BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER BOARD GAME

Product Information

It’s a shame because a lot of Buffy is done relatively well. The plot related systems are interesting. They’re also filled with a kind of unreached potential because you spend so much time searching and tidying up that you never really get to enjoy the unfolding narrative. It doesn’t build up to a climax – the punctuated frustration of advancement just has the effect of stretching out the excitement so that it’s a thin, unsatisfying gruel. As cooperative games go, Buffy is fairly simple and light. This is more of a beer and pretzels game, best played for the experience. It’s not a heavy, deep, Robinson Crusoe or Mage Knight type of game. Complexity wise, I’d put it in the same category as Pandemic or Flash Point: Fire Rescue, or some “experience” semi-co-op games like Betrayal at House on the Hill or Transylvania: Curses and Traitors. There are some decisions to be made, but a lot of what happens to you in the game is determined by random card draws and unpredictable events. Skillful play can mitigate these things to an extent, but there are games where you just get hosed by fate. The event cards. Where bad things happen. If players cannot physically manipulate the board, it supports easy verbalisation. The movement of non-player characters is algorithmic with only a few opportunities to change it. One of those for example is the Hellmouth where a player can move a baddie into an adjacent location. In those circumstances an indication will need to be made as to which baddie and which location. Cards make heavy use of icons and text. The board uses art and text. The standees are differentiated primarily by the characters, and each of the different tokens is adorned with descriptions.

Gameplay in Buffy is very similar to many familiar cooperative titles including Pandemic, Eldritch Horror, Forbidden Desert, or Flashpoint: Fire Rescue. If you’ve played any of these (or most other major co-op games), you’ll instantly recognize many familiar mechanisms and ideas.

The Buffy board game wasn’t much of a hit with us here at Meeple Like Us. All in all we’d rather just watch the DVDs, really. The game had a couple of major problems. The inconsistent design that liberally mixed heavy randomness with algorithmic optimisation undercut its effectiveness as a strategic experience. The theme seemed more like it was aimed at devotees of the Buffy wiki more than anyone else. That meant that it didn’t really hit the mark as a piece of fan service either. It’s a shame – it’s one of the few games about which Mrs Meeple was actually enthusiastic enough to make a special request. I would have liked it to have been better. Two stars in our review. If you were more focused on progressing the quest your attention might not linger on the core game mechanisms. One of the reasons XCOM succeeds as a game is that it doesn’t give you a lot of time to dwell on what’s actually happening. It manages to be fun through an act of misdirected attention. Don’t look at what I’m doing with my left hand, follow the right hand. Buffy doesn’t accomplish that though – it seems perversely determined to make sure you understand its fractured gameplay. It clamps your eyes open and forces you to observe until you understand. A kind of ludicovico technique. Buffy is a challenging game and will become more challenging as time goes on, but the challenge curve is linear. It gets gradually harder rather than rapidly escalating to a point of unfixable horror like you see in Pandemic. I’m not 100% convinced that’s a more emotionally accessible design – I think it probably comes down to individual preferences. Would you rather be instantly killed by a tiger bite or slowly asphyxiated by a python? If Pandemic is the former, Buffy is the latter. It makes the challenge more tractable but at the cost of potentially putting you in the position where you have failed a few turns before you realise it. In the Buffy episode, “End of Days,” Spike says, “We’ll go be heroes,” as they head off to defeat Caleb. That line should have been the tagline for Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Board Game because you (the players) are off to save the town of Sunnydale from the Monsters of the Week and Big Bads. As a member of the Scooby gang, you’ll fight to slay the baddies before they kill all the townies (or you)!

As is often the case in co-op games you all win together or you all lose together. The cause of success and failure in Buffy is hard to pinpoint because when things are bad it’s because the group as a whole let them get bad. That means nobody can point to a particular player and, fairly, say ‘this is all your fault’. That’s great.

For those familiar with Eldritch Horror, one look at the board will have you making direct comparisons between the two. The design of the Sunnydale board bears a lot of similarity to Eldritch’s board. Eldritch is by far the heavier (and longer) of the two. Buffy feels a bit like “Eldritch lite,” though. You’re moving from location to location, resolving events, and dealing with baddies. Both are good games but given a choice, I’ll take Buffy due to the theme, lower complexity, and shorter play time. Just be aware that, despite the looks, Buffy and Eldritch are two very different beasts. So I did own the game, and I did use the board, cards and pieces, cuz the version we got in Europe wasn't as good as the US one!

Throughout the game, you’ll also be able to collect items and artifacts to boost your skills and help you fight. Events will pop up that direct you to place more vampires and demons on the board, as well as causing detrimental effects to the heroes. Every time you think you’re making headway, you’ll face some new peril that threatens to undermine your heroic efforts. As such, when Mrs Meeple sees a game and says ‘Buy that one’ I take it seriously. That’s why we ended up with a copy of the Buffy board game during our last visit to the UK Games Expo. Those who aren’t fans of the show have a harder time. First, since they don’t know the lore, it’s harder to get into the game. There’s a lot of, “Wait, who is this person?”“What does this mean?” and “Why is this important?” questioning that goes on. Also, non-fans seem less tolerant of the game’s breezy play style. They seem to expect something deeper, more challenging, and thinkier and are often (in my experience, anyway) disappointed with Buffy. Here’s the basic gist of play. You take on the role of one of the Extended Family of Scoobies. You can be Buffy, Xander, Giles or Willow as you would expect. You can also choose to be Angel or Spike if you like. Each player gets a limited pool of actions they can perform each turn. Each draws from a shared menu of abilities, but also a special Super Ability that is unique to them. Each character will also have a couple of inventory cards representing consumables. Wooden stakes, weapons, magic supplies and so on. Each of these will have some combination of additional actions they permit while you have them. They will also provide a bespoke special powers that activates if they’re discarded. If you have a wooden stake in your inventory for example you’ll kill vampires you fight rather than stun them. If you discard the stake, you’ll kill the vampire without spending one of your precious action points. Different locations in the game have different power that you can access, which makes it seem like there’s an extent to which you need to defend and optimise your control of areas to accomplish the tasks. It’s a solid pitch. We’ll recommend Buffy in this category – if Pandemic was a bit too cruel for your liking you might find Buffy a more appropriate alternative. Physical Accessibility

We can start off with good news here. Nothing in the game uses colour as its primary channel of information. I don’t even know any more. I would have once said that Buffy was a wonderful example of the re-appropriation of a misogynist trope – that it’s great to see a scenario where the pretty girl is the one rescuing everyone else. But Joss Whedon has revealed a lot of his true nature over the past few years and it’s correspondingly difficult to be too enthusiastic about the authenticity of the feminism reflected in his work. This part is best left up to the views of each individual reader.