High Stakes

The obstacles that games can throw at us exist on a sliding scale of chaos. Some advertise their threats, letting you plan ahead and duck the blow. Others are the jump scares of the hobby, asking you to improvise solutions on the fly. Vampire Village sits somewhere, uncomfortably, in the middle. 

Maxine Rambourg designed Vampire Village. Guillaume Tavernier and Jerome Levealey illustrated the game. Studio H publish the game.

Vampire Village is not a game about making a nice, cosy home for folk who don’t like the sun and have unusual dietary requirements. Instead you are tasked with keeping some humans safe from Witches, Demons, Werewolves, and the Vampires of the title. 

The villages need defences to push this menagerie of monstrosities back from whence they came. A deck of scquare cards is presented to you to build these villages up. Defences are simple. From the left will come witches, the top werewolves, and from the right Vampires. Only the furthest left, right, or top cards will count towards the defensive value encouraging the building of straight walls around the centre. 

These cards can also contain villagers, which count as points at the game end. You can even combo cards together to produce more villagers. Some cards are the homes of heroes, which produce no defence, but have their own part to play in the battles to come. Sticking within the confines of a 4X4 grid you pass, and build. Pass and build.

The monsters test the defences as soon as they are assembled. This section of the game is not so much a draft as a dealer’s choice. Each player is dealt 3 monster cards, keeps one for themselves, and passes one left and one right. Do this again and each player now has 6 cards to their name. The monsters gather at their assigned sides bringing their strength to bear against your defences. If the monsters have less strength than your defences, all is well. When they overcome the defences a card on that side is eliminated alongside the weakest monster. Then you clash again and keep doing so until the horde is stopped or sated on tasty villagers. 

This does allow for some potentially interesting defensive construction. Towers sticking out to take a hit, reducing the strength of the incoming hordes. In doing so you might lose some people, but what is a mauled villager between friends. 

Heroes can help bolster your defences. Playing one allows you to move villagers around your town. When the monsters turn up, the heroes can throw themselves into the fray. In doing so they sacrifice themselves to take out the strongest monster in the pack.

Demons are the monsters we haven’t mentioned yet. They turn up below your village and you can’t defend against them with mere walls. Only heroes will stop them or they will wreak havoc upon your town. 

You do this building and defending a second time around, giving you a bit of an ability to plug gaps in your defences and prepare for the second wave of monsters. As you get to the end you count up all the villagers you have left, the monsters hanging around outside and come up with a score. 

This is all well and good, but the dichotomy at the core of the game quickly becomes apparent. You must build defences, but for what? You don’t know what is going to turn up at your address. Now you could say that about many games. When the primary activity is building walls for unknown numbers of assailants you feel a disconnect. You have a slightly better foundation to work with in the second round for sure. However, the unknowable nature of each wave means you are planning for everything, and therefore planning for nothing. 

It goes the other way as well. When you are dealing out monsters, you may just have the ones you need to either threaten your opponents or help out yourself. This might not be a problem in another game, but drafting gives the experience an air of frustration. It doesn’t matter how well you draft you could just end up with a bunch of monsters that can take you down. 

It reminds me a bit of Galaxy Trucker in a way. You build up a thing with a draft and then it is broken up by random chance. The play experience in Galaxy Trucker feels different though. Players don’t affect you directly and there is an element of being able to look ahead at what is coming. 

In Vampire Village there is no real ability to plan, which leaves the draft element feeling directionless. Drafting games need a clear path to travel along. A purpose that each choice, hate draft, and agonising passed on card reflects on. 

Vampire Village is a game that feels out of place. I am genuinely not sure who it is for. It’s not light enough to be a fun filler like Sushi Go. It also isn’t crunchy enough to sit alongside a game like Moon. Vampire Village ends up feeling like neither one thing or another. The Jekyll and Hyde of drafting games. 

Hachette Boardgames UK sent me a copy of Vampire Village. My opinions are my own. 

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