Disney Villainous Treacherous Tides review – A seaworthy release

There’s a new Disney Villainous set sailing this way! Disney Villainous Treacherous Tides brings two new villains to the series: Tamatoa from Moana and Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean 2.

As soon as I heard about this release, I knew Ravensburger had landed on a great concept for a Disney Villainous expansion. Both characters share a watery theme and similar goal of acquiring valuables, which makes this box feel like a coherent package in a way none of the others have before.

The game looks great, as usual. In particular, I’m thankful the illustrators didn’t try and go for a photorealistic approach to the first live action (well… CGI really) baddie, Davy Jones. The cephalopod-headed captain and his cursed crew (oh and the Pirates main characters too, I guess) look great in cartoon form, and I’m now hoping to see them in the dev’s Disney Lorcana TCG sooner rather than later.

The only black spot on aesthetics, before we dive into the gameplay, is the movers. While Davy Jones’ is great, Tamatoa’s leaves a lot to be desired. I’m personally of the opinion that Villainous movers should all be tall and thin, but even if you’re less strict on that, I think Tamatoa’s playing piece does a poor job of representing the character.

I guess it’s showing the villain’s coin-encrusted shell and his legs, but if you plonked this hunk of plastic down in front of me, devoid of context, I would have no idea what I was looking at. What would have been wrong with a big (vertical) crab claw?

Now onto the gameplay, and while Treacherous Tides doesn’t show enormous innovations, there’s some fun stuff going on here.

The villains have similar aims; they’re trying to defeat the heroes and take objects from them. But their playstyles couldn’t be more different.

Tamatoa just has two targets to find and move to his lair – the Heart of Te Fiti and Maui’s Hook. The Heart of Te Fiti is in the crab’s Fate deck and brings Moana into play. Maui’s Hook is in the Villain deck, so you can find it yourself or it can be pulled into play by Maui, an impressively powerful hero to beat.

When Maui is in play, you start flipping cards from a unique third deck at the beginning of each turn, representing Maui’s many shape-shifting forms. These can have a wide variety of effects – some are good for you, while others set you back.

And it’s worth noting that if you’ve got either treasure locked down when Moana or Maui arrives, they nick their respective item.

In contrast, when Davy Jones grabs his treasures, there’s no returning them, but he has to get five of the darn things! With this villain, your aim is to put heroes in play, give them treasure tokens (which are attached facedown), reveal their treasures and then vanquish to secure them.

What makes this trickier is a Fate deck stacked with cards that move heroes and treasures, or take them off one hero and put a facedown treasure on another. This feels super thematic, fitting with the constant swapping around that took place in Dead Man’s Chest. The treasures also all have random negative effects, making their carrier stronger or hampering you in some way when you get them.

Personally I really loved playing Davy Jones. He has a difficult mission to complete, but really powerful cards to help achieve it. You’re constantly making progress towards your eventual goal, revealing treasures, adding to your motley crew, or looking for the terrifying Kraken to unleash.

On the other hand, Tamatoa is the complete opposite. His objective seems on the face of it much easier – you just have to beat two heroes – but his cards feel anemic.

There are a chunk of cards that deal with the Maui deck, which only do anything at all when Maui is in play. And so many of the rest are just about digging through your own Villain deck to look for the Hook, or revealing cards from the Fate deck to look for the Heart. Even many of his Fate cards are distractions that feel like busy work, as they’re removed just by moving to them.

It’s a lot more all-or-nothing compared to Davy Jones’ mission, which is why I found that, while the latter always has lots to do, the former is often just sitting around twiddling their claws.

So I think that one of the villains in this box is really strong and the other is a bit of a miss. Ultimately that illustrates why it may have been a mistake to go from three villains per expansion to two. There’s less stuff to try out (although the random nature of Davy Jones’ treasures and Tamatoa’s Maui deck does add some variety) and if one of the characters doesn’t click with you, you’re out of luck.

Ultimately, I wouldn’t recommend you buy Treacherous Tides as your first foray into Disney Villainous, as it’s a bit too wonky to stand alone. But if you already have the base game and especially if you enjoy Pirates of the Caribbean, there’s still a lot to love about this release.