Villainous: Treacherous Tides review — Ooo Shiny

Villainous has returned with another two-character expandalone (Ravensburger’s term for a standalone expansion) set. Treacherous Tides features a live-action Disney character for the first time, Davy Jones, as well as everyone’s favorite shiny crab, Tomatoa. There are now plenty of options to choose from as a starting point, and whether you are new to the game or a collector, is Treacherous Tides for you?

If you’ve never played Villainous before, here is a quick overview. Each player chooses a famous villain from the Disney universe and races to be the first to complete their unique victory condition. You move from location to location within your villain’s realm and perform the actions indicated in that location. You will play cards, get Power Tokens (money), battle Heroes that invade your Realm, and generally perform the effects on the cards you play. Players can interact with other players by taking Fate actions to disrupt each other's plans with powerful effects or Heroes that block actions until defeated, plus any number of other effects. Every expansion can be mixed together, and each Villain will have a different way to win and maybe even different ways to play the game. 

I would consider Treacherous Tides an “advanced” expansion. While new players can certainly jump in with this box and have fun, the play styles and win conditions of both new characters are on the higher side of complexity and difficulty compared to the core game and other expansions. 

Davy has a set of 5 Treasure Tokens that he needs to obtain to win the game. The Treasure Tokens need to be placed onto Heroes and then revealed, followed by defeating the Hero. So we’ve got a 3 step process to collect one token and you need to do that 5 times. This is all made even more complicated by Heroes normally only entering your Realm through another player taking a Fate action. What happens if the other player just refuses to do Fate actions? Fortunately, Davy has cards that allow him to search the Fate deck for Heroes himself and put Treasure Tokens on them. That means you can’t be locked out of the game by the other player refusing to Fate you, but it does mean you are at the mercy of card draws to find those action cards. Once you have a Hero with a Treasure and are ready to fight, the rest becomes pretty trivial due to the Kraken. 

The Kraken is a huge 8 power Ally that doesn’t get defeated when battling as long as you are battling a Hero with a Treasure (normally Allies die in the fight). With multiple cards that allow you to fish the Kraken out of your deck, Davy needs to focus on discard cycling to pull the Kraken and Heroes as fast as possible. Even with the tools in place to speed things along, you still have to do it 5 times. The multi-step order of operations can make playing Davy challenging for new players or younger players that are not ready to process that kind of puzzle. 

Tomatoa is much more straightforward in terms of win conditions, but has another challenge to deal with. Maui. Tomatoa needs to get Maui’s Hook and the Heart of Tafiti to his Lair. Maui’s Hook is in Tomatoa’s deck and if you are lucky, you will just draw it. From there you need to dig the Heart out of your Fate deck and win the game. Finding the Heart offers a very similar challenge to what Davy has to do with the Treasure. Either your opponent(s) will find it for you with Fate actions or you can play cards to cycle through the deck to find it yourself. The real trouble is Maui. If he makes it into play he will take the Hook from you. Once he has it, you have to start dealing with the Maui deck. 

For the first time ever in Villainous, a character has a third deck. The Maui deck simulates Maui using the Hook to shapeshift each turn. If you’ve seen the movie, you know it doesn’t quite perform the way it used to. In the game that translates to random effects going off every turn. Sometimes that are good for Tomatoa, sometimes they are bad. The random elements can ruin your plans and make retrieving the hook a challenge. Of course, once you do get the Hook back, you need to be quick and grab the Heart. A savvy opponent will cycle the Fate deck as fast as they can to get Maui back into play where he will steal the Hook again and start the whole things over. So while Tomatoa is the simpler of the two characters in the box, he still has more than the average character to juggle.

For collectors, what can I say? It’s a good set. Both characters are fun to play. The win conditions, if you boil them down, are similar to others we have seen before, but the Treasure Tokens and Maui Deck add new curveballs to differentiate them from previous sets. We may be getting to the point where adding complexity is the only way to achieve something new, and that may be interesting to you or it may not. There is a danger that the new sets become too complicated and are unable to be competitive against the older sets that just have easier and more straightforward win conditions. If you enjoy the game though, and want new toys to play with, Treacherous Tides is a fun addition to the family. 

Lastly, I want to touch on the art and components. Despite Davy Jones being the first live-action character (within core Villainous, not counting Star Wars), all of the art is new, unique pieces that have been created for this game and to fit the cohesive style of the other expansions. You won’t find any live-action screenshots from Pirates of the Caribbean. For me, I love the cohesive look. Art is of course subjective. Tomatoa is of course from an animated movie so the artwork is what you’d expect to see. It features some iconic scenes from the movie, like the feature image on this review, and all around is fun to look at while playing. 

The tokens and playboard are standard issue and I have no complaints. I’ve also felt the Power tokens were a bit bland compared to the rest of the game but it’s too late to change them at this point. The cards are the only real weak spot. Since you have to shuffle the decks every game and sometimes more so if you are discarding a lot, the cards quickly begin to show wear. The edges notch easily and the artwork on the backs, while pretty, is easily scuffed. If that bothers you, you probably want to consider sleaving this one.