BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER BOARD GAME

Product Information

If you discard the stake, you’ll kill the vampire without spending one of your precious action points.

To defeat the Big Bad, the players must face down a series of “Monster of the Week” enemies, and in turn gather clues. This is quick, and the challenge is getting weapons to do it, or using other special items or abilities. If you’ve played any of these (or most other major co-op games), you’ll instantly recognize many familiar mechanisms and ideas.Spike and his sidekick Drusilla use cards quicker than most fighters, but the attacks can be devastating. The game progresses with players first defeating the Monsters of the Week and then moving on to the final battle against the Big Bad. One of my favorite things about getting a new set is to look through each of the cards and see the beautiful artwork. I found myself wanting to pause the gameplay to check out all the cards (which is possibly not ideal in terms of pacing). Other artifacts include the Gem of Amara, which allows vampires free reign in the sunlight, the Glove of Myhneghon, which causes you damage when used, but also boosts the damage done based off of your Majik.

The event cards are, again, very generic and lack a deep sense of theme - one card restricts movement to a certain number of spaces without much of an explanation as to why, others stop the special abilities of locations again without explanation or thematic description. At the end of the round, all those baddies will converge on the civilians and if one of your gang isn’t there to prevent it, the death will get registered on the apocalypse tracker that is counting down to the end of the world. Well, the experience of facing the demons and vampires is quick and almost a little sideline to the game; facing the monsters of the week and then finally the Big Bad on top of that makes this game feel like your own mini-series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and who doesn't want to feel like that?Meaning it will explain a card in great detail, and then a few pages on it will explain how to use that card. Added to this is that at times the game presents a puzzle to be solved, such as which baddies to fight and which townies to protect and save, as well as who can fight the monster of the week or the Big Bad, where the players bring their heads together to try and solve it, good for player interaction in a co-op game and good for people who like puzzles but the sudden halt can be jarring and can create a stop-start feel to the game.