Mischief & Malice couldn’t have come out at a better time. With the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Loki on Disney+ and the hysterical M.O.D.O.K. series on Hulu, a board game based on these characters is sure to pique the interest of both MCU and hardcore comic fans alike. Like all of Prospero Hall’s games, Mischief & Malice absolutely nails the theme and really captures what makes each villain unique and interesting. If you're a Marvel fan that feels good being bad, and you have at least two other people to play with, Mischief & Malice is a must-play.
If you’re not familiar with the game system, Marvel Villainous is a card game for 2-4 players in which each player selects a different villain to play and competes to complete individual win conditions. Each villain has a unique deck of cards and a small board that depicts their four domains. Each turn, the villains travel to a different domain and complete any of four available actions, like play a card, discard, vanquish a hero, or pull a card from the fate deck. In Mischief & Malice, an expandalone to Villainous that can be played either with existing characters or completely on its own, there are three villains to choose from: Loki, M.O.D.O.K, and Madame Masque.
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While every play follows the same rules, every character has a completely different playstyle and objective. For example, Loki’s goal is to earn and spend ten Mischief, a type of currency that is specific to Loki and his cards, while Madame Masque’s goal is to settle her vendettas by vanquishing eight superheroes. Whoever completes their objective first wins the game, and each villain has plenty of ways to interrupt the other villains as they pursue their individual goals.
I really love the presentation of Mischief & Malice. It’s a small box game that doesn’t require more than a small area to play in, and there aren’t many components to keep track of: just a small game board for each villain, a few different decks of cards, some tokens, and a trio of beautiful player pieces that represent each character. The art style blends a modern comic aesthetic with complex geometry and a rustic color palette that just feels villainous, for lack of a better term. The cards in each villain's deck represents the allies and iconography that these characters are known for, such as the A.I.M. agents in M.O.D.O.K.s deck and the multiverse versions of Loki (including Kid Loki), and there are also plenty of Avengers to find in the wild card-esque Fate deck. Everything in the box is true to Marvel lore, and the developers have done a fantastic job of representing each villain's personality in their cards and playstyle.
I love the idea of Villainous’s asymmetric gameplay, but in practice, I never felt like it really clicked for me. The big problem I have is that the game scales poorly for two-player. This was unexpected, especially since every Prosper Hall game I’ve ever reviewed played great for two, but after three tries, I just don’t think Mischief & Malice works particularly well with only two. It’s an issue of scaling. When Events get drawn from the Fates deck, all the players have to work together by sending allies to the event to defeat it. The problem is that the difficulty of the events doesn’t scale with the number of players, and I consistently found myself in a situation where the negative effects of the Event were only hurting one player who had to single-handedly try to defeat it, hobbling themselves while the other player focused on their goals. Similarly, Madame Masque’s win condition relies on heroes getting drawn from the Fates deck. With only two players, the Madame Masque player often found themselves just waiting turn after turn for one to get drawn, with nothing to do.
A lot of the cards are also incredibly situational, and I got the sense that they’d be a lot more useful if used with more players because it would increase the likelihood of certain situations arising. More often than not, I felt like I was moving to domains with discard actions just to get rid of dead cards in my hand, and I think with three or four players there would be more opportunities to use those situational cards.
Ultimately I think Mischief & Malice is a really well designed game and a fantastic collector’s item for Marvel fans, but if you’re primarily looking for couples games, I don’t think Marvel Villainous is the right game for you. I haven’t tried the base game, which includes Thanos, Hela, Ultron, Taskmaster, and Killmonger, so it’s possible two-player works better with other characters. I definitely recommend Mischief & Malice to fans of Loki, but only if you have a few other Marvel fans to play with.
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