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I'm designing a game for 4+ players where you fight the evil occupying force that has taken over your town.
My first major hurdle is: I think the game will be more rewarding if the 'evil overlord' is playable. You can then make choices on how to deal with the resistance fighters that are gradually sabotaging your 'vision of utopia', and it would undoubtedly feel more realistic to the 'good' players. My question is, would it suck for one of the players to be the bad guy? Having the other guys trying to beat him? Or would it be enjoyable?
I haven't played a board game where it's me vs everyone else, and thematically I'm the bad guy. Have you? What was it like?

There's often people who very much like this role. The main challenge with it is whether you build somehing "fair" where each side has an equal chance of winning or go more of the DM route where the evil player is expected to lose. The latter tends to go over better, but can be disheartening for the player who has to be the punching bag. The former is odd just because it often leaves a lot of disappointment from the table when the bad guy wins and its hard to figure out how capable any group will be in working together.

Personally, I prefer automated villains and pure co-op, but they're always a little gamey and lack the unpredictability that comes from an intelligent opponent. Mostly I've just come down to preferring my competitive games to be 1v1 affairs.

Yeah good response.
I think the DM route will be the way to go. I want it to have a strong narrative aspect, so someone will need to coordinate that and keep track of where everyone is. You're right it would feel very odd if everyone lost to one bad guy. A real anti-climax.
Thanks for your thoughts.

Plenty of dungeon crawl board games have this role and it's not anything unusal. Many players like this "one against many" feel (myself, for example) and it's a good role for the best player in the group, because the rest will have the advantage of others pointing out mistakes.

As an example, I liked Descent 2ed with a player Overlord but the version with an app is an automatic "not interested" from me.

The board game nemesis offers three first player to die the option to play the evil aliens instead.
The player can't fully control them, but gets cards with actions instead.

A coop versus evil overlord game could work if the overlord has a more limited control over his minions. This way the players can counteract and outplay more easily. Depending on implementation the "feel-bad" moments could be reduced.
1 versus all games always run the risk of the single player feeling singled out, so taking some control away let's the evil player blame his minions.

I think exactly the opposite - the team should have a harder task to win the game as they enjoy more computing power If the overlord makes a tactical mistake, there's no one to suggest reconsidering that move.

As such, the overlord should be more powerful by design, to balance for the fact that players are going to have 2 to 4 times more brains to pick.

What could be a very interesting idea for a game would be to have the bad guy take control of an evil mastermind rather than an evil force.

The game (and bear in mind this is a spur of the moment brainwave so it could be a dud) would inolve manipulating the players into doing something, rather than just killing them or stopping them.

For example, let's say the players have stumbled into a tomb with some sort of ancient evil there which needs to be unlocked. The process for unlocking the evil would resemble the process for unlocking the tomb, so the evil player would be trying to get certain players to do certain things. Not quite sure how those things would play out, to be honest.

Perhaps they have a set of events which need to have happened, and not necessarily in order. They can play certain cards or abilities when the things have been done, like collapsing rooves and triggering traps. That sort of thing.

To avoid foreknowledge you'd need a lot of different scenarios which contradict each other and are randomised, so that the players can't manipulate them easily. They should not know whether what they're doing works for or against the evil player.

As a random game mechanic, the evil player may score points and gain abilities when there are all players in one room, all players separate, or players in 2 groups. the evil player would need to use their monsters & traps to try and herd or manipulate the players into doing their bidding. The players would be trying to escape, or stop the evil, whatever fits better.

This is a very cool idea but I think more in the realm of RPG scenarios than of a board game.

works well in The Thing if you've ever played it