Summary
A game for 2 – 4 players
Play time is 30 to 70 minutes
Publisher is Renegade Games
Introduction
When the sun sets, the undead awaken. To slake their Hunger, they feed upon the herd of unaware mortals in Vampire: The Masquerade Rivals Expandable Card Game.
Let’s get it on the table
Vampire: The Masquerade Rivals Expandable Card Game is a card game in which you control a clan of vampires. This box contains the city of San Francisco and in it you battle to gain control. There are 5 expansions, we will place everything in this review and update it with the different expansions. First we start with the starter deck and a short introduction including a small how to play.
By dominating mortals, using your influence and fighting in the dark of the night on the streets with their rivals. Gather your allies and compete against one or more players.
Each player plays with a Clan from Vampire: The Masquerade.
Your turn has the following phases:
Beginning Phase; Burn Ongoing Events with token(s) of your color on them. Then A new street challenge or objective is revealed at the beginning of each player’s turn.
Now the start of turn effects happen, remove “No influence” tokens from your vampires and ready all the cards you control. Return your vampires back to your haven.
Action Phase;
Each player has two actions during their turn, you can perform the following actions:
-draw a card from your deck or clan deck
-play a card (for example an action scheme card or an Influence card)
-recruit a vampire
-claim a title
-attack! (you can attack another player or the Inquisition/ Mortal cards in the streets)
End Phase;
1. Torpor and Mending; Put 1 blood from the supply on each of your vampires in torpor. Then choose any number of vampires you control and you may discard 1 card for each chosen vampire to mend 1 blood on that vampire (also from the general supply).
2. “End of turn effects” happen now
3. Antagonists (cards like S.A.D.) now do you harm
4. Draw 2 cards to end your turn, you can choose from the Library of Faction Deck.
The other clans will fight against you for dominance in the streets or in the harbor.
Defeat your rival or collect 13 Agenda Points to win the game and claim domination of San Francisco.
In this starter deck you receive 4 different Clans, they are already prepared to start the game. When you’re ready and played a couple games, you can use the other cards and create your own deck. Also you receive a City Deck, we’re going to play in San Francisco. There are 2 different Cities at the moment, San Francisco and the city of Prague where vampires fight for control in the heart of Europe.
The Different Clans are (see pictures above):
Brujah
Toreador
Ventrue
Malkavian
With the basegame and with the different expansions you got a lot of different cards like extra cards for creating your Vampire Deck but also a lot of new starter Decks, Agenda’s and Haven cards.
For every game you need a Haven and an Agenda, in the base game you already receive a couple of different of these cards so you don’t have to play the same card with each game but when you got the entire collection you really have a lot to choose from.
A game of Vampire: The Masquerade Rivals Expandable Card Game can end in 3 different ways:
– When you’re the first player to reach 13 Agenda Points
– When you knock out your Rival (all the Vampires of your opponent are in their Torpor)
– When you have the most Agenda Points when a foe gets knocked out. A foe is knocked out when their Prestige has been dropped to 0 when the last active vampire has been defeated. A foe is another player than your Rival!
Creating your own Deck
This is an expandable cardgame and it’s allowed to create your own deck. But please just play it a couple of times and then maybe a few more and then you can start building up your own deck.
When you want to modify or build your own deck you have to follow these rules:
– Your Faction Deck may not include any duplicate vampires and must contain exactly 7 cards. But you can combine vampires from different clans.
– Your Library may not include more than 3 copies of each card
– Your Library must contain a minimum of 40 cards and a maximum of 60
– Agenda and Haven cards are not clan specific you can use any combination
When you start playing, you all turn the Agenda and Haven cards at the same time.
You can use the same Vampire in 1 deck but can’t play them at the same time. Only when one of them is in torpor you can play them with the recruit action but the other vampire in torpor will then be burned.
Well we recommend to create your own deck to have more fun playing this wonderful game!
Conclusion & final score
Difficulty: 3.35/ 5
Re-playability: 7
Our score: 8 out of 10 dice
What a great card game this is! The game does like quite a few rules and in the beginning we always had to look something up so the games took a little longer. We really didn’t mind this because it felt right away that this is an interesting game. The rules are well explained but contain a lot of text and not enough examples/pictures. The game itself contains really cool and interesting artwork.
The actions are clear and you can plan a bit during the game but not too much in advance. After all, you never know what will be placed face up on the table, also you really depend on the actions your opponent does but determining the challenge or goal cards on the table can be really decisive at times. There will be cards on the table that are bad for both you and your opponent(s) and you will have to decide for yourself whether you want to risk it or not and try to attack this card or do you opt for another action?
You have 2 actions during your turn but in these you can do quite a lot but make sure that you start collecting points and those 13 can sometimes be quite tricky. You really have to attack to get them or it will be hard for your clan to claim control of San Francisco. You have in your clan a good variety of attack, action cards etc., reaction cards comparatively a little less but that is well compensated by the other cards. During the game you will also have to pay close attention to your blood tokens, as soon as you cannot replenish them from your personal supply you immediately lose the game.
The game has a high replayability. You already have 4 clans and 1 city in the box, but the cards of the clans can also be exchanged by additional cards in the box. If you want more variety there are currently 5 expansions including a new city in Europe.
Vampire: The Masquerade Rivals Expandable Card Game is a game for 2 to 4 players. We only played it with 2 players and found it to be a lot of fun. The game seems to be even better with 4 players. What is nicely done in this is that in the beginning you do not know who your opponent is, that is determined by 4 chips. But during the game you can also make sure that you can set up a cooperation, temporary or otherwise, to beat your opponent.
Thanks to Renegade Games for this review copy and the opportunity to write about it.
