In Short
Mwahahaha! provides an enjoyable gaming experience for anyone interested in a middling complexity super science flavored board game showcasing a moderate to high amount of random chance and a moderate amount of strategy. Take on the role of a mad scientist bent on world domination and compete against your friends to be the first one to hold the Earth ransom, and along the way use all the Minions and Dirty Tricks you can to get a leg up on your rivals! It’s a fun game, but while it does offer plenty of important decisions along the way the random elements keep it nicely in the realm of goofy beer and pretzels gaming.The Good: Cheesing it up by taking on the role of your mad scientist can really add a lot more fun to the game. The mechanics do a good job of creating distrust among the players while still encouraging trading. Explaining the rules to others was not difficult.
The Bad: Repeat games feel the same. The rulebook does clearly state rules, but it could really use some reorganization and a formatting overhaul. This game probably won’t hold your attention except as an occasional change of pace.
The Physical Thing
Mwahahaha!’s main components include 10 Mad Scientist cards which serve as resource tracking boards for each player and 20 Doomsday Device cards which are used to, well, destroy the world. These components are very attractively done and easy to work with in play. While I call them cards, they’re strong pieces of cardboard that can easily stand up to many games without any problems.Mwahahaha! also makes use of a large variety of cards, each of which features a quality illustration. Given the humor aspect of the game, just looking at a lot of the cards for the first time is good fun. A bundle of six sided dice and a large assortment of small game tokens are also included in the box. All materials easily fit back into the box, and cleanup is fairly easy.
Mechanics and Play
Play starts off with players selecting (randomly or by choice) the Mad Scientist they want to play. What differentiates the scientists is that each one can process only certain amounts of Raw Materials each turn, and each one has a special ability relating to Raw Materials. The two types of special ability both involve turning down Raw Material cards for automatic materials of certain types, either a choice of 2 of two different raw materials or 3 of a single raw material depending on the scientist. In play it seemed like the villain that could take 3 automatically had a slight edge in the early game, since these materials are used to purchase Minions and Empire cards. Individual scientist strengths and weaknesses are one of the reasons trade can be an important part of the game in larger games. Because of this I’ve found that two player games of Mwahahaha! don’t seem to work as well as larger games, and that about four people is the sweet spot.After picking a scientist players choose a Doomsday Device from a random deal of 3. Matching up the scientist with the Doomsday Device is important because different Devices need different amounts of materials, and so some devices work much better with some villains. There is a second element of strategy with the devices in that they’re all on a likelihood of success / cost to use continuum. The more expensive devices tend to be more reliable and have a greater chance of success, so it’s a trade off. The game offers players opportunities to become more or less villainous and gain bonuses when using the devices, so device selection can easily control the way a player will play the rest of the game.
With scientist and device selected play begins. Every turn players draw their hand up to five for Raw Materials, gain one Dirty Trick card, and then set about using those materials. The scientist’s attributes determine how well certain raw materials can be processed into useful materials. Some are good at using Money, others Energy, etc. Players may trade with one another, but a player’s hand can never be revealed. This is to make sure the Betrayed cards, found in the Raw Material deck, can be used to sucker friends and foes out of their cards. The first portion of a turn is spent resolving trades, processing materials, and purchasing Empire and Minion cards.
Empire cards allow a player to process more raw materials while Minions can be used to raid an opponent’s holdings to gain materials or steal away Empire cards. In play a lot of the game’s strategy can be found with these two card types. Players can only have a limited number of each, and since Empire cards only apply to one resource type and Minions can only attack and defend certain resource types it becomes a challenge to try to focus on the player’s immediate needs. If you must process more Eureka (a material) then attacking an enemy’s holdings with Minions that are good at attacking Eureka may be the best way to go. If your opponents need Structure then getting some high Structure-rated minions to defend your assets is important.
After the resource management of the start of the turn, players take turns attacking one another’s holdings with Minions and trying to cause havoc. After that, anyone with a working Doomsday Device gets to use it to try and threaten a city, state, country, or the world (each must be threatened in turn). The mechanics of this are a simple comparison of d6 dice rolls, with the scientist typically having a slight to large advantage over the target. Minion attacks work the same way, using a nice simple mechanic that’s easy to remember. If the government gives in to the villain’s threat then the villain gets a reward. If not, then someone’s going to have a bad day.
The game has a variety of options for gaining Humiliation and Maniacal counters, which provide a penalty or bonus when trying to intimidate a government. If a government doesn’t give in to a villain’s demand, for instance, the villain can blow up the Doomsday Device and destroy the government in order to show how damn scary they are. This destroys the device and forces the villain to start anew, but the alternative is to slink away and accept a Humiliation counter.
So, each turn everyone does the resource management part of the game and manages their Minions, Empire cards, Raw Materials, and other options. Then everyone chooses whether to attack another or not in turn. Then those who are able threaten governments with the Doomsday Device. All the while Dirty Tricks are being played for large variety of unpredictable effects. Various sub-rules come in to create even more strategy along the way. For example, if a villain threatens the same target level twice (e.g., city then city) the villain gets a reward but also gets a Humiliation counter for such a lack of ambition.
In play I was having the most fun with a larger group of people. It takes about four for the trading aspect of the game to really kick in. With two people it just didn’t seem worthwhile to ever trade since my opponent was about as skilled as we had too good of an idea where each other stood. With more players this changes and it adds more of an unknown element to the game as well. One of the things I enjoyed about it was that it was unclear who was going to win until the end. When one player gets close a few attacks can deplete their Device and delay them for a few turns. We found that the game offered a good mix of strategy and randomness, and there were always meaningful decisions to make.
