Star Trek vs. Star Wars (and a collection of memes)

That can't be him, he's holding sand as a kid, Anakin never liked sand

 

For those of you who don't know, Villainous is a board game where, funnily enough, you play as villains aiming to achieve your evil schemes, with each villain having their own unique goals (based upon those in their respective media) and journey to their own locations to fight heroes unique to their story and achieve specified objectives, while foiling those of opposing players by playing their villains' Fate cards. Though I haven't played it it looks a good game, especially given each character has their own strategy and win mechanics, and have been following its development for a while now. Originally designed for Disney Villains, it has since spawned a Marvel version and, after a lot of demand given Star Wars has also been subsumed into the Disney empire, now the Galaxy far far away has its own version coming in August.

Surprisingly it has five villains, which is rather odd given the Disney Core Set had six and the Marvel one had four I believe, and given that board games generally like to support an even number of players.

What's worse is the choice of villains, which I personally think is rather poor - Grievous and Vader are the only decent ones, the others being Moff Gideon (riding the wave of Mandalorian fan frenzy no doubt), Ventress and Kylo:


Certainly both the Disney and Marvel versions had expansion packs that added further villains, which I certainly hope means we'll see Sidious, Dooku and Maul appear as well, but for the time being they are absent.

Nevertheless, it'll be interesting to see what the Star Wars edition is like, with a new vehicles mechanic being introduced to represent characters travelling between planets in the Deep Space section of your character's board, as well as the four planet locations representing your character's passage through the films they are in:

 

Agreed. Those are some major omissions. Who the hell wants to play Gideon over the likes of Sidious or Maul?

The whole expansion pack (board game DLC) is an obvious cash grab. Is it too much to ask for a complete boardgame?

 

I can see how it makes sense with regards to the Disney version, which now has 18 existing playable villains (6 in the main Core Set and 3 in each of the four Expansion packs) and 3 more coming in the first Pixar Expansion, each with their own board, cards and playing piece, plus the potential to add in more from the many many films in the Disney and Pixar sagas, but the Star Wars version will have far fewer (unless they add some in from the EU as well, which is unlikely), and unlike the Disney/Pixar villains which all have a film of their own to star in, many of those villains are minor players in the games that are controlled by the biggest bads - Sidious plus his Sith apprentices, Maul, Tyranus, Vader and later Kylo. Those should definitely have featured as the big five in the game to present the most 'complete' product covering the entire saga. The lesser villains could then be represented as Ally cards (a significant feature in the Disney version anyway) that are used to help defeat Heroes, so you could definitely have a complete Star Wars version in just one box.

But of course keeping some of the bigger villains aside for Expansion packs will motivate more people to buy them, resulting in maximum

 

Not from the NIGHTBRINGER!

EDIT:

 

There are a lot of games using this business model these days. Doesn't stop many of us from buying them anyway.