Valor & Villainy: Minions of Mordak

6th October 2021

Time for some midweek gaming! It's a Wednesday and we're round Simon's.

Valor & Villainy: Minions of Mordak is the game of the evening; an open-world styled, fantasy-themed, RPG-inspired exploration game with one player assuming the role of big-bad Mordak and the others taking on the mantle of heroes.

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What's in a game?
Valor & Villainy is fairly involved game that features a lot of components.

• Map tiles: Valor & Villainy uses a variety of map tiles, most of which are randomly placed. These tiles depict the landscape, they also detail encounters that the heroes will come across.
  Starting tiles: These 5 tiles depict; as you'd expect the game's starting area and will be the map's central tiles.
  Region tiles: These tiles are ranked from tier I to tier III on their backs. When the map is created, the lower tiered cards will be closer to the centre.
  Each tile also contains icons depicting what will be found on that tile, which can be minions, ambushes etc.
• Hero boards: There is one of these thick card boards for each of the game's heroes. They are double-sided and on the back, each character's backstory is displayed.
  The front contains a portrait, as well as health and action point tracks. There are also a number of recessed tracks and spots in each board, into which various smaller components can be dropped and represent the characters increase in skills and training. Character's have tracks for melee, ranged and magic actions.
  The board also lists each character's unique ability and at the bottom has spaces for gear and equipment.
• Standees: Each hero also has their own standee.
• Mordak board: The Mordak player also has their own board which is very similar to the hero boards with a health and action tracker and recessed tracks to represent Mordak's increase in ability.
  Mordak possesses 1 extra ability; corruption.
  Procession of horrors tile: This tile slides into place next to the Mordak board and over the course of the game, allows Mordak to accrue power, it also serves as a round counter.
• Mordak standee: Not to be outdone by the heroes, Mordak has his own standee.
• Spell cards: Spell cards come in 3 types as explained below
  Arcane spell cards: These blue spells focus on attacks and tricks.
  Divine spell cards: These yellow spells provide support and healing.
  Void spell cards: These purple spells are used by Mordak and typically for the big-bad, they bring mayhem and ruin.
• Treasure cards: Can be earned by players by defeating minions.
• Loot stash cards: There are used to track minions that have defeated and treasure that's been earned by the heroes and by the Mordak player to track heroes that have been defeated!
• Minion cards: These are different types of enemy that the heroes will fight, they come in 3 classes, Chump, Elite and Boss, each getting progressively tougher.
  Minion cards contain information such as movement, attacks, damage and health levels, each one is also double-sided and can be flipped to the other side to display different stats for a minion when they get wounded instead of outright killed. Some minions will get weaker when hurt, a few will get tougher.
  Like the heroes and Mordak, minions have actions and stats.
• Covers: Each type of minion has it's own cover, used to hide what card is at the top of each minion card.
• Dice: These six-siders come in 3 different colours and are not numbered from 1-6. Instead the colours represent different levels of ability: White is novice, yellow is adept and red is mastery, each colour has a different number distribution, with white having the lowest, ranging to red with the highest.
• Ability tokens: These come in 3 colours that directly relate to skill dice. Players acquire these tokens for their abilities which in turn determine what dice are rolled by that player.
• +1 tokens: Can be acquired by players through rolling well and used for one-off bonuses.
• Initiative token: This double-sided first player token has Charge on one side and Hold on the other.

Valor & Villainy also has various other tokens for specific circumstances and situations including woeful sheep tokens!
The components are all high quality, tiles and tokens are suitably thick and sturdy, as are the standees. The cards are all well made and the rounded plastic dice feel weighty enough but the standout components are the chunky recessed hero boards which feel solid and also fairly practical.

Artwork throughout the game is excellent. The landscapes on map tiles are well produced, clear but also colourful. Character illustrations are bold and slightly-cartoony, it's a style that gets used quite a lot in fantasy-themed games, but it looks good in Valor & Villains.

As you'd expect for a open world game like, Valor & Villainy uses a variety of icons and symbols, particularly on spell cards - which essentially are all different. For the most part, the iconography is intuitive and pretty straightforward to understand.

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How's it play?
Setup

• The Map: The 5 starting tiles are put out face-up in same position for every game, then, a number of map tiles are randomly drawn from each tier, although certain tiles (The 3 shrines.) must be included, then tiles in each tier are shuffled, some are randomly drawn and placed face-down around the starting tiles, the tier I tiles go closest to the starting tiles and the tire III the furthest away.
  Once all the tiles are placed, there will be a 5x5 grid of tiles, although in games will a lower player count, they'll be slightly less tiles.
• Heroes: Give each player a hero board and associated standee, along with the requisite components to track health and action points, as well as a +1 token.
  Players' whose characters can cast spells should draw cards from the relevant deck.
• Mordak: The Mordak player should take the Mordak board and set it up in a similar manner to the hero boards.
  The procession of horrors tile should be placed next to the Mordak board and the Mordak standee put on it.
• Card decks: Shuffle the 3 magic decks into 3 face-down stacks, do the same with the treasure deck.
• Minion decks: Shuffle the 3 minion decks into 3 face-down stacks, because these cards are double-sided, the relevant cover should be placed on the top of each minion deck. This ensures the Mordak player draws minions blindly.
• Initiative: Give the initiative token to the starting player.

The game is now ready to begin

On to play
In Valor & Villainy, the hero players are trying to discover the 3 shrines hidden somewhere amongst the face-down tiles to weaken Mordak and the Mordak player will be trying to make it hard for the heroes to find them until he arrives on the map after the 6th round.
Heroes always act first with the starting player beginning, then going left. The Mordak player may then act after the hero players. The Mordak player essentially gets 2 turns to act, 1 for Mordak himself (Although Mordak doesn't have much to do in the early game.) and 1 for minions.
When players take their turns, they will have a number of actions points they can spend to move or act as they see fit, there are also some free actions that can be performed

• Initiative: Who has the initiative token is the first player, they may choose to act first or last, in which case they flip the token to the Hold side.
• Hero actions: Heroes may perform actions, these include the following:
  Scout: This is a free action. When a hero chooses to scout, they flip all adjacent face-down map tiles to their face-up side, this may reveal enemies, loot or trigger ambushes.
  Looting: If a player's character is in a region without enemies, they may loot any treasure as a free action. Treasre is not immediately acquired, instead it is placed on the pertinent loot card and divvied up at the end of the round.
  Movement: For an action point a hero may move to a adjacent tile that is already face-up. Characters may only orthogonally.
  Actions: All hero actions are performed using one of their 3 stats, generally this involves combat.
• Mordak actions: In the early game, there's little Mordak can do to directly confront the heroes, although he can make life hard for them.
• Minion actions: If there are any minion cards on the board, the Mordak player can use them to attack and harass the players. Minions move and attack in much the same way as players.
• Combat: Combat plays a big part of Valor & Villainy:
  Melee: Melee occurs when enemies are on the same tile:
  Ranged: A character who decides to attack at range can only target enemies in adjacent tiles.
  Magic: Characters may spend their spell cards to cast spells.
  Defeat: Combat will generally result in one of the involved parties being defeated.
  Minions: When a minion is defeated, it is out of the game and added to the players loot stash
  Hero: When a hero is defeated, they are out of the current round and the Mordak player adds their standee to their loot stash. The standee is returned after the level-up phase has been completed
• Level-up: Once all players have had their turns, the game proceeds to the level-up phase.
  Throughout the round, any loot players acquired or minions that were defeated are added to the hero loot stash. During the level-up phase, they earn the hero players experience points, the loot can then be divvied up between them as they decide and equipped.
  Similarly, the Mordak player will earn experience points for each hero that was defeated.
  Then players may spend XP to increase their skills by adding ability tokens to their boards, they may also spend XP to increase their action points.
• Next round: The Mordak player moves their standee one space along the procession of horrors and the standee of any defeated hero is placed in the centre starting tile, ready for the next round. The initiative token is passed to the player on the left.

There's a bunch of other, mostly situational rules in Valor & Villainy, I'm not going to go into in further detail, since they don't always apply.

Endgame
Once 6 round have been completed (Or all 3 shrines have been discovered.), the game goes into The Final Battle!
During the final battle, Mordak himself will appear on the map and directly engage the hero players in combat.

Mordak has a large amount of health; 70-100. If the hero players reduce Mordak's health to 0, they win the game.
Conversely, if the Mordak player manages to defeat 3 heroes during the final battle, then the Mordak player wins the game.

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Overall
There's a lot of charm to Valor & Villainy's presentation, especially the bold, chunky artwork for characters and minions.
Mechanically, the game is actually quite straightforward, unremarkable even (At least it is for the hero players.), although it does contain a fair amount of exception driven and situational rules. Using cards for minions makes it a little fiddly to move them around and handle, it also looks a little dull and flat (sic) but conversely, it makes it easy to track minion health and combat initiative.

Valor & Villlainy has several quibbles in my opinion
One of the most significant is the game's one-vs-many mechanic, these types of mechanic rarely work well in my opinion. Obviously the game will have been balanced to try and take this into account, but few games can balance the difference between 1 human brain versus 4 human brain and the hero players will always have this to their advantage. It almost feels like the game is set up to advantage hero players over the Mordak player.

The game also has a weird tonal shift thanks to this one-vs-many mechanic. For most of the game, the Mordak player will be a thorn in the players' sides,  a source of constant minor irritation. Then, during the endgame, it becomes straight up, directly confrontational PvP as Mordak appears on the map. It feels weirdly more aggressive.

For the heroes, the game is mostly about managing encounters as they appear, recognising and prioritising threats, then dealing with them using the most efficient method, allowing them the maximum opportunity to explore the tiles.
For the Mordak player, it's about exploiting any opening or weakness that the heroes present, not only defeating heroes but stymieing and thwarting them whenever possible.

Valor & Villainy is a open-world RPG-esque experience where a varied band of heroes, explore, fight monsters, acquire treasure and level up. The ingredients of an RPG are all there, but it doesn't feel quite right and I think there're a couple of reasons why.

There's a lack of storytelling to the game and variety to the encounters, there's randomness when setting up a map and not all tiles will appear in any single game, but they're just encounters, they feel a little bland and there's no sense of travelling, journeying or adventuring.

The normal map (For 4+ players) will have 20 face-down map tiles to scout, to explore all of them will require turning over 3-4 map tiles per round. Scouting tiles is actually a bit of a balancing act and one of the challenges the hero players face. if the heroes scout too slowly, they risk not finding all the shrines, if they do it too quickly, they risk revealing more minions than they can handle at once.
This will require players to head off in different directions and in an RPG you should never split the party!

In relation to combat, it seems the most efficient way for the Mordak player to accumulate experience points is to relentlessly pick on one player until they are defeated, then choose another player to pick on. It feels particularly un-RPG-like where combat tends to distributed amongst all heroes.
Even then, when a hero is defeated, on the next turn, the hero will reappear in the centre tile like it's a videogame spawn point.

All of this adds up to make Valor & Villainy feel disconnected from RPGs.

But for me, by far the biggest problem the game has, is its run time. We played with 5 players in total and a game took somewhere between 2-3 hours to play out. If felt like each player took about 4-5 mins to complete their turn and don't forget that the Mordak player essentially gets 2 turns in a row, 1 for themselves and 1 for their minions which makes a round 25-30 minutes long and that's before adding in The Final Battle. It also meant players had about 20 minutes of downtime between turns.
It's too much, if Valor & Villainy was an exceptional or engaging game, it wouldn't be such an issue, but it's not. It's not a bad game either, it's just slightly bland and slightly average. 

There's nothing wrong with an average game, so long as it doesn't outstay it's welcome.
The effort Valor & Villainy requires to play doesn't quite justify the experience it provides.