by Brant Guillory, 21 March 2024 ~ #UnboxingDay
When you can snag a Modiphius boxed game for $15, you do it. And a Bond game? C’mon. This was a no-brainer for me.
Better to be #1 than #2
click images to enlarge
So basically, this is a James Bond-themed Villainous. That does solve one of the biggest headaches from the old VG James Bond RPG: everyone wants to play Bond, and if you’re not Bond, you’re just a background character. By having the players play the villains, Bond is still a central character in the game without the players fighting over who gets to play him.
There’s all of the toys, including a bunch of plastic cubes, Spectre-pi with both round and square bases, a poker chip, the villains, a mounted map, large and small deck of cards, dice and counters.
The map looks a lot like the computer maps from Casino Royale and includes a variety of key locales from the movies. Interestingly, you have both Drax Manor and the Amazonian launch location, but no other real mentions of Moonraker anywhere in the game.
Very well-illustrated rules, with examples of play.
Two of the villains – and two of my favorites. Much like the Villainous series, they all have asymmetric capabilities.
The counters are just a bunch of markers that you use on the map and villain boards.
Here’s the list of missions, based on what’s happened in many of the movies over the past 65 years. Interestingly, although Kristatos is one of the villains in the game, there’s no location on the map from For Your Eyes Only and there’s no mission from it, either. He was one of the best non-Spectre villains in the Bond œuvre, so his inclusion in a game called Spectre is already a little weird, but if you’re going to include him, then include a mission from his movie, or his rock-top monastery-turned-hideout.
These cards seem to be the ones that control what’s happening throughout the turn, but I haven’t dug into it enough just yet.
So yeah, a full box of goodies about one of my favorite franchise for less than a cheap dinner date. This was a no-brainer, and although it’s not really a wargame, it was new and cool and worth showing off.
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