Bad Trevor (Saturday Review)

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Fero City: a bustling metropolis that has become a battleground. There was little time to evacuate the millions of inhabitants before a horde of supervillains descended and started pulverizing iconic landmarks. Most people fled, but many had no chance. Now you have to get them out of there before it’s too late and before the arrival of the worst supervillain of them all: Bad Trevor by Mark Hurdle from Fist Bump Games.

The rulebook’s introduction sets the scene and the amazing graphic novel-style illustrations bring the story to life. An epic battle is about to ensue and innocent civilians are about to be caught up in the chaos. So the bar is set high and everyone around the table rightly expects a monumental gameplay experience.

Simple Gameplay

The basic gameplay is quite simple. A deck of 52 cards is evenly dealt out to the three to five players around the table. The deck has a mix of civilian cards, which you’re trying to collect pairs of, hero cards, which provide benefits, and villain cards, which have a negative effect. The aim of the game is to be the first to get rid of all of your cards.

On your turn, you choose three cards from your hand and place them face down in front of another player. The idea is that you’re attacking them with your cards and hence they are called attack cards. The opponent chooses one of the three cards and the other two go back into your hand. If the other player takes a villain card, something bad happens to them, such as having to miss a turn. If they take a hero card, they will gain some sort of benefit. If it is a civilian card, it goes into their hand and nothing happens right away.

So far, so simple.

Civilian cards add a little twist. At the beginning of your turn, if you have a matching pair, you can play it to either reverse the player order or request a specific civilian card, all of which have a name, from another player. If they have the card, you take it. If they don’t have it, then you end your turn immediately. You can keep playing pairs as long as you have any, but you don’t have to play them if you don’t want to.

Pass The Bad Trevor

There are also a couple of special cards. Bad Trevor, the namesake of this game, can never be discarded. So any hero card effects that allow you to discard cards don’t apply to them. The only way to get rid of this card is to play it as one of the three cards in front of an opponent and hope that they draw it. If that happens, the other player also has to take the other two attack cards. So make sure you never draw Bad Trevor.

The other special card is Kamikaze Kevin. This card serves two functions: whoever gets it in their starting hand places it face-up in the middle of the table and starts the game. So you have one less card than the others. The second function is that anyone can take Kamikaze Kevin and place it on top of one of the three attack cards and shout “Take that Bad Trevor!” Whoever does this has to be sure that the card they put Kevin on top of is Bad Trevor.

The face-down card gets revealed and if it is indeed Bad Trevor, the person who played Kamikaze Kevin wins. If it’s not, the player who put the attack cards down wins instead. So effectively, Kamikaze Kevin is a nuclear attack that will end the game one way or the other there and then. It’s a high-risk-high-reward strategy.

That’s it though. Very simple rules and a lot of the gameplay experience comes from the card flavour text and the player interaction.

Basic Bad Trevor

That’s where Bad Trevor falls down for me. While it is great for people who like games with a lot of luck and very little strategy, where the people around the table make the game exciting through their interactions with each other, there really is practically no player agency.

The benefits of hero cards and the negative effects of villains are not particularly spectacular. There are no cards that you can play from your hand to protect yourself from attacks. There is no combo potential where one hero card can be combined with another card to make it stronger. It feels a bit bland. I just draw one of the three attack cards and do what it says. It’s all quite mechanical. There is no excitement, except maybe for the attacker when the opponent decides which card to take. Even that lasts only a few seconds, unless the opponent really can’t decide.

The most action comes from civilian cards. If you can manage to get a lot of matching pairs, you can quickly get a win. So keeping an eye on what cards other players draw is important. You need to know what civilians are where and then play one of your pairs to demand a civilian that gives you another pair and then hopefully keep going until your hand is empty.

Great Potential

That’s a real shame, because I think Bad Trevor could have been so much more. As I say, it’s perfectly fine and will be fun for the right group of people, but for me, it needed more. The setting is great and the illustrations really suit the game. They might not be to everyone’s taste, but they definitely capture an epic graphic novel style. The names and flavour text of cards are generally all right, but sometimes did make me cringe a bit.

I know, I’m probably just a boring old bloke who needs to loosen up and enjoy the fun. Yet, I somehow was really looking forward to an epic card battler where the opponent parries with a card from their hand, after which the attacker follows suit with an even more epic attack and it goes back and forth until one player gives in or has run out of cards and is down and out.

If I look at other card games like it, I have to think of Star Realms. That game is also quite simple, but there is more strategic and tactical thinking. You want to put up shields, try and trigger combos and build up to an epic turn where you wipe out your opponents.

In Bad Trevor, the antics of the heroes and villains are almost neither here nor there. Focus on saving the civilians and you will win the game. The rest is just fireworks and theatrics. I’m really sorry, but the game just doesn’t live up to its own expectations for me – but maybe I’m just missing the point.

Useful Links

• Bad Trevor: https://badtrevor.com/
• Kickstarter campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/markhurdle/bad-trevor
• BGG listing: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/415081/bad-trevor

Videos

Transparency Facts

I feel that this review reflects my own, independent and honest opinion, but the facts below allow you to decide whether you think that I was influenced in any way.

• I was sent a free review copy of this game by the publisher.
• At the time of writing, neither the designers, nor the publisher, nor anyone linked to the game supported me financially or by payment in kind.

Audio Version

Intro Music: Bomber (Sting) by Riot (https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/)

Music: “Valor” by AShamaluevMusic.
Website: https://www.ashamaluevmusic.com

Epic Intro 2018 by Sascha Ende
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/3002-epic-intro-2018
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Playlist

These are the songs I listened to while I was writing this review: