Valor & Villainy: Minions of Mordak managed to get tons of backers on Kickstarter. People were rather quiet about the game before the campaign began, but Skybound Games needed only about an hour to get it funded. What made their tabletop creation so popular?
One Against All
All players but one, play the game as heroes, wandering the world while looking for ancient shrines. Finding them is the only way to stop an evil wizard called Mordak.
Mordak is the character, that the final player plays as. He’s got the task of defeating all intruders and achieving final, limitless power!
So: we’re dealing with an assymetrical game, which sadly eliminates the ability to play solo. At least for now, as the creators are promising lots of expansions, and they may contain not only the solo variant, but a co-op one as well.
The world, where we’ll have to fight, consists of 25 locations placed in a somewhat random manner. Heroes will traverse them, discover new places, find treasures… or enemies. Revealed servants of evil become controlled by Mordak. Heroes fight them using dice, same with casting one-use spells.
This way, turn by turn, both sides gain experience, new abilities and treasures. These become incredibly useful near the end of the game, when Mordak appears in person and attempts to get rid of every single annoying hero.
Feast for the Eyes
What without doubt drew many backers in was the incredibly good visual side of the game. Images are phenomenal, and make you keep looking at them, while you absorb all the details. The entire thing is colorful and has a light, comical feeling.
Character cards come in unusual shapes, and the game, while placed on the table, looks extremely tempting. If you decide on backing the more expensive Deluxe version, you’ll also get the character minis, higher quality carved dice, metal initiative token and an insert made by Gametrayz. Don’t worry about the cards. It’s going to fit all of them sleeved!
Kickstarter
Basic pledge level starts at $39. The more upgraded Deluxe version is priced at $59 and that’s it. There are no add-ons, and despite that, the game has managed to collect over $180.000 from the initial goal of… $15.000. Majority of stretch goals are now unlocked, and more appear with each passing day. Same with daily “bonus gifts” for all backers.
The campaign is planned to last until February 16th. The games will ship in January 2020.
