Rating: * *
Type: Resource building/card game
#Players: 2-5
Recommended # players: 3+
Play time: 3-4 hours
Summary: Mwahahaha! puts the players in the role of super-villains attempting to build a secret weapon with which to threaten the world. The players collect four kinds of resource to construct their weapon, and to deploy various supporting cards, including minions which can be used to try and steal resources from the other super-villains. The players must progress through four stages, starting with threatening a city and ending in successfully threatening the world (the game’s victory condition). As the game’s name and concept suggests, the various super-villain characters, secret weapons and support cards are “humorous”. In fact, getting into the wacky spirit of the game is a minimum requirement to enjoy this game, which lacks much in the way of interesting gameplay.
Gameplay: The objective of Mwahahaha! is to collect enough resource tokens, from four types, to activate a secret weapon and thereby intimidate increasingly large sections of the world into submission.
Each player chooses a super-villain and receives a small number of secret weapons to choose from. These vary only in the number and type of resources favoured – and, of course, the variety of amusing theme played to – something I’ll come back to later. Players are then dealt resource cards which can be exchanged for resource tokens. Resource tokens can be used to buy empire cards (permanently improving the level of resources you can collect), or minion cards (used to steal other player’s resources and empire cards, and to defend against same), or to activate your secret weapon.
The chief point of gameplay is to build up the correct number and type of resources, which in turn is dependent on the resource cards you draw. You can sidestep the need to draw the right resources by collecting empire cards or by attacking other super-villains with your minions – or by trading with other players. Finally, there are also dirty trick cards which act as one-shot effects to enhance your actions or disrupt others.
Eventually someone will get enough resources to threaten their first city. This is resolved with the roll of some (usually a lot of) dice, with a pretty high probability that the city will cave in and offer you tribute in the form of more resources. Once you’ve done that you need to put still more resources into your secret weapon, so you can threaten a state, then a country, and finally the world. As you get closer to threatening the world, chances are the other players will try to dog-pile you with their minions and dirty trick cards, so you’ll need to put more time into defending yourself.
Strategically, Mwahahaha! is pretty lacklustre. There are plenty of choices to make but none of them really seem to make much difference to the fundamentals of the game, which is grinding out those resources. Maybe we at Black Armada were missing something, but this felt tedious and long-winded, with the slow build-up from threatening a city to threatening the world only serving to draw the game out.
The main element of the game that promised to be fun is the amusement factor: every card represents some comic or movie trope, and the super-villains offer the opportunity to do slightly racist accents (Doctor Hitler vants a banana, dumbkopf!). In turn your choices may at least partly revolve around what will be funny. Care to threaten the world with a giant robot? Or perhaps you’d prefer an army of dinosaurs? As you can imagine, this is fun at first, but the underlying lack of gameplay interest meant that it wasn’t long before even the humour left us cold.
Components: Mwahahaha! is a great-looking game. The box contains high-quality components with unique artwork on most of the 271 cards and on the 10 mad scientist cards. It also contains 20 doomsday devices, which are made of the same sturdy cardboard as the mad scientist cards and designed to slot into them (although we found it was occasionally a bit of a tight fit). Finally, it has 230 colourful tokens and as well as a large number of really spiffing luminous green and purple dice. (The contents claim “all the dice you need to play” – we make it 20 dice.)
