Last year’s Disney Villainous tabletop game successor Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power was a showpiece for Marvel fans and gaming collectors despite how unforgiving its difficulty curve could be. In 2021 the Marvel version of this popular game series is getting its first expansion in Marvel Villainous: Mischief & Malice.
Marvel Villainous: Mischief & Malice
Published By Ravensburger
Available August 1 at Target, everywhere later this year.
The appeal of the Villainous game series is a two-pronged attack. On the surface, the abstract mover figures based on beloved characters and fantastic art direction make you want to own these games even if tabletop games aren’t your thing. For the enthusiast, Villainous is a unique game world where being bad is the only way to win. Its use of strategy and adaptation of characters is one of the most fun game nights you can have.
In this standalone/expansion to the Marvel version, you’ll get to play as Madame Masque, MODOK, or Loki. Each character has their own specific win condition. For example, MODOK wins the game once he gets enough resources to power the cosmic cube while Loki can only win by gaining and using 10 “mischief tokens”. Each player is partly their own island and that’s the brilliance of its strategy challenge.
In M&M, players pick one of the three characters in the box (Loki, Madame Masque, MODOK), set up that characters realm, draw their own cards and find ways to take actions that either vanquish enemy allies, advance your own goal, or just prevent the other players from achieving theirs. You always feel there’s an eggshell balance between taking actions towards your win condition or making moves to prevent other players from winning.
When it debuted Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power gave itself a distinction from Disney Villainous by doing things to make itself a more group complex game. The Mischief & Malice expansion continues that trend with the fate cards. As in Infinite Power, the fate cards here come in multiple varieties. Some of the cards are specific to a character they can only be played on while others reveal global events that restrict certain actions until they’re resolved by anyone playing.
The new characters you’ll get in this release have much steeper difficulties than the base game. In four games, I was only able to win once with MODOK while the rest were won by whoever was playing as Loki. It isn’t so much that Loki is an overpowered character as much as the cards assigned to MODOK and Madame Masque are handicapped. MODOK has limited ways to gain loyalty yet three times as many cards in play cause him to lose those points while Madame Masque’s goal is to vanquish eight heroes to satisfy her vendetta but players can easily stop her by not putting any fate cards in her realm that give her heroes to fight and making her wait for her own cards that help her.
As with Mischief & Malice, you can pick up and play any of Villainous’ expansions even if you don’t own the base game. Though you’ll only be able to play with a maximum of three people and rotating the same three characters would get old. Having this be a feature is great but you get the most out of Mischief & Malice if you treat it as an expansion to the base game. We played in a combined version with Infinite Power and the unbalance of some of the card decks was less of an issue. The instructions also recommend keeping the game to a max of four players even when combined but we easily played with six people.
On the surface Marvel Villainous: Mischief & Malice is another gorgeous collectible from Ravensburger. There are some mechanical flaws with the setup of two out of the three characters in the box that lead to some frustrating times when playing it as a standalone. However, if you own the base game Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power adding Mischief & Malice is strongly advised. A lot of the expansion’s standalone flaws get covered by adding more players and it turns both into one great package.
