For those who are unfamiliar with Batman: Gotham City Chronicles and what it is – Gotham City Chronicles is a new hit board game that was Kickstarted by Monolith  around this time last year. Recently, those who pledged have been getting their orders and revelling in just how big the game is.

Batman: Gotham City Chronicles you see, is freaking huge. It comes in two big boxes, at the basic pledge level, both of which are bigger than Scythe. One box was dedicated to the heroes, boards, resources, and rules. The other box, the one we will be looking at today, contains all the villains.

If you haven’t seen part one – that one (which you can read here) has all the heroes in it. Today, we’re going to be purely looking at a few tokens, a dashboard, and some of the coolest minis to ever be put into a board game.

Let’s get this show on the road!

Batman: Gotham City Chronicles – Unboxing the Villains

Okay, so first thing first – the villains box for Gotham City Chronicles isn’t as full as the heroes box in some ways, but it does have more minis in it. What I mean by this is that, unlike with the heroes box, we don’t have rule books or artwork (which is now framed, although we need to figure out where to put it) or Bat-Tablets. Instead, on opening the box you are simply presented with this. This is the villain dashboard or command post –

So…right now it doesn’t look like much; however, it is the framework for the villain’s game. Again, I haven’t played the game yet (we’ve just moved house and our dining table is yet to arrive) but this seems to be the place the person controlling the bad guys keeps track of everything during the game – since there are tokens representing each bad guy that slot into place…like so…

Underneath the command post are the miniatures, and underneath that are a set of tokens. We’ll come back to the miniatures in due course; however, for the time being let’s look closer at the tokens. These are interesting as they fall into a few different categories. There are generic tokens:

I don’t know what those are for yet, but now is a good time to talk about the cardboard. I suspect these pieces are all die cut. They are incredibly high quality and are made of thick cardboard.

Next there are a couple of boards. These are add on boards, comprising of one room each, for specific missions during the game.

Finally (and I say finally, but there are loads of these), we have selection of villain, innocents, and cop cards. These are double sided and show the kinds of abilities the villains, bystanders, and cops can do. The cards fit neatly into the dashboard, with fantastic art depicting the villain (or character) on each one.

All in all, first impressions of the cardboard components of the game are good. As mentioned previously, the quality of the components is really high and, to add to that, they feel like they will last.

It’s also a really good sign than Monolith properly care about the quality of Batman: Gotham City Chronicles – something that is great to see.

Batman: Gotham City Chronicles – Looking at the Miniatures

The Villains Box is pack to the brim with miniatures. There were a lot in the previous box, in with the heroes, but the Villains box is enormous and comes with more pieces. It is, in fact, about 1/3 physically larger, and holds a lot more minis. The minis are also split into two compartments – normal and large.

Like with the heroes box we are going to look at a few prominent examples in the Villains box. Here there will probably be more minis we look at, as these characters are so awesome they need a spotlight.

First though, before we look at those, let’s just look at the box as a whole. There is one tray filled with henchmen and one tray filled with special villains (with a few henchmen).

There is also a tray filled with large figures and we will come around to a couple of those in detail in a minute.

So, let’s look a bit closer at a few of the villains –

The Joker and Scarecrow

One of the really nice additions to the box is, due to Kickstarter stretch goals, a few of the villains have more than one sculpt. This goes for Scarecrow, Harley Quinn, The Riddler, Killer Croc, and Bane. Interestingly the Joker only has one sculpt – probably because in the Arkham expansion he comes with the Titan Joker sculpt from the Arkham Asylum video game, but also partly because the Joker has one look and it’s iconic. Scarecrow, on the other hand, has two unique sculpts – one the classic look with the scythe, and one (I believe) from the New 52 The Batman storyline. My Batman knowledge is pretty good, but not good enough to recognise all the sculpts on sight.

Mr Freeze and The Riddler

It has to be said, I love The Riddler sculpts in Gotham City Chronicles. Not only is he one of my favourite Batman Villains, but his sculpts are one some of the coolest. Why? They’re just so casual. You get the feeling he is just happy to calmly taunt the Bat. Amazing.

Bane and Poison Ivy

Both Bane and Poison Ivy have great sculpts in the game as they both have incredibly dynamic poses. Bane is doubly interesting because he gets two sculpts. Where these aren’t necessarily different in size, he has a large base on one of the sculpts meaning Bane needs to be kept in the big section of for big bad guys. The only reason I would guess this is the case is because he needed to be in an even more dynamic pose, and the small base wouldn’t have then accommodated his legs.

Clayface and Penguin

Although this may seem like an odd comparison, The Penguin is one of the smallest miniatures in Gotham City Chronicles, and Clayface is the biggest (vertically speaking, with Man-Bat taking the horizontal record, with a wingspan of around 6 inches). As you can see, The Penguin has a lot of personality – but Clayface is just impressive in all ways. He stands around 5 inches tall and is bound to wow on the board.

Killer Croc and Man-Bat

Finally, just to give a view of some of the larger models that are in the box. Croc has two sculpts, and Man-Bat has one, but all of them are awesome.

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So, there we go – a look at some of the content in the amazing Batman Gotham City Chronicles Villains Box. If you’ve played Gotham City Chronicles, let me know what it’s like. Whether you’ve played it or not, let me know your thoughts on the miniatures and content in the comments below.

Published by Luke

Board game nerd, comic book geek, Rubik's Cube solver, Splendor player, and Blogger. View all posts by Luke