EVIL COMES PREPARED is a Fantastic Expansion for the Most Part

Villainous has become a pretty popular board game. You can play with up to five of your friends and you each take on the role of a Disney villain. The latest expansion is Villainous: Evil Comes Prepared and it’s a great addition. First, it adds Ratigan from The Great Mouse Detective, Scar from The Lion King, and Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove. With each villain comes a new piece and I love the ones for Scar and Yzma. The one for Ratigan makes me a little disappointed since it doesn’t feel like an abstract take on the character, but rather a silhouette of a picture of him.

Each villain gets their own board and their own objective which look great and seem fair. The objectives are designed with varying complexities but similar difficulties. For example, Scar has to kill Mufasa and then a number of other heroes until he reaches 15 points in his Succession Pile (dead heroes pile). Meanwhile, Yzma has four Fate Decks instead of the normal one with Kuzco hiding in one of them and sometimes moving between them like in the films and Yzma has to defeat Kuzco with Kronk. Ratigan actually has to get his Robot Queen to a specific location, but if that plan gets foiled, he has a secondary objective that comes up instead.

The one problem with the gameplay that I encountered is that Ratigan has very few Ally cards and their relatively low-powered while three of the Hero cards in his Fate Deck are 5+ which is pretty high. There might be better ways to handle this imbalance, but we struggled to find the silver lining.

Second, I’m new to Villainous, but I was ecstatic when I learned that the expansions are stand alone. That means that you don’t have to own the base game to play the expansion! I think this is a great feature as it means that you can try the game for a little cheaper than usual.

Overall, Evil Comes Prepared is a great addition to Villainous. I’m sure if I sat down more with Ratigan, I could find better strategies, but he’s definitely one that I wouldn’t recommend for new players.