Build your village and protect it from the surrounding creatures!
What Is Vampire Village?
Vampire Village is a card-drafting game for 1 to 5 players, ages 10 and up, and takes about 20 minutes to play. It retails for $24.99 and is available now in stores or from Hachette Boardgames USA. Although the illustrations are a little grotesque, the gameplay isn’t too difficult to learn, so as long as your kids don’t mind some monster mayhem, they should be able to play this one.
Vampire Village was designed by Maxine Rambourg and published by Studio H, with illustrations by Jérôme Lereculey. It is distributed in the US by Hachette Boardgames USA, who provided me with a review copy.
Vampire Village Components
Here’s what comes in the box:
- 5 Starting Village cards
- 30 Round 1 Village cards
- 30 Round 2 Village cards
- 30 Round 1 Creature cards
- 30 Round 2 Creature cards
- 4 Attack Order tokens
- 125 Villager/Threat tokens (100 1-value, 25 3-value)
The village cards are square so that you can make a grid of them, with the illustrations made so that everything makes a connected picture once they’re laid out. Most are buildings: each one has a highlighted building in the center, and the color of the roof also corresponds to the type of defense it provides: green to the left, blue at the top, and red to the right. (Yellow buildings provide defense in all three directions.) The building cards also have a section at the bottom indicating how many townsfolk are added when the building is placed.
A few of the village cards depict heroes—most of these also show shields indicating defense, and they may also have a movement icon with a number at the bottom. One nice touch: the backs of the cards are marked with a I or II showing the round, and the village cards also have a little arrow to remind you which direction to pass cards.
Creature cards come in four types: vampires (of course), witches, werewolves, and demons. They are color-coded to match the defense icons: green witches, blue werewolves, and red vampires; demons have global effects and do not attack from a specific direction. These are creepy, monstrous vampires—definitely not your shiny attractive vampires, and the demons are pretty gruesome as well.
The villager tokens come in two sizes, values 1 and 3. One side of the tokens has the number, and the other depicts the villagers: there are four different faces, and the 3-value tokens just have a random assortment of three of them.
The attack order tokens for the creatures are chevrons that fit together to make a line; the demon token has a bump in the center as a reminder that it is always first, because the other tokens won’t fit against it in that direction.
How to Play Vampire Village
You can download a copy of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is score the most points by keeping villagers alive and having creatures held at bay outside your village.
Setup
Give each player a starting building with 2 villager tokens on it.
Shuffle each of the decks separately, and make a supply of villager tokens. Place the demon attack order token first, and then randomize the rest of them to form a line. This is the order that the creatures will activate each round.
Gameplay
The game is played over the course of two rounds. During each round, players will draft buildings, then draft creatures, and then resolve attacks.
Deal 6 building cards to each player for the current round.
Everyone chooses a building card from their hand, then passes the rest of their hand (to the left in Round 1, and to the right in Round 2). Once everyone is ready, everyone reveals their building card and adds it to their town.
At the bottom of the building card, there’s an icon showing how many villagers to add to your new building: it is usually based on how many you have of a particular building type in your town, or possibly how many buildings are in the same row or column where you’ve placed it. In Round 2, there are also some buildings that will give you villagers based on the number of heroes in your town.
If you place a hero, you may move villagers: you get total movement points shown at the bottom of the hero card, and you may spend them on villagers that are adjacent to the hero, moving 1 villager 1 card per movement point. (Villagers may move onto other buildings or onto hero cards.)
Continue choosing and placing buildings until everyone has added 6 buildings to their town. Note that your village must fit in a 4×4 grid (a rule I know I’ve missed!).
Next, you’ll draft creatures. Deal 3 creature cards to each player. Everyone chooses one card to keep for themselves, one to pass to the right, and one to pass to the left. Reveal the cards once everyone has passed cards, and place them at the corresponding sides of your town: witches to the left, werewolves at top, vampires to the right, and demons below.
Repeat this process once, so that everyone will end up with 6 new creatures per round.
Now, resolve the attacks.
Each demon can be resolved by discarding a hero from your town; some of the demons have other effects, in which case you can choose which one to use, but you must choose an ability that affects you if possible. Demons may remove 1 villager from each yellow roof, remove a building card with the fewest villagers, or force you to take a creature from the player to your right.
Each of the other three creatures has its own ways of determining strength. Vampires are the simplest: they are valued from 1 to 6. Werewolves come in two colors, black and white: each one has a strength equal to the number of that color that you have. Some witches are worth 2 strength, and some are worth 1 per witch that your neighbor has; these witches have an arrow to indicate which neighbor. Calculate all of the creature strengths and mark them with the strength tokens.
In the attack order indicated by the tokens, activate the creatures.
Add up the total strength of that creature type, and compare it to your village’s defense, which is the shields facing those creatures, but only in the row or column closest to the creature. (Shields that are facing the creature but are in a further row or column are not included.) If your defense meets or exceeds the total creature strength, you’re safe! Leave the creatures there.
If your defense is lower, then the creatures have broken through. Choose a building in that row/column to discard (along with any villagers on it), and then discard the weakest creatures in the group. (That creatures got through and destroyed a building and then left.) Then, check your total defense and creatures strength again. Repeat until you’re safe or all the creatures have been discarded.
Some hero cards have expertise against particular creatures—while these don’t add to your defense value for that creature, if you discard a hero to remove a creature, you may remove a creature of your choice rather than just the weakest one.
Resolve attacks for all of the creatures.
If that was the first round, leave the remaining creatures next to your villages, and then repeat for Round 2.
Game End
The game ends after two rounds. You get 1 point for each surviving villager, and 1 point for each creature remaining next to your town. Highest score wins, with ties going to the player with the most village cards left.
Solo Mode
The solo mode simulates a 3-player game, but you’re the only one building a village. You’ll make three “hands” of village cards, randomly removing cards from them after you draft to simulate other players taking cards from those hands.
During the creature phase, you still draw 3 creature cards, keeping one and passing the others to the left and right, but your right and left neighbors will just have a stack of creatures mostly to track things like witch powers and demons that would move creatures around. You’ll randomly draw 2 cards from the deck to add to each player’s creatures, so that after doing this twice everyone has 6 creatures.
During the attack phase, set aside villagers that have been eliminated—these will be the Creatures’ Feast points. Demons in the other player stacks do not activate, just your own. When you eliminate a building card from an attack, it must be the building in that row/column with the most villagers in it.
At the end of the game, compare your total villagers with the Creatures’ Feast (and do not count remaining creatures!). If you have more villagers than the Feast, you win!
There’s also a variant for the solo mode where you keep playing multiple rounds, and each round you draw 1 more creature than the last round, and see how many rounds you can survive with at least one villager remaining.
Why You Should Play Vampire Village
Vampire Village is an excellent game to break out for October—vampires and witches and werewolves and demons, oh my! According to the rulebook, the story is that we are all building fortified villages, trying to protect our villagers from monsters (and maybe trying to redirect some monsters to your neighbors!). Inevitably, some of them break through and eat some villagers and destroy our buildings, but then we try to rebuild and hold the line. But because you score points for creatures that remain surrounding your village at the end of the game, I like to tell myself that these villagers are thrill-seekers: sure, surviving is nice, but what really makes it worth living in this village is seeing those monsters outside who can’t quite get past your defenses.
The gameplay is fairly simple—a standard “choose one, pass the rest” draft for the village cards, and then the “keep 1, pass 1 left, pass 1 right” draft for the creatures. The only more complicated part of the rules is calculating the monster attacks, and understanding how to plan strategically based on the order that monsters will attack.
Generally, you want to make sure you have a bit of defense on the three sides of your village, but the order matters a lot! If I have a witch-hunter hero at the top of my village, the hero might die from a werewolf attack before getting a chance to deal with a witch. It’s also worth figuring out which buildings you’re going to sacrifice to attacks, and trying to use heroes to move the villagers away before that happens.
Of course, you know what they say about the best-laid plans: if you build up a really strong defense against witches but leave your right side defenseless, your neighbors are sure to pass a bunch of vampires to you. Werewolves are weak individually, but it doesn’t take many of them to form a powerful pack: I once ended up with 4 of the same color werewolf, which is a whopping 16 strength, likely to cut through at least 3 village cards before I have enough defense to stop them. The witches can also pile up quickly, because of the ones whose strength is based on your neighbor’s witches. If your neighbor has a lot of those type of witches, you can set yourself up with a few witches just to boost the attack power of the others.
This is game of brutal losses, and you have to be okay with that. I’ve managed to score fairly well in some games, but there was one time where my village was cut down to a single building with a single villager in it—and no more creatures outside. That villager wasn’t too happy, I bet, but I had a fun time playing the game anyway. You also need to be okay with attacking—and being attacked by—your neighbors. Look, I’m sorry, but I just can’t take any more werewolves, so I’m passing this one to you. It’s not personal, it’s just survival.
With just two rounds of building and attacks, the game is fairly quick once you’re familiar with the rules, and since the gameplay is simultaneous and you’re really only affected by the players directly next to you, adding more players doesn’t add much length to the game either. It’s a clever little game with a monstrous theme—if you like games that are a bit of a puzzle, plan a trip to Vampire Village!
Visit the Hachette Boardgames USA website for more info or to order a copy.
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
