Disney Villainous Filled with Fright expansion review — It’s Oogie’s turn to boogie

“Mmmm, my, my … what have we here?” Disney Villainous Filled with Fright is a single character expansion that adds the much requested Oogie Boogie to the game. Fans have been clamoring for Oogie Boogie since the core box came out and he is finally here.

It’s probably safe for me to assume if you are reading an expansion review, then you are aware of how the game plays, but you know what they say about assuming so I’ll give a short overview. In Villainous players play as a villain from a Disney movie. Every villain has a unique win condition. A few have some additional asymmetric mechanics but most of the gameplay actions are the same. On your turn, you move your mover (character miniature) to a new location within your realm (player board). The location you move to will depict the action icons that you are able to perform that turn. Players will be moving around and playing cards to locations in an attempt to complete their win condition while also performing fate actions to play hero cards to opponent’s realms to cover up their actions and deter them from winning in various ways. First to fulfill their win condition wins the game immediately.

Oogie Boogie follows the same pattern as other characters but has an added unique dice mechanic. His win condition is to find and then defeat Jack Skelington. You start the game with Sandy Claws imprisoned in Oogie’s lair and have to play four Imposter Sandy Claws to his location to summon Jack Skellington and then fight him. The Imposter cards and the majority of Oogie’s Effect cards all require a dice roll. Oogie is tricksy and able to benefit from any result, but it may not always be what you wanted.

Oogie’s villain deck is filled with cheat cards that let you reroll dice and a host of bats and spiders. You will also find the whole gang of Lock, Shock, Barrel, and even their bathtub. The bats let Oogie get another ally out of his discard pile so cycling Lock, Shock, and Barrel is easily done. Lock, Shock, and Barrel all buff each other and provide additional benefits to Oogie at their location, like bonuses to dice rolls and drawing extra cards. The bathtub makes it easy to assemble your fighting cards at the lair for the final confrontation with Jack.

The Fate deck has all of the citizens of Halloween Town. Like all hero decks, they can easily overwhelm you if ignored for too long. Oogie’s win condition is actually pretty easy to accomplish, so if you are playing against him, it’s critical to keep the pressure up with Fate cards to lock down his action economy and try to keep the bathtub off the board so he can’t quickly take out Jack.

Production quality is on par with other titles in the series. The cards have great art from the movie but are a bit thin. The Oogie Boogie mover is fantastic. It’s a perfect shade of ghostly green and covered in creepy crawlies while actually managing to look kind of cute like a chubby baby. Maybe it’s just me. Oogie’s dice are amazing and my favorite part of the set. So much so that I keep the dice out of the box so I can use them for other games. All six faces are carved into different skulls and covered in a dark wash. They do a convincing job of looking hand carved and I can’t stop playing with them the entire time I am playing the game.

Filled with Fright is a great addition to Villainous. Fans of A Nightmare Before Christmas should definitely pick this one up and even if you don’t love that movie, Oogie Boogie is still really fun to play. His win condition is not complicated at all so he’s also a great choice for newer players to use without getting overwhelmed by some of the more complex villains available. Two thumbs up.

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