Buying a game on completely on faith is something I generally don't do. In fact, I generally don't buy board games for myself at all, instead relying on my friends to help me with my gaming habit. I've actually only bought two games, Twilight Imperium (with the expansion) and Memoir '44.We can now add MWAHAHAHA! to the list of games that I now own. I knew nothing about this when the shopkeeper recommended it, and bought it entirely based on his opinion. As it turns out, it's actually a fun little game with a neat theme a and a bunch of flavor.
At its core, MWAHAHAHA! is a card game where the players take the roles of different archtypeal supervillians trying to ransom the world with a superweapon you're attempting to build. The other players are trying to do the same thing, so conflict inevitably occurs with minions, resources, other assets are thrown into peril. There are several different scientist/villians to play as, and twenty different superweapons to try and complete. As you gather resources and other holdings, you steadily increase the power of your weapon, first threatening cities, then states, entire countries, then the whole world. The player that first successfully threatens the world wins the game.
The game has a lot of positives. The presentation and art of the game is first-rate. All the characters are well-drawn and given a lot of flavor. The minions and different businesses you can control also play well into the games irreverent but faithful theme. These are comedic villians, despite the wonton destruction of people and places. The dice-fest mechanics of conflict resolution also work surprisingly well. Initially, we were worried that we'd get to the endgame too soon resulting in a stalemate and a grind that would be long and boring. The game's end came at a good point, and we ended up enjoying the experience.
With 10 different mad scientists to play as and 20 machines to build, you'd think that there'd be a lot of replay value. I'm hoping that this is the case, but the biggest obsticle to this is the mad scientist characters themselves. Unlike the different races from Twilight Imperium, the characters available in MWAHAHAHA! have very few mechanical differences. In fact aside from the card art and what resources they are able to better produce, there are no differences between the villians. All of them have the single ability to spontaneously produce the resources they are least able to refine. It's an OK trait, but in the end game it's useless. It's pretty disappointing, as I was expecting the characters to have wildly differing powers, like bonuses to minion combat, or a bigger hand size, or resource penalies, etc. Anything that differenciates the characters in a game mechanics sense would have earned this game a lot of credit. I see this as the game's only flaw, but it's a rather large one. I'm considering adding a desk of cards where each player is given a character quirk or benefit. One might be "Inspirational: All minions fight at +1 die", or "Small-Minded: +2 die to threaten a city, -1 to threaten world", or even something like sacrificing minions to get extra successes in combat or threats.
I give MWAHAHAHA! a 5/10 VP. The game will most likely be played again, and the theme, mechanics, and art are all quite cool. It's fun and definately something different to get onto the table.
