When most folk think of RPGs it is Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) that first comes to mind. They conjure up images of years-long campaigns, heroic characters, and dank dungeons. The idea of fitting an RPG into a single 2-4 hour experience is not the mode that most people think of. These are commonly referred to as one-shots, and it is how RPGs have been run at conventions for years. More recently this has become the design objective of some RPGs. Alice is Missing is the poster child, but other games are approaching the one-shot design goal with gusto.
Eat the Reich is designed by Grant Howitt with art and graphic design from Will Kirby. It is published by Rowan, Rook, and Decard. The game sees you take on the roles of vampire commandos, coffin dropped into Nazi occupied Paris to kill, then drink, Hitler. You heard me. Now, strap in.
A GM review means that I have experienced the game from the Game Masters chair but haven’t been on the player character side of the table. RPGs can feel different depending on the role you are adopting so I think it is useful to you, the reader, to know where my perspective is coming from. In that spirit you should also know that I ran the game as a one-shot over 4 hours for a group of 5 players.
The game makes it clear from the outset that this is a pulp version, with an overcurrent of ultraviolence, of the events of World War 2. No knowledge of that conflict is necessary to play this game, and the text addresses how to handle the horrors of the Nazi regime. Long story short, you don’t. The Nazi’s are evil people who are going to get killed. They don’t get speeches, they don’t get to seem heroic or noble, they just get murdered. Ultra-violently. Hitler doesn’t get some big moment at the end. He’s there to be ripped apart.
The core of the experience sees you pinballing from action scene to action scene. There is little room, or desire, to stop and take a moment to expand on the lives of our heroes. Those details come through how they fight and when they kill.
That is not to say there is no room for characters to chat, build relationships, and change. Eat the Reich provides you with 6 pre-generated characters that range from a cockney blood mage to a half-bat monster who is mute (or maybe just shy). The character backgrounds are very broad strokes, so there is plenty of space to flesh them out in play. A specific mechanism that allows players to re-roll dice actually encourages flashing back to previous missions, sometimes shared with other characters. Its a neat way to build relationships amongst the heat of battle.
The play of the game centres on visiting various locations, over 3 sectors as you advance towards the final confrontation at the top of the Eiffel tower. Where else was it going to be? Each location is packed with threats, opportunities, and loot to make your mission go with a bang. You could probably just run this straight from the book as it is pretty well laid out to facilitate that. I personally did a bit of leg work to make things run smoothly. You can find that on my RPG resources page.
Threats could be anything from a sniper team to a tank. Opportunities are the focus of a location and once achieved the team can move onto the next. This could be as simple as ‘get through the museum’ or as fun as ‘disrupt the garden party’. Regardless of their description, both opportunities and threats are a track to be ticked down. This is called the Challenge of the Threat or Opportunity.
When a player character acts, they roll a pool of d6 from skills, equipment, and abilities. The GM rolls a pool of dice as well, representing the threats, who have an attack rating, that the team is engaging with. Rolls of 1-3 are removed, then the player gets spending successes; 4-5 is 1 success, 6 is 2 successes. For the GM 4-6 is 1 success so the players get a slight advantage from the off.
Successes can be spent in a variety of ways: to reduce the challenge of threats and opportunities, gain blood that powers abilities, activates specials, or take away some of the GMs successes. The GMs remaining dice pool at the end of this is the damage the character will take. The vampires can of course take a pounding, but 3 damage at once will get you downed and out of the scene temporarily. It’s a pretty zippy system that lends itself to going around the table in an almost board game style manner. Action is described, pools are formed, dice are rolled, and consequences applied. All neat and quick.
However, at times it can feel a little like you are waiting for the players to roll well enough to be able to move onto the next location. There are a few factors that make this the case.
You start with 0 blood, the resource that lets you power your abilities. This means that successes have to be spent in order to gain blood. A result 4-5 gets you 1, 6 gets you 2. That means you are not spending those dice on getting rid of threats and opportunities that would actually move the story forward.
When most threats are reduced to zero challenge they get reinforced at the end of the turn. They come back with d6 worth of challenge and an increase in attack power. This is a good way of saying to the players ‘don’t hang around’. However they also get stronger if you roll 0 successes in a turn which seems like an unnecessary cloud to a silver lining for the players. It makes things just that little bit harder, and more dice for the GM means more to defend against.
Although the vampires can take some damage, it felt to us like they were still vulnerable. You have 3 columns for damage, with 2 rows in each. If the GM has any dice left you take a damage in a random column. If they have 3 dice left you take the whole column in damage and are downed, leaving you needin rescued by another player. The first damage in a column is narrative only, but the second sees you taking some sort of mechanical disadvantage. This leads to players fearing too much damage and spending successes batting away the dice of the GM. The result of this is that you get some rounds where the players are batting away damage rather than getting on with the mission. That makes the pace drag in a game that is all about getting to the finish line.
Now the Vampires do have Specials to call on to help them out. These can only be used if a 6 is spent. That’s two successes so these Specials better be worth it. Unfortunately some don’t feel like they are. Nicole’s Sapper Ability reduces a threat or objectives challenge by 1, but spending a 6 on those would reduce them by 2. There are some that reduce the attack rating by 1, but it feels like it is better to just go at them if you have the dice to do so.
It has been brought to my attention that I called this wrong. Nicole’s Sapper ability reduces Challenge and does not eliminate Threat or advance an Objective. I’ve kept the criticsm in with this addendum. Mea Culpa.
The blood resource can be used to heal, for 3 blood, or power abilities that are all over your sheet. As I’ve already mentioned you start with 0 blood, the justification being you absorbed all the blood from your special coffin to reconstitute yourself on landing. You have to take time out from getting things done, to getting blood. It feels stingy, and again meant that the pace of the game was slowed as players spent rounds gaining blood instead of doing things with it.
You can of course work round these issues, or they may not be issues to you. One of the hard things about reviewing RPGs is that you get people saying ‘well I would just change that on the fly to this’ or ‘well you can homebrew that’. As someone trying to cast a hard critical eye on the form, I have to try and play as close to the rules as presented as possible. I try to run it as the designer intended, to get a feel for what they wanted to say, the stories they want groups to tell. It is why at the top of these pieces I have started contextualising my play experience with each game. My hope is that it helps you understand where my criticism is coming from and frames the culture of play at my table, one that will inevitably be different from yours.
Eat the Reich is a playground of ultra-violence and action that brings to mind Splatterhouse style of film making and b-movie schlock. I mean that as a compliment. The game has loads of great hooks for the GM with every location being filled with potential. The bosses, the Ubermensch, that you come across provide a good change in difficulty, a chance for the players to gain new abilities, and for the GM to twirl a moustache or two.
Despite my criticisms I still think Eat the Reich is a good attempt at a one shot focused game. It is a beautiful production with rules that are well explained, and a premise that is an absolute banger. The system doesn’t quite stand up to intense scrutiny, and if this was intended to be played in a longer running campaign those niggles might cause more problems.
Eat the Reich presents you with a pulp, ultra-violent Nazi takeover of Paris and tells you to sort it out. I can’t deny that I enjoyed running it and my players had a blast. How could you not when you drop kick Hitler off an airship then explode his corpse mid-air like a firework.
I borrowed Eat the Reich from a friend who backed the Kickstarter. Some of the links in this piece are affiliate links to Drivethrurpg. You can find the prep I did for the game here, hope you find it useful.
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