Let your inner bad guy out of the box with our guide to Disney’s Villainous board game
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Kids might love Disney princesses, but it’s often the villains that really stand out in the company’s roster of animated movies. Cast with star power and gravitas in mind, Disney’s evildoers have been voiced by Jeremy Irons and Vincent Price, and portrayed in live action by Angelina Jolie and Glenn Close. They often seem to be the characters having the most fun, as they revel in their power and brilliant schemes, often via a catchy and ominous song.
The German game company Ravensburger understands the deep appeal of being bad, which is why it launched Disney Villainous in 2018. The base game lets two to six players take on the role of iconic Disney villains racing to complete their objective, and getting in each other’s way by enlisting the aid of another villain’s cast of heroes. Every villain has their own win condition and deck, producing a huge amount of replayability as players can try new characters and see how they fare against each other.
Villainous proved so popular that it’s been followed up by three sequels, each introducing three new villains. Another edition, Marvel Villainous, is scheduled to release in August, and will expand the concept to some of the best villains from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you and/or your kids are bummed about Disney postponing all its big releases due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Villainous provides a great way to have some fresh interactions with the characters you love to hate within the safety of your own home.
The game comes with guides for how to play each character, and advice for what the other players should be aware of when it comes to disrupting them. What it doesn’t come with, though, is an easy way to determine the varying complexity or quality of its characters to help players pick the ones they’re most likely to enjoy. So we’ve done that work for you, playing six of the series’ villains to provide answers on how they stack up against their cinematic counterparts, ensuring your stress-free start to your villainy career.
Prince John, Robin Hood
Prince John is an unusual Disney villain, as he starts the 1973 animated film having already basically won, managing to take over the England of anthropomorphic animals by hypnotizing his older brother into running off to the Crusades. Now he’s just trying to make a bunch of money through unjust taxes, and to stop Robin Hood from making fun of him.
Appropriately, John has the easiest time winning the game out of any of the characters we tried. One of the core mechanics of Villainous is gathering power tokens, which are used to play cards from your hand or activate cards that are already in play. Visiting squares on your board, each based on a key location from the film, gets you one to three power each turn. John’s goal is simply to acquire 20 power.
Unfortunately, the villain must move every turn, so they can’t just camp out in the one location that gives them the most power every time time. Every zone lets you take three to five actions, though, such as playing cards, gaining power, or drawing cards from another player’s Fate deck, from which you can force them to deal with their heroes or other annoyances. Heroes typically reduce the number of actions you can take at their location, so playing them on your opponents makes their turn less effective.
Most of John’s heroes also have the ability to steal power from him—representing Robin Hood’s efforts to steal back tax payments—but if he can defeat the hero, he gets the power back. John also has access to the Jail, a zone where he can ship unruly heroes to free up the locations they’re messing with. He also has plenty of powerful allies that can be used to defeat heroes, and many of his cards let him gain extra power when heroes come into play or are defeated. As a result, even attempts to disrupt his efforts often wind up playing out in his favor.
Captain Hook, Peter Pan
Captain Hook is another fairly simple villain, good for beginners in that he also has the benefit of bad things working out well for him. Hook wins by satisfying his obsessive desire to find and defeat Peter Pan. The boy who won’t grow up is hidden in the pirate captain’s Fate deck, which means that, for most of the game, it’s a terrible idea for other players to play Fate cards against Hook, since they’re just accelerating his search for vengeance.
That means Hook’s pretty much free to do whatever he wants in the early game, recruiting pirate allies and building up his arsenal. Cards like his collection of different hooks, or a ship’s cannon, improve the effectiveness of various locations, making every turn better for him than it will be for most other players. That’s meant to compensate for the fact that one of the locations on his board is locked at the start of the game: He needs to find a map of Never Never Land tucked within his own deck to be able to get to Lost Boys’ base at Hangman’s Tree.
Once he’s done that, though, Hook just needs lure Peter to his ship so he can be defeated. Peter is the most powerful single hero we’ve seen in the game, so Hook needs to amass an army of well-armed pirates to actually dispatch him. Luckily, that’s exactly what he’s good at, even as other players try to counter it by buffing Peter with help from the Lost Boys or Tinker Bell. It’s a nice manifestation of Hook’s ability to play on Peter’s arrogance, and shows how Peter is only able to win through the strength of his friends.
Scar, The Lion King
Scar is the signature villain of the Evil Comes Prepared expansion, and feels, in many ways, like an evolved version of Hook. His goal is to first defeat Mufasa, and then a bunch of other heroes to establish himself as the heir to Pride Rock. Although other players can interfere with Scar’s attempts to hunt down his hated brother, his deck is full of cards that let him play cards from his Fate discard pile, or interrupt people using Fate cards against him, putting some of the agency back in the player’s hands. The game really gets the feel of the scheming nature of the character, the kind of guy able to deal with young Simba by making him feel guilty about his father’s death.
Scar doesn’t have to worry about any locked locations—that mechanic was entirely eliminated after the base game was released. His army of hyenas is also extremely powerful, gaining strength from working together at the same location to take down imposing enemies like Mufasa and Simba. Because he has so much control over his own Fate deck, and actually needs to defeat heroes to win, disrupting Scar’s schemes is really difficult. That makes sense for a villain who pretty much told Mufasa he was going to murder him, then was able to pull it off because the hero was too noble to do anything about it.
Ursula, The Little Mermaid
Speaking of those locked locations, Ursula is probably the reason they were eliminated from later expansions to the game. The sea witch is really fun in concept, but it’s almost impossible for her to win due to the restrictions placed on her. One of her locations is locked at all times, based on whether she’s in her aquatic or human form, and changing requires playing a card—so you might not be able to easily do it when you want to. Those are also the two locations where she can play Fate cards, meaning she’s always going to be less aggressive toward other players, since it’s really hard for her to take action against them two turns in a row.
Ursula’s goal focuses on the trident, which summons King Triton, who she must then defeat, before spiriting his stuff off to her lair. The problem is that, like in the movie, Ursula doesn’t really fight. While every other villain in the game uses their allies to beat up heroes, Ursula can only defeat them by playing contract cards that each specify a location on her board. If she can get the hero to move to that location, through a mix of sorcery or her eel allies, they’ve violated their contract and are defeated, presumably transformed into those gross little monsters living in her lair. It’s great flavor, but hard to do—fiddly, easily disrupted, and with lots of complicating factors. There are just too many ways to mess with Ursula, and not enough ways for her to win. As a personal favorite, her handicaps all fit with her weird ethos of pretending to be a good guy and playing by the rules. But villains that use dirtier tricks are always going to beat her.
Cruella de Vil, 101 Dalmatians
The fashionable villain is the star of the Perfectly Wretched expansion released back in March, and is one of the most fun villains we’ve played. Her goal is to capture multiple Dalmatian puppies, of course, so that she can make a spectacular new fur coat. Cruella does this by sending her goons to pick up Dalmatian tokens, which can represent 11 or 22 puppies who spawn at different locations. Her deck revolves around getting Dalmatians in play, and having her powerful allies nab them. Appropriately, she prefers to sit back and look fabulous, using her phone to call her minions into action.
Cruella is great at racking up power, with cards that let her gain it based on how many Dalmatians she’s found but not yet captured, and then spending it to play allies and move them around. She can pick up speed fast, but her Fate deck has plenty of mean surprises for her enemies to turn against her, like Dalmatian couple Pongo and Perdita, who can rescue Dalmatians she’s already captured or prevent her from catching puppies at their location. That can be hard for her to deal with, since she really needs her allies on puppy-catching duty rather than fighting off full-grown dogs. But just as Cruella seems to absolutely revel in the ridiculous depths of her depravity, there’s something delightful in the simple joy of nabbing puppies and kicking heroic animals away.
Professor Ratigan, The Great Mouse Detective
Hailing from the 1986 Sherlock Holmes riff The Great Mouse Detective, Ratigan’s Villainous incarnation plays out exactly how a criminal genius should—with an elaborate opening gambit, and a measure of spiteful revenge if his enemies manage to get in his way.
At the start of the game, Ratigan’s got a difficult and somewhat convoluted plot involving kidnapping heroes and stashing them in his lair, then marching a big powerful item across the board. If that item is destroyed, though, his victory condition changes to defeating Basil of Baker Street. Unlike other villains who need to defeat specific heroes, Ratigan doesn’t have any way to get Basil in play on his own. If he ever appears, though Ratigan just needs to leave the detective alone, which is appropriate for a guy that really wants to show off how smart he is, rather than getting his hands dirty.
Ratigan is slow to ramp up, and can be fairly easily disrupted, but he’s extremely fun and flavorful. His preferred way of dealing with heroes in both the movie and the game is to feed them to a fat cat he summons with a bell. Felicia is more expensive to play if Ratigan doesn’t feed her by sacrificing one of his minions, and that’s a trade he’s likely to make, considering how desperately he needs to horde power. There’s even a card for a guy that gets eaten in the film that you can play for free and has no useful abilities. He’s just meant to be cat food.
We haven’t played all of the villains Villainous has to offer, and we’re still eager to try more and see what the Marvel expansion brings. So if you’ve played any of the ones we didn’t mention, please let us know your thoughts in the comments section. Maleficent? Jafar? Queen of Hearts? Mother Gothel?
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The game definitely benefits from having more than 2 people play. With 2 people it becomes a little RNG dependent based on what cards you draw, which can get annoying real quick. My first game was with my dad, Ursula and Cpt Hook respectively, and it just so happened that a required card of both of our objectives were at the bottom of our decks somehow, so any progression took ages, especially with Ursula. It’s fun, though.
Geek & Sundry has a couple longplay videos of the different expansion packs, they’re pretty fun to watch and gauge whether you’d be interested in playing or not.
Recently did a bit of a binge on Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I’m still very early in the game, but I’ve got my students in proper classes and managed to get through a big fight without losing a single one (though of course I’m on Casual.) The problem with playing this in bed is before you know it, five hours have passed. (Granted that’s less of a problem these days.)Am definitely looking forward to fooling around with the new tools in the Super Mario Maker 2 update. Though I’m of two minds about introducing the Koopalings- they’re cool characters but also the LAST thing this community needed was more material for boss rushes.
Nioh 2 has been a wild ride. After a mid-game of lackluster bosses, the game has thrown a few at me that took a few tries. The most challenging so far was Shibata Katsuie. I defeated him with an inch of my health left and in pretty spectacular fashion (straight up slapping him in the face). Even made a video to commemorate:
Currently, I’m at a new boss, one that brings to mind the giant skeleton of the first game. There’s a similar mechanic to hitting body parts until he’s stunned after which you have to run up to its face for a devestating blow.
A friend and I are starting a new co-op game together and have decided on Risk Of Rain 2. Looking forward to something that’s colourful, offbeat and unpredictable.
Hey! It’s kind of a big milestone for me this week, as I reached the half-way point of my quest to play The Top 500 Video Games Of All Time (according to one online list) after almost 8 months of work so far. It’s been loooooooong project, and also really helpful as it’s been a way for me to write about my own mental health and daily struggle to get better along the way, and it’s felt great to start finally putting out some of those first articles and seeing how far I’ve come.So I’m starting the weekend with the 251st game of that list, the original Fallout. I’ve not had much experience with this series; Fallout 2 came up earlier in this project, and I failed at it REALLY hard, especially as I’m such a CRPG amateur. So today I decided to go in armed with a Beginners Guide to get me over the first few hurdles, and it’s been a big help so far. I’ve done my first side-quest and killed a bunch of Radscorpions, and got a good friend Ian helping me out along the way, which is very nice. We’ll see how long I can go without getting overwhelmed, I guess. After that I have the NES classic Castlevania 3, which I’ve heard a lot about but never played myself. I’m a big fan of Super Castlevania 4, so looking forward to going back a step to see what came before. Apart from that, I’ve been diving back into Apex Legends to see if I can’t finish the Battle Pass before Season 5 starts; I have a whole lot of levels to grind in about 10 days, but the new Duo’s mode has been a great way to get some hang-out time with my brother who’s quarantined a couple hundred miles away. Hooray for video games! Hope you all have a great weekend, stay safe 🙂
I started Cloudpunk yesterday, and I almost immediately got bored of it. The environments are gorgeous and rendered in loving detail, and the voxel aesthetic really works. But the game suffers from the Night-in-the-Woods problem of layering pointless, tedious gameplay on top of a story that would have been better told in a visual novel. And in this case, the writing isn’t even a quarter as sharp as Night in the Woods’s. I’ll probably muddle through due to my completist instincts, but man, this is a disappointment.I’m going to try to make it to the final stretch of Tokyo Mirage Sessions this weekend. This is another game that I honestly haven’t enjoyed very much, and it’s been hard to put my finger on why. I think the premise is a lot of fun, and in principle the combat isn’t too different from Persona or Digimon Story. However, after some reflection, I think I’ve figured out why: the progression systems are too simple. Both Persona and Digimon Story have you juggling a team of monster companions, figuring out how to level them up and unlock new monsters. This involves long-term strategizing: figuring out which monsters to use in which contexts, which dungeons to farm for items or XP, which monsters to fuse/evolve/sacrifice/etc. There’s nothing like that in TMS. The only meaningful progression system is levelling up, and you level up through regular combat. If you need to grind, you just go to the place with the highest-level monsters you can access that won’t kill you, and you go to town. There are no actual decisions to be made. In the end, you’re really just going through the motions, and the only time you have to turn your brain on is during combat.That actually reminds me of a broader point I wanted to make: I think complexity is sometimes unfairly regarded as a frustration, even though it’s largely orthogonal to what I believe is the actual source of frustration: opacity. There are relatively simple RPGs where you can’t figure out what the actual systems do or how you’re supposed to progress in them (looking at you, Kingdom Hearts II, though I should say it’s considerably more complex than TMS). And then there are enormously complex RPGs where every system is explained in meticulous detail and is relatively intuitive (e.g. Xenoblade Chronicles 2). Of course, complexity has diminishing and eventually negative marginal returns. But as long as a game properly lays out what its systems do, then complexity can be pushed pretty far.
Continuing through Dragon Age Origins. Now completed the Circle Tower quest and had fun storming the castle at Redcliffe, so about to go off on a quest for the holy hand grenade. At Redcliffe I managed one of my favourite mini-challenges in the game, which is preventing any of the village militia guys from getting killed by zombies; though it took a fair amount of meta-gaming to do it. (Lloyd the barkeeper makes a comment afterwards about how he doesn’t know how he survived. Well I do, chap – it’s because I kept casting force field on you).I’ve never done it, but apparently it’s possible to do the whole find the Urn quest before ever going to Redcliffe. One for a different playthrough, but I do really like that idea.Lord Exposition: Sir Knight Grey Warden, I have a pewilous undertaking for you. You must seek out the Urn of Sacwed Ashes of our Most Holy Pwophet Andwaste.Player Character: *rummages in pack*
Yeah, I was stuck playing Ursula the one time my friends broke that game out. Can confirm.
We have Villainous and the three (so far) expansions, and really enjoy it. I’ve won with Ursula at least once – there are a few characters that are really dependent on having certain cards. In fact, IIRC, the problem with Ursula is more that you need King Triton’s trident before you can do anything.It’s a great concept overall, the one thing is that the winning mechanisms for each villain realllly varies in difficulty – King John is super straightforward; Dr Facilier is really complicated.
Played Villainous once, and won as the Queen of Hearts. Her victory condition is very much luck-based, as you need to line up your minions, then play one of the “Take a shot”* cards in her deck. You then reveal the next few (3?) cards of her deck, and if your minions attack values tally higher than the totals on the cards…you win.*- It’s croquet, not alcohol. Your minions have to be switched between allies who can attack & wickets that add to your shot score.If all the shot cards are stuck towards the end of your deck….chances are you’re going to lose your 1st attempt (since the high point cost of the shot cards work against you when they get revealed). After the deck re-shuffled, I found another card relatively quickly and won on my 2nd shot attempt.The other players in the game were Jafar (who is a lot easier to play if you know the one ‘hypnotize’ spell in your deck needs to be used on a specific character), Prince John, & Maleficent (who has a lot of spell cards, and abilities which can block fate cards from messing with her board; I think you have to plan on playing fate cards against her early to stop her from getting on a roll). It’s a game I’d like to play more.[EDIT: Forgot to add, Villainous is one of the few games I’ve heard of where the expansions don’t actually require the core game in order to play. Since the characters player deck & fate deck are self-contained, you can play a full game between just the expansion characters….which would seemingly be a cheaper buy-in than the base game.]Not doing much console gaming right now. I’ve found Upper Deck’s Legendary DXP iOS app, as a replacement for my weekly, family-based game of Marvel Legendary. The app is quite buggy, and requires a persistent online connection, but the cards are basically the core Marvel game (and some expansions) minus the license. While you can pay to buy additional characters or cosmetics, it’s remarkably f2p friendly; there are daily quests for a small amount of pay currency, and significantly more of the pay currency can be earned by just playing the game. Because it can be played online, it’s possible to get on a call with the extended family, and play the board game while social distancing.
I’m glad you enjoyed it. I think it’s the disparity between win conditions that really put my regular group (not for now, obvs.) off the game. Prince John just racks up victory points (is that what they’re called?) while other villains were stuck with arcane, tougher-to-achieve goals. Plus, there’s the same issue that comes with wildly asymettrical games like this: nobody wants other players to know how close they are to winning, but everybody wants to know how close their rivals are to winning. I suppose resolving that issue just comes with experience.In theory, there’s a lot to like about the game. I’m always interested in asymettrical games. The underlying mechanics are simple enough, using space and symbols to indicate what you can do when you move to a new location. And it is a good deal less complex than Vast:The Crystal Caverns, which has a special playbook for each individual player!
It’s called “power” I think which fits King John. But yeah, it’s definitely somewhat disparate in difficulty and much easier to tell how close some are to winning than others. We’ve played it in 2, 3 and 4-player modes and I think it does work better with more than 2, though there’s also a learning curve.
Greetings. A pretty active gaming week in this, our latest
stay at home week. First up, on the old PC. I’m continuing in my quixotic quest
to play every game in my backlog, even if it’s for a mere 5 minutes. This week,
I consciously tried to do that instead of slipping into my two comfort food
games, Minecraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Since I’m
basically going through my GOG Galaxy launcher (which combines most of the
other launchers into a single app, so consolidates my Steam, Epic Games, etc.
in one single app). And I’m very much still in the ‘A’ section. First up a
blast from the distant past, a game that was originally released before I was
born, 1979’s Akalabeth (sometimes known as Ultima 0) and in common with the early Ultima games it was the progenitor for, it was really bloody
difficult. Mostly because there’s not a handy map and just about every dungeon
screen looks like a white wireframe. The best character I ran was this guy (I
think the stats are all due to RNGsus)I did get to the equivalent of level three (of ten) and
spoke to Lord British about the creatures I had been killing.
From sparse wireframe dungeons to a more atmospheric horror
type game, that I clearly hould have tried to play with a mouse instead of a
laptop touchpad, since the mouse and keyboard controls of Alan Wake led to very weird hand cramps on the
trusty computing potato. The game looked great, and ran smoothly:
But because of the aforementioned hand cramping issue, I
kept dying to the nightmare creatures before even getting to the lighthouse
which I think marked the end of the tutorial level. Then it was time for another retro game, whose levels put me
in mind of the old Commander Keen games, Anodyne 2: Return to Dust. The
levels looked like this:In contrast to the overworld which looked more
sophisticated:
The story seems pretty nonsensical, but the gameplay is a
lot of fun, and I’m definitely going to be doing more in the game.
I couldn’t entirely escape my earlier named comfort
food games, doing a little bit of Minecraft:
This was mostly spent exploring, and auto-smelting so much
sand into glass so that I can get a better build done later. Also, the witch
kept spawning on the roof of my house, so I’ve killed four of them with ground
level crossbow shots. I need to put some torches or campfires on the wooden
roof to stop monsters spawning up there.On mobile, to celebrate ForkKnife making it to the Google
Play store, I downloaded it, played it, and died almost instantly (finishing 61st)
because I couldn’t actually pick up the fucking gun I landed next too. The controls
here:Are nothing but a great big lie. The other game I played on
mobile was advertised on two podcasts I listen to, Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me, and Crooked Media’s Lovett or Leave it where
Jon Lovett mentioned that he was on level 270 of Best Fiends in the ad. I
thought that was a lot, but after a week, I’m here:
So, that might be a little bit excessive play.
Finally, on tabletop I was able to get two games of Dungeons
& Dragons 5th Edition in. Tuesday was the ongoing
campaign, where the party is currently trapped in an old manor house that has
slipped into disrepair and doesn’t appear to have an exit. We’ve dealt with a
few bandits and are being taunted by a laughing demonic voice who has been
mocking the futility of our escape plans. The highlight for my Warforged Cleric
was when we went into an alchemist’s potion room, and through a collection of
extremely bad dexterity rolls stuff was spilled upon my character. He ended up
being split into three separate bodies. While that sounds neat, the fact that
each of those bodies was then shrank to be a mere 2-inches high was a
significant drawback. Towards the end of the session, I had the three bodies
stand on each other’s shoulders to an impressive 6 inch form. My one spell cast
of Thunderwave in this situation did deal with the only remaining threat in the
room after the rest of the party did their murder hobo bit. We’re now long
resting and I’m hoping the potions wear off.In the other session, a Friday night one shot. We had to
deal with a plague cult, which is very seasonal. My goblin ranger and his
trusty pet wolf didn’t do much this time, but we had an Eladrin Cleric who was
effectively a kid, and she kept blundering into things. The big bad that our DM
wanted us to fight was an extremely powerful plague god entity, but we found
the sorceress who was trying to summon it, and disrupted that spell, avoiding
that fight. And then the Eladrin kid pushed the sorceress out of a 5th
storey tower window for “being a very naughty girl.” Despite that, we’re able
to level up to level 4 for tonight’s one shot. I’m debating whether to take a
+2 Dex, +2 Wis, +1 of each, or the Mounted Combat feat for my Beat Master
ranger. I feel like the feat might be more fun, so I could ride the wolf into
glorious battle (or more likely away from glorious battle like the coward he
is).
Since I started working from home last month, I’ve watched a lot of miniature painting tutorials while working and either through being thoroughly suggestible or awakening my on/off interest in painting tiny men, I’m considering ordering Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress from my local game shop (if they have it in stock and will ship it uptown; otherwise I’ll wait until NYC businesses can open again). It looks both like a fun project and a pretty cool game and since it’s a self-contained board game rather than a miniature skirmish game like Underworlds or a full-on wargame like 40K or Age of Sigmar, I don’t have to try to recruit my friends into miniature painting in order to have people to play with. The $150 price tag and real possibility that I won’t paint more than a handful of figures is what hold me back (I still have paints from the first Reaper Bones kickstarter, so I’m not planning to buy any more paints for this). Rundown of the games I’ve skipped around playing under the stay at home order: – Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is so far a lot of fun; I’ve gotten to level 7 or 8 as a Paladin/Fighter and it’s been a good time. Only thing holding me back is that I want to spend time in a different room staring at a different glowing box after sitting at my desk for 7.5 hours a day. The changes to abilities/resources between the first game and Deadfire are very welcome. -Borderlands 3 somewhat mindless loot treadmill that’s still fun when you’re in the mood for it. Getting through Handsome Jackpot DLC toward the new level cap before I do the newest DLC and check out how they’ve overhauled the post-game content. I may stray from my Zane playthrough to give Amara a shot.-Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice second time I’ve tried to get into it and I think this one might just not be for me. I’m terrible at parrying in Souls games and I find the stealth and movement to be frustrating.-Bloodborne thought I would play through it again, but there are areas that, when I think about them, I just don’t want to bother playing through at the moment. -Dark Souls III is what I’m currently messing around in; just playing something familiar. D&D 5E has continued via Discord; it’s a pain to upload maps and keep everyone on the same page, but I don’t really want to learn Roll20’s interface to make it work. It’s been good to continue the game and have a good laugh together on Sunday afternoons and keep the game moving. Stay healthy, everyone!
Before I get into video game things this week, how about some board games since it fits in with the theme. Specifically Kenny G’s Keepin It Saxy. It’s an interesting little cooperative game that pits you and 2 to 4 other players against several bad things that can ruin Kenny G’s groove. Draw cards that represent bad thing like a traffic jam in Malibu, and play other cards to counter the bad moods with a melody. They’re color-coded and you have to hit the right pattern to make the bad thing go away, or you have to roll dice to figure out how many groove tokens you lose. It’s 6 stages over the course of a day and if you still got some groove tokens, y’all win. It’s good dumb fun if you’re tired of competitive games, or your family/roommates want something chill after the Great Monopoly Board Tossing.On the game front, I’ve slowly wormed my family into Ring Fit Adventure. It’s a fun little jaunt that’s kept them interested in keeping active during the whole quarantine closure. They keep coming back to it once a day, so so far it’s working. I had it boxed up since before Christmas, so there was no need to fight the scalpers for it. Speaking of not fighting scalpers, since my Switch is being used constantly, I may or may not have stumbled on a Switch Lite and may or may not be trying to figure out account sharing and what restrictions are in place to play games digitally across the consoles. Stupid Nintendo and its weird restrictions keeping me from playing two different digital games on the same account. I get it, you want to make sure I’m not playing Mario Kart against myself with the same purchase. But if I want to play Hollow Knight, they can’t play Pokemon.And the fun game I get to look forward to this weekend is “why won’t my PC start up?” I’m pretty sure I managed to fry the RAM somehow. It had a good four-year run at least. I went to look for replacements on Amazon and shipping times were backed up until Mid-May for some very reasonable reason. So I figured I’d check out Best Buy … and it turns out they’re not letting people in stores, so I have to buy it online and have it available for pickup later. Here’s hoping this is the actual problem and not the start of a rabbit hole.Before all this I did manage to finish The Messenger, which was just what I needed. A nice little platform challenge mixed with some good fun dumb dialogue. I knew this was a good “you’re stuck inside and need some dumb laughs” game from the moment I tried to look in the cabinet too soon. The twists in it were appreciated by me and probably well known by now, but I’ll avoid mentioning them for now. It’s about a good 10-hour jaunt and there’s free DLC that I started but just kinda fell off. I’d gotten what I wanted out of it.
You know, as much as the Disney theming largely made me think “probably a Candyland-level low-complexity game,” the Villainous box is attractive. I’ve eyed it every time I’ve passed it at Target or, more recently, in Amazon board game searches. I hadn’t quite put the minimal effort into looking up the core mechanics or adding a good Villainous workshop mod on Tabletop Simulator, but if there’s asymmetric gameplay/win conditions based on your character and multiple expansions if I really get into it, this basically checks all the boxes for my favorite board game night staples – minus co-op gameplay. Might be a good one for our more general-appeal game nights, when we’re not playing 8-hour abominations.Board Games I downloaded a huge stack of Tabletop Simulator mods this week with the intent of getting a basic feel for the gameplay in each and figuring out my next solo lockdown adventure. Even though it doesn’t fit the solo game theme and won’t do me much good, I’ll probably throw in Villainous when I get home. Might be a good post-lockdown purchase.Even after I’d gotten them all downloaded and lined up for my weekend, seeing Robinson Crusoe ranked so highly on so many lists, even with all these other games downloaded and unplayed, I threw it in my shopping cart with the Dark City expansion for Legendary.See, my roommate’s moving out next week and has opted to only take Legendary. He says he feels like this is the gaming apartment, and I’ve really been the one to recruit the core gamers in our group, read through the rules days ahead of time, teach everybody how to play, and decide which games we’d get next. I figure if he’s relinquishing some of the games we bought together, or that he picked up expansions for, I can get him what everybody seems to consider the essential Legendary expansion – especially if the price is pretty reasonable right now. It’s not even close to a fair trade, but he’ll appreciate the gesture.I look forward to learning the ropes in Too Many Bones, Aeon’s End, Mage Knight, and/or Friday through Tabletop Simulator this weekend – and maybe Villainous. I’ve put feelers out for who in our board game group would be interested in picking up Tabletop Simulator when it’s on discount. I’d like to go back to having the semi-regular Saturday game night. At the very least, our Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 crowd is interested, and specifically interested in finishing that campaign. Which, with how many modifications we’ve made to the game throughout the campaign, sounds tricky to set up in TTS.I’ve got some ideas, but the specifics can be left for later. Right now everyone’s dealing with real-life changes (like my roommate moving out) in the middle of an actual pandemic, so we can wait a couple weeks for the inevitable 75% discount. But game night was something worth looking forward to every week, and we’ve been without for like 7 weeks now. Hopefully we can patch it together through TTS. Fingers crossed.And I’ve maybe got one more person I’m recruiting through Twitch. I mean, as long as we’re hosting these things online, what does it matter if she’s two towns over or in Michigan? I told her I’d teach her Pandemic this weekend.I also finished the last of my Exit games – The Forbidden Castle.It’s an incredibly frustrating experience getting to a puzzle and not knowing what I’m even looking at. I pull the first hint card. It tells me to make sure the puzzle is in front of me before proceeding to hint 2. Yes, I have the puzzle in front of me. That’s why I asked for the hint. Thanks, game. Having taken my first hint, my end-of-game ranking automatically goes down by two stars.The second hint card tells me that I should maybe try looking at the puzzle, and the process might just come to me! Oh, cool. Thanks for that helpful bit of insight. It continues: I might even try folding and cutting! And I don’t like this plan because I don’t know what I’m supposed to cut, and cutting the wrong thing would probably render the puzzle unsolvable. I’m not seeing it, whatever it is, and it means that I have to pull the third hint card, which will walk me through the entire puzzle. I want a live escape room attendant to give me a gentle nudge that actually tells me what I’m not seeing, let me at least solve the back half of the puzzle and feel like I’ve done something, but now, pulling the whole solution after getting stuck on step 1, I get zero solving joy out of the puzzle.The third hint card – the full solution – drops my score by another two stars. It assumes that I’ve already appropriately cut and folded the puzzle and that I just don’t know how to derive the answers from what I’m looking at. I spend several minutes with the puzzle and all three hint cards in front of me before I can work backwards and figure out the step they’re refusing to outright tell me. There are no dotted lines to distinguish between folds and cuts, but if I fold like so, and then cut like so, and then… ah-hah! A string of paper dolls! That staple of Looney Tunes visual gags! That was the whole puzzle! I mean, it’s clever, it’s visually appealing, it’s fun, but the whole puzzle was, “you either see it or you don’t see it.” And with the 24 minutes and 3 hints I spent on a puzzle that I didn’t get any puzzle-solving satisfaction out of, my score for the entire game was now in the toilet.I pulled the cards for the next puzzle, solved a logic puzzle, entered the apparent solution into the decoder ring, and was told it was the wrong solution. Jesus, was this only puzzle 4? I was able to solve the first 5 puzzles in the other two games before I started hitting wall after wall after wall like this. Well, what was I doing wrong? The numbers were definitely right. There was clearly one last step I wasn’t seeing. Without looking, I knew the first hint would tell me to make sure I had all the pieces of the puzzle in front of me before trying to solve it, and the second hint was probably going to tell me how to solve the part of the puzzle I’d already figured out. Because that’s the Exit experience, over and over and over again. If the game devs didn’t correctly guess where you were going to get stuck on the puzzle, you’re going to have to read the solution and lose 2 stars for every puzzle you didn’t immediately know how to solve.When you spend $12 on a box of misery, are you supposed to finish the whole box and make sure you get every penny’s worth of misery out of the experience? Nah. It was getting late. I tossed the entire box in recycling and went to bed. I wish the series was consistently as good as Dead Man on the Orient Express, but when Exit’s bad, it mixes creative puzzles with a complete lack of instructions, and either you make 12 equally viable leaps of logic until one of them pays off, or the game has to walk you through, and seeing that the puzzle was actually pretty good, that you could’ve gotten there with the right hint, is demoralizing.These are a poor imitation of the real thing. I wish our local escape room was open.Video GamesThere’s just more and more and more to do in Final Fantasy X-2 HD. I didn’t realize completing the bestiary would involve encountering the oversoul versions of every monster in the game – which isn’t complicated, but finding out the normal versions weren’t enough while sitting on floor 100 of the Via Infinito, I’m feeling like I could’ve saved a lot of time taking care of this on the way down the first time, if I’d only known. Still, not all that arduous a task. You encounter a new type of monster, you keep killing it until it goes oversoul. As long as you don’t kill the oversouled – say, wolf – every wolf you encounter will automatically oversoul and count toward your bestiary, just by seeing it. So completing the whole thing largely just involved battling a certain number of each monster in floors 1-10, then running away from every fight for 90 floors. By trading around the AP egg, it gave me a chance to fill out my mascot abilities for all 3 characters by doing something more interesting than running in circles.And even though they adjusted Cat Nip to invalidate the cheesy Trigger Happy strat I used back in 2003, mascots are an equally viable form of cheese. For the last two Via Infinito boss fights, I just loaded Yuna up with Adamantite and a speed bracer so she’d be nearly impossible to kill and only moderately slower than the other two, and her mascot abilities cover full-party revives, heals, status recovery, haste, and regen. I mean, one of her abilities revives any dead characters with full HP *and* MP. Handing her 255 defense and 205 magic defense meant there was no risk of failure. With Rikku specializing in de-buffs, which the bosses were outright immune to them, I had her just toss turbo ethers and elixirs at anyone who needed them. And after breaking the 9999 damage limit for Paine’s Cactling Gun, I was getting ~50k damage on a regular hit and 99,999 on a crit. Those 999,999 HP suddenly didn’t feel like that much of a slog.
Now I just have to run through the first few chapters of the game in NG+, siding with the other faction. With 2x speed boost and my new accessory that adds 100 strength/defense/magic/magic defense, I feel like more than half of this partial playthrough is going to be cut scenes.Assuming Final Mission isn’t going to surprise me and turn into another 90-hour leg of this journey to strike the HD Collection off of my backlog, I’m excited that I’m going to take this huge timesink off of my list this weekend – not that it hasn’t had fun moments, and not that seeing the payoff of a huge grind doesn’t give me a bit of joy, but Jesus, the two games combined have had a lot of grind. I’m feeling like something light after all this. It’s been a few months since I’ve done a playthrough of Toe Jam & Earl: Back in the Groove, and it’s gotten a lot of updates since then. It’s exciting to finally have a worthwhile sequel to the original Toe Jam & Earl, for my money the best game on the Genesis, and I haven’t given it nearly the amount of attention it deserves.
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