Evil Upheaval Review

Who's the best villain of them all?

Evil Upheaval from Lucky Troll Games has players controlling any one hokey villain (two if you're playing a two player game) that's trying to become the best villain of them all by generating the most fame or by completing their secret weapon to stop Captain Mallet from winning the game. Gameplay is actually very simple. On your turn, you must move your character from one location to another. Then you can do as many actions as you want to. These range from picking up new cards to allow you to do all sorts of useful actions, picking up bits for your secret weapon, or building your secret weapon if you're in the Evil Lair. Players can generate fame by having more power than needed on the scheme cards on the board. If they do not though, Captain Mallet will be able to complete his scheme bringing him one step closer to victory. If the schemes run out he will win. If you reach 15 fame or complete your secret weapon to stop Captain Mallet, you will win the game.

The Good: This is a really interesting game. After you get it all set up you may not think there's going to be a ton of strategy that goes into it but you need to be careful with how you manage your cards and when you need to work together with other players to have enough power to complete a scheme. I love the semi-cooperative nature of the game. It's a wonderful balancing act. The core game has fourteen different villains to choose from and they all have their own back stories and super powers. It's really nice.

The Okay: The manual isn't the greatest. There is a lot of text and not a lot of pages. Once you start to actually play the game though, it really flows nicely. I'm not a huge fan of the layout of it with what essentially is an appendix on the back that covers a lot of different concepts.

The Not So Good: There's a fair amount of luck that goes into the game. Secret weapon pieces are pulled from a bag so if that's your strategy you need to hope for some good pulls. There are a lot of cards but some of them may wind up being useless to you for a long time so you're just going to keep picking more up and hoping for the best. I would have liked to see a system in place to minimize some of the luck that goes into the game.

Final Thoughts: I genuinely really enjoyed Evil Upheaval. It's a lot deeper than you would expect and the gameplay is really quite fun. The take that elements mixed in with cooperative play can really swing the game. It's one that you can play in a relatively short period of time and you can teach it to just about anyone. I would highly recommend Evil Upheaval to anyone.

Thank you to Lucky Troll Games for providing me with a review copy of the game.