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May 21, 2020
11:39:48am
LeftOfNormal All-American
Enough of you disnophiles are on here you might like this quarantine suggestion.
My wife got the game Villainous for the older kids, partly out of shared desperation with her sister (multiple states away) because the kids needed another energy outlet. They each bought the game because it's actually a game the cousins could all play together on Zoom/Skype/Hangouts.

Oddly, I'm neither a disnophile nor a board game guy, but it's actually quite an interesting concept, and I've had quite a lot of fun playing with the kids as well. The idea is that each player is a different Disney Villain, and each villain has his/her own objective, tailored after their movie. It involves you drawing from one deck of your cards to find allies from your villain's story who have abilities to help you meet your objective (Captain Hook has Smee, for example), and the other players drawing from a deck of your cards to find "heroes" from your villain's story who will slow you down (Peter Pan, Wendy, etc).

One of the more interesting aspects is precisely that it's not a game where all players have the exact same task and where everyone has the exact same amount of spaces to move their player token. It's completely different each time, not only because you all have different "finish lines," but that each player's gameplay is set up with different advantages and susceptibilities to sabotage from other players, and as you progress through the game, those advantages and disadvantages change depending on how you and they have played so far. Some villains' objective is to defeat a specific hero, in which case, it's a gamble in trying to thwart their progress by drawing cards and hoping you draw only heroes that slow them down.

The creators of the game have done a very good job of balancing the difficulty of the objectives between playable characters so that one villain doesn't consistently finish sooner, and that's always the toughest task for game makers when you build a game with asymmetrical gameplay. If the victim of one player's objective happens to be the bottom card in their deck, they'll likely not win, and if one player happens to draw all of the most-needed cards right at the start, chances are really good that they'll win (and that sets up a hilarious everyone-gang-up-on-one-player scenario), but for the most part, all of that balances out and most players are within a turn or two of winning at the the end.

Give it a look. Great way to spend a few hours with the family.
LeftOfNormal
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LeftOfNormal
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May 31, 2010
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Jun 16, 2024
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