Nefarious

Nefarious is a 2-6 player card game from designer Donald X. Vaccarino and publisher USAopoly that puts players in the shoes of mad scientists competing to invent the best range of despicable, world-conquering creations.

It plays very quickly – I was taught the rules and played through a couple of three-player games in about 45 minutes. Because of the way the game is set-up, adding additional players is unlikely to extend that time too much.

First Impressions

Out of the box, the game looks really good. The most prominent colour is a pale blue that combines with a distinctive, cartoonish art style to give Nefarious a fun, modern look. The components also do a really good job of indicating how the game works.

You start the game with four action cards (the same for every player), three randomly dealt invention cards, five wooden meeples in your player colour and 10 coins. You’ll be looking at a central board that contains a grid of four sections (one for each action) next to a couple of ‘twist’ spots, that hold cards that alter the rules or conditions of each game and change every time you set it up.

Playing Nefarious

The goal of Nefarious is simple: be the first to accumulate 20 points from your inventions. Each invention has a monetary cost that you have to pay to build it, an additional effect that might do something to you and/or your opponents (though not all inventions do anything) and a points value. To build an invention, you simply play the corresponding Invent action card and pay the monetary cost.

Invent is one of four actions you could take in a turn, along with Espionage, Research and Work. These four actions are at the heart of the game. Player turns occur simultaneously and involve choosing an action and revealing it at the same time as everyone else. The chosen actions then resolve in numerical order and do the following:

1. Espionage – Allows players to place a meeple on one of the action spots on the central board. From this point on, those players will receive a coin every time an opponent chooses that action.
2. Invent – Allows players to build their creations by paying the corresponding monetary cost.
3. Research – Allows players to take two coins from the bank and draw a new invention card from the central deck.
4. Work – Allows players to take four coins from the bank.

Everything you do should move you closer to the goal of building enough inventions to hit 20 points. The first person to hit 20 wins the game. If two players hit 20 simultaneously, the game continues until there is a clear winner. The trick of the game is balancing the different actions to earn as much money in as few moves as possible so that you can spend more time inventing, though you need a good enough supply of invention cards to do so.

I mentioned twists earlier, and it’s worth looking at them in a little more detail before we move on from the gameplay. Two twists are drawn randomly at the start of the game and placed on the board. Some will have an immediate effect, like making all players start with more than three inventions in hand, while others are ongoing, such as adding a rule that every time a player builds an invention, all other players lose two coins. Some twists are more influential than others but they all have some impact on strategy, which means that no two games play out the same.

Fun, Quick and Light

The heading of this section sums up my thoughts on the game. I had a lot of fun playing it. It was really easy to learn and intuitive to play. If you have a little bit of experience with card games, you’ll master the mechanics without any issue. Even completely new players should be able to pick it up without much difficulty. In essence, Nefarious is a very slick, streamlined experience.

While luck can play a part in the outcome of the game, it requires skill if you want to win. There is so much to be gained from planning your turns well that a player who’s just winging it is likely to be left behind. That said, the skill that’s involved isn’t a mental drain. While more experienced players should beat newer players more often than not, the barrier to entry is low enough that even a first-time player will be able to grasp important strategic elements if they pay attention.

The speed of the game also works in its favour. It’s the kind of game that you can’t play just once, which means that anyone getting to grips with strategy will have more of a chance to try things out. It’s also the perfect length for a filler in a longer gaming session. When I last played it we sandwiched it between two larger games that required a bit more intensity – it made for a nice break from something weightier without breaking the flow of games through the evening.

If I have one complaint, it’s with the Twist cards. There’s a lot of them, and some definitely make for a better game than others. If you find yourself playing a few two many dull games, I recommend choosing them yourself rather than drawing them, or even leaving them out entirely. Nefarious is short enough that you can gloss over a bad game or two, but you don’t want to risk putting off new players with a particularly boring set-up. I feel like they could have been tested a little more extensively, but maybe that’s just me. Either way, they’re easy enough to manipulate and leave out if you don’t like them, so it’s definitely not a major issue.

That caveat aside, I think that Nefarious is the perfect choice if you’re looking for a quick card game with a flexible player count. It scales really well and has a lot of replay-ability. It rewards skill but has a low barrier to entry for new players. All in all, Nefarious is a fantastic example of a well-designed lightweight game.