Vampire Village

I’m coming in strong with this one, no messing around. Vampire Village has two major flaws. One of them I can fix right now. The first thing you’ll see is the box art which is great, has a very modern manga vibe that sets up an expectation. You’ll imagine that the rulebook will open with a couple of paragraphs of backstory to get you in the mood, something to bring you into the world and ready for the game. You’ll be disappointed. Monsters are coming and you have to defend the village, that’s about it. We need a little something here, a touch of flavour.

Fig 01: A promising start, but never judge a game by it’s excellent cover…

It’s a dark time for Fartrandia and its neighbouring villages of Wastrand and Smellatro, an era of horror that they have brought upon themselves. There’s enough farmland to produce a sufficient harvest for all, but the Farties got greedy, came up with the idea of harvesting more for themselves, taking the Smellos share and selling it back to them for a tidy profit. This meant less for the Wastrels as well – who fancied some of that juicy coin too, and a terrible plan was concocted: the Wastrels made a bargain with the witches in the forest to bring hexes upon the Farties, in exchange for a sacrifice or two which they’d get from the Smellos, no bother. The Farties, meanwhile, had poisoned the Smellos water with a terrible concoction that turned some of them into werewolves who descended upon the Wastrels. As for the Smellos, well, they dragged some coffins from a mysterious castle on the cliffside and left them at dusk for their neighbours to enjoy. All the while, demons were watching this bad behaviour and biding their time…

See? You’re in the mood now, aren’t you? You’ve got something to play for. I was going to do a whole story about how the villages got sick of lending each other stuff and never getting it back, but that seemed rather frivolous for the amount of bloodshed incoming. You know me, I don’t do frivolous.

Remember, the story is only one of the flaws…

Fig 02: All these villagers milling about and waiting for the monsters to come.

Me? I’d be offskis.

First Impressions

The great news is that the manga style continues throughout the product. The monster designs are excellent, to the point where I’d watch whatever anime they were in if it existed, and the interior of the box looks good too. Minor niggle – the villagers on the tokens don’t quite fit in with everything else and look like they’d be from a different show. The monster decks are good quality, although the lack of a linen finish is noticeable. Less impressive is the material used for the village cards. They are too flimsy when you consider that they are intrinsic to the gameplay. They feel too easy to rip or ruin, and it wouldn’t take too many plays for them to start looking tatty. Cutting corners for a lower priced game doesn’t always pay off.

Vampire Village is a tower defence game, and I found it slightly reminiscent of Kingdom Rush: Elemental Uprising which I reviewed some time ago. This is most likely due to the square village/tower tiles that both have in common. Given the game style and the experience I’ve had with this genre, I had a couple of expectations. Firstly, that it will be a tough challenge – on this count, I am right. Secondly, that it will be a long game of multiple progressive rounds that grow ever tougher as the game progresses – about this I will be proven very wrong, surprisingly so.

Let’s Play!

There’s not a lot to set up for Vampire Village. Keep a pile of the villager tokens to one side and within easy reach. There’s one villager and three villager variants. The flip side of these tokens can be used for totalling up and marking attack scores later. There’s three village decks. From a Starter Village deck of 6 cards, each player gets one of these at random. Then there’s a pair of larger village decks, marked I and II (we will call these markings a grim omen). There are also two monster decks, also marked I and II (starting to see the fundamental flaw yet?).

Village set up is quirky. Six cards from pile I are dealt out to each player. You choose one card from your hand to add to your village, then pass the rest around. This continues until all the cards are dealt and laid out. You’ll place these cards within an imaginary 4×4 grid and mustn’t allow your village to expand outside of these boundaries. (I assume that’s because we’d be looking at a town, and this game is called Vampire Village.)

Fig 03: Which witch is this witch?

I’ll say at this point we were going through the rulebook page by page during the first playthrough and had not read the full thing prior to playing (this was neglectful behaviour, borderline irresponsible). The village tiles can have shield symbols with numbers on either side, at the top, all three at once, or none at all, and while this clearly meant something – defence seemed a reasonable assumption given the genre – I didn’t quite fathom the precise relevance, and we slapped our villages together with ignorant abandon.

Don’t play games the way I do: you’ll cause yourself all kinds of unnecessary problems.

The villager tokens come into play here. The bottom of each village card has an instruction regarding how many villagers to place on that particular card. You may want to take this element into account as well when you’re choosing your starting cards. For example, one card may ask you to place upon it a number of villagers equal to the amount of village buildings with a yellow roof. And yeah, you guessed it, you’re not only looking to save as much of your village as possible but also its inhabitants.

The monster deck is next – deck I first, of course – and each player will draw three cards from the shuffled deck. In a three player and up game, you will keep one card, pass one to the left and one to the right. It’s up to you decide which card might be least damaging to your situation (think carefully, you fool!), and which of your neighbouring opponents you owe the most revenge. (Remember that last game you played where your other half clearly cheated?) For a two player game you’ll keep one card and pass the other two over (feel no guilt, they’ll stitch you up just the same). After this first set of three, everyone draws another set of three Monster cards from deck I and does the same thing again.

You’ve built a village, you’ve spread out some snacks… I mean, villagers in the various buildings, you have chosen your doom, let the bloodbath commence!

Does anyone survive?

You’re about to learn some surprising things. I consider myself to be a horror aficionado and that I knew the rules of every basic horror archetype inside and out. More fool me! Vampire Village contains vital information that could save your life should a real blood-sucking creature invasion ever occur. Listen up. Witches attack from the left. Vampires swoop in from the right. Werewolves drop in from above. That’s got you thinking about your home defence set-up. You need your garlic strings on your east-facing wall, lasses and lads. Hexes and protective amulets to the west. And if werewolves come battering through your ceiling? I mean, I’ll be honest, I think you’re stuffed. If you’re UK-based then it’s extremely unlikely that you have a gun, and even if you do, where you gonna get a stash of silver bullets? Werewolves are the worst, I swear.

Fig 04: This indicates the order in which the monsters will attack. I like the arrow motif, and again the artwork is outstanding…

Oh, there’s one more creature type – demons. They strike from below, which seems reasonable when you think about it. And yes, you spotted it, there’s no defence down below (oo-er), so get these over to your neighbours asap.

It’s time to resolve the attacks, and each creature type is a little different in this respect. Vampires are essentially brute force, and simply have an attack range between 1 and 6. A no-nonsense bunch, these toothy ones. There’s two types of werewolf, grey and black. Each grey werewolf card you have is equal to the total number of grey werewolf cards there are. If you have three of them, then each card equals three points for a total of nine points of attack. Bear this in mind when dishing monster cards out to your pals. Witches are a little more complicated again: there’s three different flavours. Your basic witch has an attack value of 2. A witch with a left arrow has an attack value equal to the number of witches attacking your left-hand neighbour. The right-pointing witch does the same with your right-hand neighbour. If anything, the game will get your latent maths brain working. Big bad demon will have one of two attacks. It will either eliminate a hero (ouch) or apply a special effect which could be destroy the building with the fewest villagers, or add an extra creature to the attack on your village. If neither of these attacks can be fulfilled, the demon has a strop and stomps off petulantly into the night (it’s discarded).

Fig 05: Devil-Boy has arrived! You’re all stuffed now.

Once you’ve had a good battering – and if your village isn’t reduced by half or more then you’re doing well – it’s time to set up for round two. It goes the same as the first. Deal out a hand of Village cards from deck II, following the same methodology as earlier. Then it’s Monster cards from deck II as well. Three cards, keep one, pass the other two. Deal another trio of monsters, and let the second attack commence.

And that’s it. You’ve reached the end game.Tot up the scores, see who amongst you has the least fang holes in their skin, and they’re the winner. Set up and play again if you wish.

I’m going to be honest, I didn’t wish. There was a feeling that Vampire Village had shown me everything it had to offer and it was completely underwhelming. It seemed to me that things were only just getting started when it was abruptly over. There isn’t a satisfying endgame scenario, the game just stops. For the sake of professionalism, I of course played a few more games, tried it solo, because games can grow on us. I’ve had a couple recently that I really didn’t gel with initially, but have become firm favourites since. That hasn’t happened with Vampire Village. Every single time I play it feels like half a game. A tower defence game simply shouldn’t be this short.

There’s a kernel of something promising here, but it feels underdeveloped and hampered by its low price point (and honestly, for what you get gameplay-wise, it should be even cheaper than it currently is). It needs more rounds, which would require more cards with more variety. If this were a village that had been ravaged by werewolves from above, vampires from the east and witches from the west, I’d say stuff it and leave it to beasts.

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