The popular Disney Villainous game series where players attempt to be the first to complete their evil character’s objective has seen a few additions to its base game but none that have gotten the point of Disney as storytelling property such as the new Bigger And Badder standalone expansion.
Disney Villainous: Bigger And Badder expansion brings in characters from the Pixar realm of Disney. Players will get to add Lotso (Toy Story), Syndrome (The Incredibles), not from the Pixar side Madam Mim (Sword And The Stone).
In Disney Villainous, players each progress privately on their own sideboards, using any of the available actions in one of four locations on their turn. Those actions include drawing power, playing and discarding cards, activating abilities, and performing a Fate action, which allows players to draw cards from an opponent’s deck and play an Effect, Item, or Hero that will harm them in some way. The game can become an intense battle of strategy as you need to figure out how to balance your objective progression against preventing opponents from achieving theirs since there are very few times you’ll be able to do both at once.
What Bigger And Badder demonstrates better than any previous entry in the series is how Ravensburger designers have incorporated the narrative of these characters into the game’s mechanics and objectives. Madame Mim’s goal is to beat the wizard Merlin in a battle of wits. In The Sword in the Stone, they each transform into different animals, trying to defeat the other. In Bigger and Badder, Mim plays different Transformation cards that give her the ability to beat Merlin’s corresponding Transformations.
Syndrome plays out the plot of The Incredibles movie in this game. His cards tell the movie’s story of a villain testing and strengthening a superweapon by trying it against Heroes. The villain cards play into the character’s whole trial and error machine creation in the film while the painful fate cards associated with him pack an Incredible wallop.
With previous expansions for Disney Villainous, it was hard to justify buying and playing it as a standalone. Instead, most of the expansion’s value came in adding to the game purely for variety. However, this new Bigger And Badder takes such good care of the narrative of the three characters that it makes the standalone experience fun to play when contained to its three villains.
Part of that fun also includes how well balanced the character’s unique cards and fate deck are to one another. Unlike previous expansions and the base game, it was easy to tell how overpowered strategies characters such as Gaston and Ursula could develop. I’ve only been able to test the expansion characters against the main base game characters, but so far Lotso, Syndrom, and Madam Mim don’t have god-like advantages nor fall behind some of the previous characters’ quirks.
Disney Villainous: Bigger and Badder is available now to play as a standalone Villainous game or add its cast to the original for a bigger villainous battle royal.
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