GOODIES AND BADDIES / DEVELOPER: MIKEY WADE / PUBLISHER: KEYSQUARED GAMES / RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 2020
As any board games fan knows, Nottingham is the hot-bed of the UK games design industry, with more games producers in the one city than you can shake a handful of dice at. The lovely people KeySquared Games let us have an advance look at their latest action packed card game, Goodies and Baddies, currently funding now on Kickstarter.
It’s a silly, energetic and very clever card game that pits a bunch of fantasy heroes against a series of monsters (baddies) and each other. The idea is that you’re all fighting for the top spot as the Number One hero. It’s a three- to eight-player game aimed at a family-sized audience. Each player has a hand of equipment style cards that lets them equip their hero. (Some cards need to be played before the fight starts, others during). Once the player is ready, a baddie card is drawn and the epic fight begins. You get three goes at causing damage to the Baddie, but then so does it, so don’t waste your chance to knock it out quickly. If you win, you get an award. The aim is to get seven victory points, typically by beating up baddies.
Different monsters do different things. For example, you can’t hurt ghosts, you just have to survive the fight. Demons will mess you up, but if you win you get something cool out of it. So far, so simple. What makes Goodies and Baddies tremendous fun is the built in competition between players. A lot of your cards spoil and interrupt other player’s actions, and there’s even a ‘duel’ card that lets you take out opposing players.
Goodies and Baddies is a game that feels a lot like the very popular card game Munchkin, but has refined play down to the simpler mechanics. It’s less about stacking and hording power and more about going out of getting the job done before your friends’ notice how well you’re doing.
Each player round engages the whole table; they are plenty of things to be watching for as one person takes on a Baddie. They are also boss battles, which are encounters that everyone has to face. These tend to drain resources quickly, meaning that you may be the hero of a boss battle but come out as the loser in the long run.
We also got to play the game’s two expansions: Trixie Pixies and Boons and Banes. Both of these are fun little boosters that we pretty much mixed into the core game after one play through. They change play order and mess with player resources and are nice speed bumps to add variety to the game once you’ve got a hang of it.
The game is currently only available via Kickstarter (which, alas, is still the best option for indie games developers). You can support the campaign here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/keysquared/goodies-and-baddies-card-game.
