Vampires vie for power in my dining room
I played through a 3 player game of Vampire: Prince of the City this evening. We kept it to 6 turns to get a taste of how it works and because the rules warned that a 12 turn game can take as many as 4 hours.
The game is very social in nature. The mechanic lends itself to people interacting by creating and breaking alliances. What's more, there are mechanics built in to the cards that end up almost forcing strife between the players.
The conflict resolution system is a shadow of the actual White-Wolf D10 system. Each player card (one for each of the 5 clans in Vampire: The Requiem) have 3 "stats", Mental, Physical, and Social. Conflicts are resolved by rolling a d10 and adding the appropriate stat and comparing your final number to your opponent (or to a fixed difficulty in the case of "event" conflicts on cards). Various Disciplines can add dice or bonuses to certain conflicts as can various cards.
Influence forms the central goal of the game. Each turn you are awarded a certain number of influence tokens (3 by default, but certain things can increase or reduce this number) and each player takes it in turn to bid their influence on the various areas of the city (aka, the game-board). Bids can be contested (according to certain rules of proximity and whatnot) and another type of roll-off ensues. This is the mechanic that represents the vampires gaining or loosing control over the city's various domains. If you manage to take over all of the territories in a domain (they're colour coded) you gain extra influence to use next turn. Certain cards might also give you bonuses for controlling individual or groups of territories.
The game continues and the turn counter counts down from wherever you set it to 0. Whoever has amassed the most prestige (gained both through defeating event cards and by gaining control over the city territories) by the end of the game is the winner.
As usual, the game seems like it'd be better with more players, but even with just the 3 of us, it played out in a way that made me want to play it more. I can't say as I had huge expectations for the game (has White-Wolf ever even published a board game before?!), but have been interested in this type of board game for years - since I first played the first Vampire CCG actually. I always thought the Vampire resource and intrigue game would make an interesting exercise in strategy. As yet, I am not disappointed.
Also, playing this game reminded me that White-Wolf has never gotten around to publishing the Exalted CCG. I wonder what happened to that?
The game is very social in nature. The mechanic lends itself to people interacting by creating and breaking alliances. What's more, there are mechanics built in to the cards that end up almost forcing strife between the players.
The conflict resolution system is a shadow of the actual White-Wolf D10 system. Each player card (one for each of the 5 clans in Vampire: The Requiem) have 3 "stats", Mental, Physical, and Social. Conflicts are resolved by rolling a d10 and adding the appropriate stat and comparing your final number to your opponent (or to a fixed difficulty in the case of "event" conflicts on cards). Various Disciplines can add dice or bonuses to certain conflicts as can various cards.
Influence forms the central goal of the game. Each turn you are awarded a certain number of influence tokens (3 by default, but certain things can increase or reduce this number) and each player takes it in turn to bid their influence on the various areas of the city (aka, the game-board). Bids can be contested (according to certain rules of proximity and whatnot) and another type of roll-off ensues. This is the mechanic that represents the vampires gaining or loosing control over the city's various domains. If you manage to take over all of the territories in a domain (they're colour coded) you gain extra influence to use next turn. Certain cards might also give you bonuses for controlling individual or groups of territories.
The game continues and the turn counter counts down from wherever you set it to 0. Whoever has amassed the most prestige (gained both through defeating event cards and by gaining control over the city territories) by the end of the game is the winner.
As usual, the game seems like it'd be better with more players, but even with just the 3 of us, it played out in a way that made me want to play it more. I can't say as I had huge expectations for the game (has White-Wolf ever even published a board game before?!), but have been interested in this type of board game for years - since I first played the first Vampire CCG actually. I always thought the Vampire resource and intrigue game would make an interesting exercise in strategy. As yet, I am not disappointed.
Also, playing this game reminded me that White-Wolf has never gotten around to publishing the Exalted CCG. I wonder what happened to that?