Marvel Villainous: We Are Venom

You Cannot Just Go Around Eating Anybody You Want To

We Are Venom is a single expansion pack which requires Marvel Villainous or Mischief and Malice to play. In the Villainous universe players go head to head battling it out to see which Villains can live their best lives.

They Try & Silence Those Of Us That Ask Questions

This pack includes Venom’s personal playing board incorporating locations such as The Daily Bugle and Thrill World. Interestingly, although you get Venom’s guide or personal rules if you like, there is no main villainous rule book within this expansion. Quite possibly because unlike the three character expansion of Mischief and Malice you can’t play this game stand-alone as you need at least one other villain to battle.

You Are Not Innocent

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.

Within the pack you also get venom’s card deck and his personal fate cards as well as a pack of symbiote tokens showing venom on one side and spiderman on the other. The token pieces can mean there are A LOT of tokens in play, especially if you start whacking on +1 or -1 strength tokens but the images are pretty cool and they allow for an extra special ability of Venom’s.

If you’re a fan of the comics or films you’ll know that Venom is an anti-hero, I mean he has the constant internal struggle of right and, well, wanting to eat people. This has been beautifully reflected in the Venom hero card who will bounce about domains whenever allies are played forcing them to lose 1 strength. This card can be swapped out for any other hero within the common fate deck so you could play him even when not playing with the Venom character.

Maximum Carnage

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

If you’ve already played Disney Villainous you’ll have an idea of how the Villainous system works. However, there are some variations to gameplay mechanics. Unlike when playing Disney villains who have their own draw and fate decks in the Marvel system you add your villain’s unique fate cards to a shared fate deck. This keeps

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.

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

So how do you actually win? Venom’s objective is to use his symbiotes to merge with Spiderman, essentially you need to find Spider Man, move him into your domain and then use your allies to cover him in enough symbiote tokens to overpower his strength.

Due to the aforementioned shared fate deck there is a chance you could pull the Spider Man card and need to place it on an opponent’s board. If this were the case you would need to act quick to use special cards to pull Spider Man over to your own player board because you can only win by bombarding him with symbiotes and you can only attach symbiotes to him when he is in your domain. You don’t want another player to defeat him and send him to the fate discard pile first as this could extend your gameplay and require you to burn through fate cards much quicker than you may like.

Within Venom’s fate cards that are added to the shared fate deck there are heroes ready and able to ruin poor Venom’s day. Scarlet Spider will steal up to four venom symbiote tokens from any Spider Man hero in play onto herself whereas when Anne Weying is defeated Venom will lose all his power. And when Mary Jane Parker is placed obviously all Spider Man heroes will go with her. This can make the game a desperate struggle for Venom losing and having to reclaim Spider Man into his domain. Luckily he has cards like “It’s me, Eddie” and “Lets visit Peter” to help him.

Gonna Eat Your Brains

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

So my final thoughts on the game mostly come down to… is it worth it? It does work out more expensive buying a single character expansion and of course you can’t even play it if you don’t have the Marvel base game or other Marvel expansion pack. However, I love Venom, and not just because Tom Hardy plays him in the movie franchise, though admittedly that’s a bonus! For me as a fan of Venom I cannot imagine not including him in my Marvel Universe games. But if you’re not looking to collect lots of the Villainous versions you may prefer the simpler gameplay of the original Disney sets.