Villainous Gets Marvel-ous!

Disney Villainous was a game that surprised everyone by actually being rather good, or at least a lot better than expected, and has spawned at least three standalone expansions and a jigsaw (honestly). As a result of this game’s success, the House of Mouse is joining forces with the House of M (potentially) in a Marvel-based release of the game, Marvel Villainous Infinite Power.

It resembles the original game in many ways, in that players take on the mantel of a baddie and play to complete their own victory conditions – yes, it’s asymmetrical, so what’s sauce for the Thanos may not be sauce for the Hela. Players can disrupt their opponents by drawing from a Fate Deck and playing to their opponents board – in the original game, each player had their own Fate Deck, but with the Marvel Universe being such a crossed over thing, players share a Fate Deck as they share a common roster of heroes.

This is one reason why the Marvel version and the Disney version will not be easily compatible; the other reason is that the shared Fate Deck contains Events that can affect only one person or the whole table – can you say Avengers Assemble? Sure you can! It also means that players, at times, might need to co-operate to overcome these events – now that’s hardly the spirit, is it?

It will, however, be a whole bunch of wicked fun, and definitely one for the long-term fans as it will be based more around the comic storylines rather than the MCU. It will also be very striking looking, with art provided by different artists for each different villain; there will be five in total, but three villains and their respective artists have been revealed so far: Hela, the goddess of death (Ilse Harting), Ultron, AI gone wild (Eduardo Franciso) and Thanos, Grimace with a gauntlet (Johnny Morrow).

Ravensburger’s executive Vice President Florian Baldenhoffer stated: “Ravensburger is extending the Villainous franchise to the Marvel Universe because of passion. We’ve heard from many Villainous fans that the Marvel Universe would be an exciting place to play.”

So it seems like Loki might find his way into Villainous, just not in the way I predicted… but if there is any kind of prophetic power in this blog, I look forward to receiving my £30,000 win from the Post Code Lottery this weekend…