Ravensburger Marvel Villainous Infinite Power - Strategy Board Games for Adults and Kids Age 12 Years Up - Can Be Played as a Stand-Alone or Expansion

Product Information

Marvel Villainous is an asymmetric card game in which players take on the role of a comic book Villain and strive to be the first to complete their unique objective. On their turn, they’ll move their Villain to a new location in their Domain and carry out actions as indicated by the icons there. Marvel Villainous is a strategic tabletop game where you take the role of an iconic Marvel Villain. Your goal is to fulfill the evil scheme your Villain was trying to accomplish in the movie or comic they are from - whoever does this first, wins! Mother Gothel wins with 10 Trust tokens, which can be earned in various ways, usually just one at a time, but can also lose them when the Rapunzel card, which can never be removed and moves one space to the right on each turn, reaches Corona.

However, Madame Masque is arguably the most interesting newcomer aside from Loki himself. While the character is a Marvel comics deep cut, her mechanics set her aside as one of the most intriguing choices in the game. Each player takes the role of a different Marvel Villain. Each Villain has a different Objective they are trying to achieve. Each turn, players move their Villain Mover to a location on their board and perform actions that are available there. As soon as a player has fulfilled their Villain's Objective, the game ends and that player wins.Ravensburger and Prospero Hall have teamed up once again to bring you another Villainous game! This time, the Disney villains sit to one side. Here the baddies from the Marvel universe take the centre stage! This is Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power.

Taskmaster’s Objective is the good kind of difficult—get four Allies with total Strength of 5 or more at any location, in your own domain or anyone else’s. Venom is a character who likes action. He likes fighting and as such he has 3 actions at the bottom of each of his locations and only 1 in the top. This means that for the most part you really don’t mind Venom being fated as much. In fact I found it easier to almost ignore heroes that were attached to him to purely seek out Spider Man. Venom also has a specialty that lets you remove heroes so, you know, you don’t even need to worry about defeating them. That said he is still fairly balanced with the other characters so it’s not a given that you will win when playing this ‘villain’, you still need to keep your strategic wits about you. We’ve Come For Your Soul things a little more interesting as you may draw a global event that can hurt your game as much as your opponent’s so you have to team together to defeat the event or be jointly hindered by its condition, for example only drawing up to 3 cards at the end of a turn instead of to 4. I realise some fans of Villainous may not like this change but to be honest I actually enjoyed it. I found it added an extra element of tension when making the decision to play a fate card, and in fact in We Are Venom you must keep playing fate cards because you need to find Spider Man from within but ideally you want your opponent to find it and have to place it in your domain. Maybe I need to play this character more, but I find the gather ingredients/brew poison mechanic, used both to win the game and to defeat heroes, a little too cumbersome.Each game of Marvel Villainous will involve shuffling 15 Common Fate cards together with the 11 Unique Fate cards from each Villain in the current game. These include 11 total Heroes (Captain America Sam Wilson, Captain Marvel Avenger, Spider-Man Miles Morales, Winter Soldier, Spider-Woman Jessica Drew, Ghost-Spider, Spider-Man Friendly Neighborhood, Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan, Doctor Strange, Silk, Daredevil Man Without Fear), and 4 Events (End of Time, Spider-Verse, This is Our City, Mysteries of the Mystic Arts.) For other games using the Villainous gameplay engine, see the Disney Villainous wiki or the Star Wars Villainous wiki.

I am sure I saw The Great Mouse Detective as a kid, probably more than once, but I don’t remember Ratigan, and don’t care for the way his Objective works—if you play the card The Robot Queen but another player manages to discard it from your realm, your entire Objective changes.Hook must defeat Peter Pan at the Jolly Roger location, which means getting the Peter Pan card out and then moving him three spaces to the left over the course of several turns. The best part about playing Hook, however, is how many opportunities you get to add actions to your domain by playing certain Item cards, making your domain more flexible. That's a lot to take in, and it's the first quibble I have with Marvel Villainous. Much like the original board game and other 'hobby' games like Arkham Horror: Final Hour, it can be overwhelming at first due to the many layers of gameplay you've got to navigate. The unique objectives are a blessing and a curse for the same reason; they provide plenty of replayability, yet each one takes a game or two to truly wrap your head around. A-game When playing within the Villainous universe you vanquish a hero (or within the Marvel system clear a global event) at a cost. The player who does the vanquish loses the ally, and any item cards, used to perform the action to the discard pile in the process. However, Venom’s allies, such as Lasher, Riot or Agony can have symbiote tokens placed on them adding a unique element to gameplay. Instead of discarding an ally when used in battle if they have a symbiote token on them they can discard this token instead, losing a little bit of their symbiote but not dying as it were. This is really cool because if you protect your symbiote allies with enough symbiote goop, if you like, you can defeat heroes without losing valuable ally cards. Slander The venom moving piece is particularly special. To be frank I’ve found the Marvel villainous pieces feel a little ‘cheaper’ made than their Disney counterparts. This piece however has a lot of detail and looks pretty impressive. Although it still feels lighter than Disney movers it is weightier than other Marvel movers and it just looks overall like more attention to detail has been included.

Event cards are a new addition to this Villainous variant. These cards affect all players and must be defeated by players to remove the effect. This is the only time players can play allies to another location other than those in their area (without special effects). Events are defeated when their power level is lower than the cumulative villains’ cards. Whoever has the highest strength value at the event when it is defeated gains its benefit. How It Handles Another difference is the specialty cards which I guess have replaced conditions in the Disney Villainous series. When activated these can give you extra abilities that could come in really useful for example being able to pay power to place symbiote tokens from the pool on allies in your control. Only One Can Dominate This World Similarly, the artwork feels a lot more consistent this time around. The boards and cards play host to a painterly style and gorgeous blend of colors that really pop off the table. It feels more like what we've come to expect from the Villainous series.Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power runs in a sequence of players taking turns to execute actions available to them. A player takes their turn by moving their character figure to a new location. They may then activate any abilities available to them at that location. These are signifies by symbols, usually in the four corners of the spot. The Events hit home more effectively this time as well. They're not perfect by any means (some can reduce Loki or M.O.D.O.K's score to the lowest amount, which is a bit harsh - particularly if you're close to winning) but they don't seem quite as punishing as they could be before. Cruella’s Objective makes sense, and she’s probably one of the tougher ones to play, but why does she only need to capture 99 puppies instead of 101? The core concept of Marvel Villainous remains the same as Disney Villainous. Each player takes on the role of one of the classic villains from the Marvel comic book franchise. You could be any one of Thanos, Hela, Ultron, Killmonger or Taskmaster. This game scales for two to four players, despite there being five different villains.