Enemies of Gotham City Review: No, He Can't Read My Clayface
Transcript
Hey everyone, I'm Tom Vassal. Today we're taking a look at a pretty giant game here, Enemies of Gotham City. Uh this is a game for two to five players, 60 to 150 minutes, and it's based on the animated Batman animated series, which is one of the greatest cartoon series ever brought to screen. In this game, you are one of Batman's villains. You are an enemy of Gotham City, and you're going to start everything on fire. I mean, like literally, you're burning the the city down. Um and fighting other players all the while that annoying Batman guy is going around trying to stop you. Let's take a look at how it plays. First thing that you will do is you're going to pick your villain that you're going to play. And there are lots of different villains in the game. Each villain comes with a difficulty on the back. It tells you how hard it is to play them. They have a special ability, and they have a weapon that's built onto their card. After you pick them, you're also going to be picking a color that's going to come with them. And then you have whichever one you pick, you'll have their miniature that will go onto the board, which I'm sure these would look really good painted. Uh but that's what you're going to start with. You're playing on this entire map here of Gotham, which is going to have several buildings on it. And it also has different areas on the board that are going to be worth points for first, second, and third place when that
district scores. And you're going to get points for having your people there. You're going to get points for having your main guy there, but you're always going to have to keep an eye out for Batman and his helpers, Robin and etc., who might show up and cause all sorts of problems for you there. In a round, there's going to be an event card. And these events kind of are tailored for how the round this one here, for example, Gotham City burns. It tells you where Batman goes. So, for example here, you flip a card and Batman goes to Midtown. And it says each villain can burn a building in their district. If they do, they will gain three infamy, which is points here. And then it also tells you to turn over, "Hey, Midtown is the scoring section for this one." And it tells you how you're going to make income this round. So, here you'll get money for each building without fire that's in your district. So, these three things are set up at the beginning of a round. The next thing players are going to do is they're going to be picking one of these spots here on the board. And And this is for two or three players. If you're playing with four to five players, you'll have more here. And this is also determining turn order. If you go here, you'll be able to go right next door here and buy weapons that and other different equipments that you can use.
So, maybe I'll buy myself a machine gun. If you go here, you're going to get more of your thugs on the board. If you go here, you get to burn buildings. Now, almost everybody wants to burn buildings. Burning buildings at the end of the game counts as control in your area if you start a building buildings that are in fire in your color. And there's also ways that you'll get points over the game. And then if you go here, you'll get another action card. And that is the main part of the game. Players are going to take turns in their action phase. And on your turn, you can take two movement where you can move from spot to other spots. Although, you have to be careful because bridges can be set on fire. And going into spots where other villains are will can cost you money. But, you're also going to play a power card. Now, at the beginning of the game, everyone has an equal set of power cards. I can fight Batman, move muscle, make a deal, burn down something, add three goons to a district, add three goons and burn a thing in your district.
Everyone has these cards. You're going to get to play one, but you also might get more cards down here at the docks. They cost money, and these can be really interesting unique cards. Like I might get this hub of Gotham City, which gives me one infamy for each bridge with fire connected to my district. So, if I'm in a spot and there's a lot of fire on all the different bridges that are attached to my attached to my district, that might be a card worth me taking and playing in the future. Also, I have to keep note of where the scoring's going to be. In this case, it's in Midtown, but Batman's in Midtown, and there's a Batman rule that's in effect here that it says the villain with the most control has to remove a goon, and villains cannot gain income or infamy when they're in Batman's district, and Batman's district does not score. And that's the easy Batman. There's a harder one that you can play with also.
Uh now, at the end of the game, almost every district on the board is going to score at some point, and players can do all sorts of things like changing these tokens and moving them to a new spot. And like I said, they're going to get new cards and score infamy that way. Players can also use their weapons on their turn. So, for example, the Joker's weapon here is a fake revolver, where he can move up to three goons in his district to an adjacent district. Um the Scarecrow can send two goons from any district to Arkham Asylum. Wait, what's Arkham Asylum? Arkham Asylum is a cube tower. And what this means is at the end of the round before we score, we're going to be throwing cubes in Arkham Asylum. You might want this to happen deliberately. Sometimes you don't. So, here's five yellow cubes and four purple cubes. I dropped them in, and you'll notice that three yellows and three purples fell out, and you'll see some are still stuck in a tower to come out in future turns. And then you'll send the entire group that has come out to one spot on the board. And this can really swing things and change things as the game goes by.
So, it's obvious that the designers of this game definitely took some uh cues from El Grande. This goes all the way back to El Grande, one of the original games of area control, which had a cabaliero tower that you would put a cubes out on the board you're controlling different areas and getting points. Very much based on that to some degree, and I think that game is a great game. This game does a lot of things I love. It's based on an IP that I enjoy a lot, and that IP definitely comes out. Uh no one is Batman, everyone else is a lesser person. You're all these villains going up against Batman, and you're all on pretty much equal footing as the game goes by. You're all different and have different special abilities. Um for example, Mr. Freeze sets nothing on fire, but he's putting ice out everywhere instead. His fires are ice and things like that. Um uh but it everyone feels pretty even keeled, and Batman's kind of an annoyance, but you're sending him at each at each other. So, this is an area control game with some really good mechanisms. Some ideas of I have this one power card.
What's the best power card to play at any given point? Is this the time I play the one for setting things on fire? Am I going to buy these power cards? There's that There's [snorts] There's that good thing at the beginning where you place your your your worker down so that you're picking turn order because sometimes you want a really good thing. I want to throw three more goons in the board. And I want to go last. Sometimes it's good to go first, sometimes it's good to go last. If you're last, you can kind of move thugs in and use your weapons and take control of the area that people are fighting over this round, but you're never quite sure what's going to go on. And then it has a cube tower. I love cube towers that are deliberately built to have cubes come in and stop in different spots so that they won't come out. And also, it's a bit of uncertainty where everything gets sent at the end of the game. I enjoy that. I think the event that the income of this game, everything plays smoothly. It is not perfect. I think the game is slightly too long. I would drop out an entire round from the game, frankly, and I think that wouldn't hurt it too much.
And it also, for better for worse, has all kinds of stuff happening to you. The more players in the game, if you play a five-player game, there's going to be so much chaos from other players just going after you the whole time. You have to know that going in. Hey, we're going to be fighting. Oh, wow, they just they took out my minions and that minions. And sometimes Batman just at the wrong time, the wrong place, man. I had my forces in this spot and he shows up. But I don't know that you should also be so concentrated in one area, too. There's this constant back and flow. You're trying to get maybe you might get a vehicle which lets you move around the board faster. Maybe an extra weapon. You can use all your weapons in your turn to throw thugs out. Maybe you're putting your hopes in Arkham Asylum where it's a revolving door. You know, your goons go in, the goons come out. The production value here is really cool. The buildings feel good, putting the fire on them. I wouldn't mind a little goon thing, little plastic guys over the cubes, but I don't mind the cubes either that much. And like I said, it'd be nice to get that that get it painted, to have them just run around the board and fight. But there's this back and forth energy. This feels like the cartoon, a chaotic thing. It almost feels like the um after the earthquake hit Gotham City and that was it, No Man's Land, uh where they split it in different fiefdoms.
That's what this feels like to some degree, and I think it's fun and entertaining. So, with those caveats that it might be slightly longer than I like and you realize there's this back and forth, it's still very entertaining and it's very strong thematically and it's one of honestly one of the best Batman games out there. I give this one an eight out of 10. I find it to be very enjoyable. Um a lot going on. You're in for it for a good back and forth game where maybe the best strategy won't win, but you're going to have those twists and turns of the knives and get to do fun things and you know, relive some of the the classic moments of these different villains. So that's Enemies of Gotham City. Definitely check it out. I'm Tom Vasel and you've been watching The Dice Tower.
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