Ravensburger recently launched Star Wars The power of the evil dark side. The game takes the popular Villainous board game, throws in a few twists, and makes it Star Wars with the inclusion of Darth Vader, General Grievous, Asajj Ventress, Kylo Ren and Moff Gideon. Ravensburger was kind enough to send me a copy for review, but you can grab your copy from Amazon, Target, or your friendly local game store. All thoughts below are mine.
I was very excited for Evil Star Wars. I love both of them Star Wars And evil, so I was hoping for a dunk. I was a little worried because I didn’t like it Wicked Marvel a lot because of the changes they made, but I was holding back all hope. I got the game and I love set pieces for this game. Each sculpture is really cool, the boards (called Sectors in this game) look beautiful, and the box art itself is just perfect. I read the rules and there have been some changes, but the changes looked really cool like adding a second currency called Ambition and Vehicle cards. I really like Ravensburgers, but they have to stop making changes to Villainous.
Ambition is a mechanic that sounds thematically interesting. The idea is that sometimes your reputation takes you beyond the money. It is very suitable. However, in practice, Ambition falls apart. At the start of each player’s turn, he takes 1 Ambition from the center. There are only 25 Ambition tokens, and there are also cards that help you get more Ambition. Once the stock is empty, you have to wait for people to use Ambition and hope it returns to you. This has the potential not to be such a problem, but there are characters like Kylo Ren who rely on Ambition to do anything while other characters have very few cards that use Ambition. This means that there are characters who are literally piling and piling Ambition just because the game gives them Ambition at the start of their turn. So they have almost no use for said Ambition which greatly hinders the other players and doesn’t even benefit them. It was an idea that sounds good but isn’t implemented well. In one game I played, General Grievous never needed to use ambition so the player had a lot of it while other characters who needed ambition like Kylo Ren and Asajj Ventress were struggling to get enough ambition to do anything to move them towards their goals. It’s also annoying that Ambition requires you to use a different symbol in your location than regular cards. Additionally, Ambition slows down the game considerably. It took about 3 hours for a 4 person game. According to the box, it should have been around 1 hour and 20 minutes. When you take into account that two of the players were new to Villainous, you can add around 5-10 minutes for the rules explanation and then around 10-20 for slower gameplay in general which still takes you less than 2 hours!
Vehicles were also an interesting idea that failed in my experience. Vehicles can be used to slow down your opponents by reducing the size of their hands or to help you by giving you another position. They cost enough currency and took action just to play that didn’t seem worth it. Some of the versions of Fate like the Millennium Falcon are downright annoying, but they also add what feels like unnecessary complexity. I’m sure this will definitely be more a matter of taste, but my group and I found them rather useless.
Let’s move on to the positives. It is fun to play evil with Star Wars characters. Much of the art is great to look at. They’ve chosen phenomenal villains to drive with. The goals for each character were very appropriate. He didn’t have group mission mechanics from Wicked Marvel that I hated. I also appreciated that there was a character from virtually every era Star Wars so all the fans had a character they knew.
Evil Star Wars tried some new things and really impressed. I wish the new mechanics were optional so that I can play these characters with the original game. I would like Yzma, Darth Vader and Thanos to try to prove that they are the worst around. Unfortunately, this is not the case. My group considered tweaking the way ambition is handled (making it work more like credits), but was unable to test it before writing this review.
by Tommy Williams
Source: Geek Tyrant
