SDCC 2016: ‘Overlords of Infamy’ Tabletop Preview!
I hit the gaming floor at San Diego Comic-Con pretty hard, and the great thing about the free gaming area is that there is almost always an interesting demo going on. This year my highlight was the freshly kickstarted Overlords of Infamy, where the players are evil overlords competing for dominance surrounding a capital city. Players will pull off progressively more evil acts of infamy to prove your the most evil of evil overlords!
The rules were fairly easy to understand. Each turn you get three action points and a list of actions. You use actions to place and gather workers, and most importantly place tiles that represent your domain and give you more places to put workers. It’s a balancing act, since you need various types of resources to complete various acts of evil, but you also need to develop your part of the board. On top of all that, you can use a spare worker to launch an espionage mission on an adjacent player each turn in its own phase. This mix of design concepts is packaged neatly, fairly easy to explain, and plays well!
Each Overlord has a resource they gather faster and a special ability. I was lucky enough to sit down as the stretch goal Overlord Tyranny, who must have one of the best special actions in the game since he can move an adjoining player’s worker and collect the rewards. What slightly bothered me is Tyrannos art style is fresh and cartoony so it fit more with the board than the original characters; whom all suffer from scrunched serious face syndrome.
But the real highlight of the game is the three stacks of evil cards marked Knavery, Villainy, and Domination. These are objective cards that are completed by having the required resources in your stockpile. Each completed card rises your Infamy track (which allows you to draw better cards and use better espionage actions) and the better types of cards have an special outcome ability. But the best reward for the card is being able to loudly read the text on the card, supplemented with an evil cackle. While the quotes on these kinds of cards are always hit or miss with me, I found the titles were written fantastically. Each one evokes this fantastic imagery that forces you to say “Woah, that’s evil.”
What annoys me about a boardgame sometimes is you just stare at the board and see no options. Where the board of Overlords of Infamy is constantly shifting, morphing, and offering a great deal of information. The central part of the board houses a Hero, who will destroy workers and tiles to bring home, aching to be stolen by a daring player. If your tiles don’t stretch out to meet the city, you can’t interact with it. Same with espionage and other players, you can purposefully cut yourself short to avoid getting hit by your frenemies.
If there was one thing that actually bugged me about the game while I played it was how easy it was to both exploit and not understand the hero mechanic. When evil things happen, a tracker increases and at certain points the next player gets to roll and move the hero, which means before your turn starts you can move the hero out of the center and steal the treasure. It was not made too clear to me what rose the tracker (the devs moved it for me, when they weren’t talking amongst themselves) and I got it once or twice; but because of how it works only certain tiles and workers are actually in any sort of risk, and some tiles have walls that block him entirely. Now that’s not to say that the hero can’t mess your day up, but if you are warned at the start not to build that way, you can just build that way and ignore that mechanic entirely. I found myself wanting to slap down a Tyranno meeple and move him about more than anything.
I really don’t know how this gem of a strategy game snuck past my radar. It was fun to play, no one aspect of the game’s design felt too overpowering. While I have my gripes with a few things, it’s small stuff. Overall the game was fun and I found myself wanting to play more of it. Overlords of Infamy is available for Pre-Order now, go get you one!
