BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER BOARD GAME

Product Information

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. Then the next round starts again with the action phase; this makes for a fast-paced game, where it could easily have been bogged down in itself. Buffy and the gang can almost, just about, come really close to killing all regular monsters on the map. I would likely have been toast, but another player, playing Willow, used the Spell of Good Summoning to bring me all the way across the board to Sunnydale High.

It’s no more aggravating in theory than rolling a dice, but you can’t mask the fact that this brings a massive dose of ‘Lol, draw better cards’ into the design space of play and it’s incompatible with how the rest of the game plays. Each player takes one action at a time, resulting in very little down time for each, again adding to the great pace of the game where it feels like there is always something happening.Of course, at times it is very obvious what needs to be done, but there are times when the fast-paced game slows because the players are looking at the board and trying to puzzle out the way forwards with all the options available.

I really like the way that The Bronze uses indoor and outdoor spaces along with a catwalk inside the club, which gives the advantage to ranged fighters.The Big Bads have somewhat themed plot cards and events but these aren't as strong as they could be and take a little digging to get to. I found myself wanting to pause the gameplay to check out all the cards (which is possibly not ideal in terms of pacing). Despite great artwork (art was used over stills from the show, but it’s slo close to the real thing that there’s not much difference), much of the theme and the immersion in the game comes from players filling in the blanks. So, I approached the Buffy version of the Legendary deck-building series with a fair amount of positive bias.

Reading a special ability of one of the Big Bads might not lend itself to you knowing who it actually is, which makes each of them seem a little generic, though a few have hints of theme, for example the master has lots of Vampire related abilities and Adam has kill demons and townie abilities. The game with my wife ended in victory when Giles tossed the necessary tools to Buffy who won the third and final confrontation with the big bad just before the monster swarm devoured enough townies to trigger the hell-mouth. You’ll notice from even the front of the box that the set goes with a more sketched, comic book aesthetic than the other Unmatched sets. If the Mayor gets ahold of it, he transforms into The Demon Mayor and starts kicking all sorts of tail. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game looks nice, the original artwork is great but there is not enough of it, all the vampire tokens are the same vampire, all the demon tokens are the same demon.The starting spots of all the characters is indicated on the board, such as Buffy and Faith starting in the graveyward and Oz in The Bronze.