Disney Villainous

The board game that made me love board games

For a long time, board games didn’t mean much to me. Clue is fun and the only childhood classic that still gets pulled out, but it’s not something I think deeply about. They were only an occasional amusement. Then one day I was introduced to Disney Villainous and fell in love.

Disney Villainous is an asymmetrical board game, meaning each player has their own win condition and board, referred to as a realm. Each realm has four locations, at the start of your turn you travel to a new location that determines what actions you can take during that turn.

What makes the game truly interesting is the fate action. Each character comes with two decks, a villain deck and a fate deck. The villain deck is what you draw your hand from, but the fate deck isn’t for you, it’s for your opponents. When you take a fate action, you draw two cards from a single opponents fate deck, and pick one to play. Each fate card is designed to set back the targeted player in some way.

In order to win, you need to strike a balance of progressing towards your goal and sabotaging the enemy. There will be many times when victory seems assured on the next turn, only for a fate card to set you back. You don’t just need to figure out what your cards can do, you need to figure out how the fate decks of the other players can work against them.

What enamors me is how unique each villain is. Prince Richard has a simple goal of acquiring twenty power (the game’s currency), which makes him a target for every other player and requires defensive play. Meanwhile Jafar has to draw and play several specific cards to get to his win condition, leading to an approach focused on cutting through the villain deck to reach those cards as quickly as possible.

To me it has the same appeal as a fighting game or MOBA, learning the unique properties of each character and refining your strategy with them. You can’t use the same approach on every character, you need to play differently. And each character has their own way of twisting the rules or adding a new mechanic, like Cruella De Vil’s puppy tokens or the Evil Queen’s poison mechanic. Still, there are universal rules and tactics you can get better at with any villain.

Disney Villainous has also received a good number of expansions that add new villains and can be played on their own, in addition to Marvel and Star Wars versions. I enjoy crossovers when they go for lesser known characters, and that’s exactly what Disney Villainous does, with its villain roster ranging from Maleficent to the Horned King.

In particular I love how the expansions select their additions to the roster. Each expansion adds three villains, and while there’s always one popular headlining villain, that villain’s popularity is used to let more niche picks in. Syndrome from the Incredibles headlining the ‘Bigger and Badder’ expansion leaves room for the likes of Madame Mim from The Sword in the Stone to come along and join the game.

With how fans of certain other games treat popularity as some sort of static caste system, it’s nice to see something designed by people who realize that the presence of niche characters isn’t going to sink the game when you have the likes of Maleficent and Scar as headliners. And I’ve lost to Ratigan enough times to develop an interest in seeing the Great Mouse Detective.

Sometimes I even find myself dreaming up how different villains would play in the game, that’s how fascinated I am by the game’s design. There’s a mod to play the game in Tabletop Simulator where people have created custom villains to play as, so I’m clearly not alone there.

Another thing I appreciate about the game is that it isn’t too difficult to play over video calls. Since each character uses their own board and decks, there’s nothing that needs to be passed directly between players. When fated all you need to do is hold up the cards to the camera and let the other player pick. So even if nobody around you is interested in playing, you’re not completely out of luck.

Something I need to note is that the game takes a while to complete, it isn’t something that’s over quickly. Even with how long it takes I always leave each game looking forward to the next one, and reeling from how badly I got fated.

It feels like a whole new world has been opened up to me since playing Disney Villainous, one of board games as a new and active thing rather than old stale childhood activities.