User blog:RRabbit42/Review: Despicable Me games

In about three weeks, Despicable Me 2 will be available on home video and I know that everyone's interest in all things despicable will perk up again. Amongst those things are three games made by Hasbro that at first appear to be separate but are actually meant to share pieces between them.

The first is the "Battle Pods: Good vs Evil" game. This is one of those games for two players where you launch a top-like pod against other pods or other figures. As you see by the picture to the right, they give you 5 Minions and 5 Evil Minions in the set and it says that there's a total of 50 available. So how do you get the other 40?

The main way is you buy what is called a "blind bag". This is a package where you get one of the figures and a pod, but you won't see which figure it is until you open the package. It's one way the toy industry gets people to spend extra money, but some of that can be offset by trading the figures with other people.

These also come with a Mission card. The first bag I got had "Mission 7: Grab-a-Minion", which said to line up four figures and take turns sliding the card underneath a figure. Whoever gets the most wins. I don't see anything like "card 7 out of X" on it, so I don't know how many different kinds of cards they made, but hopefully it's at least one per the 31 figures you can buy this way.

Toys R Us has the Battle Pods set for $20 and the blind bags are $3 each. The set is also $20 on Amazon, with the blind bags running a bit higher at $6.40 each or $17 for a set of 3. At least two stores are selling the individual figures, but at a premium price starting at $7 and running up to about $19. If you really want to complete your collection, that would be a way of doing it.

But take note that the blind bags only include figures 1 to 31 and the Battle Pods set includes figures 32-41. The last nine are spread across two other games.

Game number 2 is Monopoly, but more specifically, a modified version of Monopoly Junior. The game board leaves out the Railway spaces that have you roll again, and it fits onto the game box with the help of two plastic support pieces. This creates an "arena" for you to spin the pod that's used in place of a die. Wherever the pod stops spinning, that's the number of spaces you move.

Gameplay is a little different than Monopoly Junior. You have to buy a property when you land on it, but you get a cupcake automatically instead of having to buy the piece before you can start charging rent. If you get both properties in a color, replace the cupcake with an ice cream sundae across both spaces and charge the higher rent. The game ends when someone can't pay the rent, buy a property or pay the fee on a Chance card. Whoever has the most Banana Bucks wins.

The game is for 2 to 4 players. You're supposed to put the Nom Nom Tom figure with the banana on top of the spinner pod, so the other four figures are used as your game pieces (numbers 42-46 out of the 50 available), but you could use any of them on the spinner, including from the other sets. However, I recommend using a regular six-sided die instead. I had problems getting the pod to spin consistently and it tended to go towards the same area of the box. I'm pretty sure the table I had it on was level, though.

The third game is Operation. There's 11 pieces to remove with the metal tweezers without touching the sides. If you want to go for extra points, you can work on pairs of pieces and earn one of the Minion figures (numbers 47-50).

I bought both at Toys R Us a few months ago. They don't have either listed on their website right now, but you can find them in the local stores. They're about $20 each, same as what's listed on Amazon.

The back of the Battle Pods set shows all 50 of the figures that are available. You can see larger pictures of each figure if you look along the sides of the Monopoly and Operation games.

There's several themes for the figures: ones saying "Bello", Minions in Medieval armor, a couple with Kyle the "dog" and Agnes' unicorn, in hospital garb for Operation, and miscellaneous outfits that we saw in the movies, like Mr. Tim, Mrs. Dave, Baby Carl and the firefighters. There's even Dave doing his "Whaaa?" line.

Even if you weren't interested in playing any of these games, they might be worthwhile to purchase if you collect Despicable Me items. For adults, since the figures are just about a half inch high, they can be used to decorate your office without taking up a lot of space.