It was my brother’s birthday last weekend. I sent him a Happy Birthday text and asked him if he wanted to do anything to celebrate. My brother mentioned how it would be fun to have a chill board game night at home. I ended up driving over to my mom’s house and I brought a few games with me. My mom has been playing more board games with us, but depending on how complicated they are, she will either try them out or watch us play to pick up the rules. One of the games I brought was Marvel Villainous which I received as a Christmas present last year, but I haven’t had a chance to open it yet. Marvel Villainous was fun and felt true to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole.

In the base game, there are five villains to choose from: Hela, Killmonger, Taskmaster, Thanos, and Ultron. I was a little surprised that Taskmaster was in the base game. While Taskmaster appears in the Black Widow film, I felt the villain wasn’t as prominent of a choice. If I had to pick, I think Loki should have been included before Taskmaster, but that’s just me. As a side note, Loki is in an expansion of the game. I knew immediately that I wanted to play as Hela first. My brother started with Ultron. Hela’s win condition was to have eight allies or Soul Marks in Odin’s vault. Reading through the win condition, that seemed doable to me, so I figured she would be a good villain to start playing as.

One thing I liked about Marvel’s Villainous is how the fate deck is a shared deck. The fate deck has events and heroes which can be played on an opponent’s board to slow them down on their win condition. In Star Wars Villainous, the fate decks were separate per character whereas, in Marvel’s Villainous, there was one deck. It felt accurate to Marvel being a shared universe where all these heroes and villains interact together. I liked how there were heroes such as Mockingbird who may not have had a strong presence in the movies. It felt more like an ode to the comics versus the movies.

I ended up winning the first round we played! I had a strategy going which was to add Soul Marks to the heroes and then once the heroes were vanquished, I could add them to Odin’s Vault. My brother tried to play heroes on my side of the board to mess with me, but that ended up working well in my favor. It seemed my brother had a good time playing Ultron.

Marvel’s Villainous was exactly what I expected it to be; a comic book villain showdown in a board game. I do want to pick up some of the other expansions. One of the more recently released expansions features Venom who I think would be a chaotic villain to play as.