V:TES On V:TES Night

Mike had been agitating for our V:TES group to actually play some V:TES on V:TES night, which seemed like a reasonable request, so we capitulated. While we were arranging seating, Max asked if anyone had a six-sided die that he could borrow. I thought that was odd, since Max is one of our newer players, and I didn't think he owned six different decks from which he'd want to choose randomly.

Game One - Crazy Go Nuts University
me (Art of Memory stealth/bleed) -> Mike (aus/dem/obf stealth/bleed) -> Max (aus/dom/obf stealth/bleed) -> Tony (the weirdest Ravnos) -> Ben (Kiasyd toolbox)

Three decks featuring Malks and Malk antis! Five decks capable of generating non-trivial bleeds at stealth, four of which also featured bleed bounce! Almost zero combat or intercept! I felt like I'd been taking crazy pills. It was particularly strange to be the only deck at the table which couldn't redirect bleeds, given how much I love the wu wei involved in that particular jujitsu trick, and how often the other people in my playgroup don't play with bounce.

I started the game with three Effective Managements in my hand, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing, since the deck I was playing has some definite crypt issues. After playing the first one, I had all three of the vampires I cared about in my uncontrolled region, so I just discarded the others. Mike brought out some aus/obf nerds and Max brought out J. Ozzy White, explaining his need for a die. Tony brought out Gwen Brand, Ben put Isanwayen into play, I influenced out Hagar Stone, and we were all ready to get the bleedfest started.

Tony's deck was noteworthy for how confusing it was for us to figure out what it was, exactly. First he brought out Gwen Brand, who attempted to put a Nightmare Curse on one of Ben's elves. This led me to think that Tony was trying out the new Ravnos with Auspex, but I was thrown off the scent when he later played a Dominate skillcard on Vassily Taltos. Some time after that, he discarded a Magic of the Smith, reducing me yet again to a state of bewilderment. In terms of its functioning, it operated like most other stealth/bleed decks, with the Dominate giving it access to bounce and somewhat more bleed punch than the Ravnos can usually generate. But surely there was more at work here?

The game proceeded as you might expect, with a lot of stealthy bleeds getting tossed around the table. I managed to nullify a few of the redirections and reductions with Hide the Minds and Touches of Clarity, recycled via Arts of Memory. Ben bled into me fairly hard, depleting four to six of my pool each turn, much to Tony's consternation. I went the eco-friendly route and recycled all of my Reunion Kamuts, and then used Villeins to move the blood on those discounted vampires into my pool, which allowed me to stay a step ahead of Ben's bleeds while I chipped away at Mike's pool.

At about the same time that Tony put Week of Nightmares into play and my pool was starting to get low enough for me to be concerned, Matt (who'd been waiting in the other room for someone to be ousted so that he and some others could start a new game) wandered in and said, "Hey, Ben, are you playing a starter? Yeah, let's see, all your cards have the same expansion symbol on them, and that just happens to be the same expansion that had the starter for this clan. You playing a starter?" My worries that Ben might oust me via expedient use of Tony's bleeds were gently lifted from me, as the cool breeze clears the fog after a heavy rain.

Max transferred out a surprise late-game Helena just before I ousted Mike, and as expected, Ben folded shortly thereafter. Max laid into the six pool Tony had just earned, putting him near ousting just before I took out Max. Tony got in one more turn of heavy bleeding and sewed up Hagar's face, but all for nought as I snuck past him to grab the last two VPs.

After the game was over, Tony revealed that he hadn't been playing a Ravnos deck at all, but an Aidan Lyle deck, which suddenly made the game we'd just played make a whole lot more sense. Oh, perfidious Chimerstry! It had fooled me into perceiving Tony's dashed hopes as a group of Ravnos. Truly, Sigfried and Roy would've been proud of these masters of illusion. Using Aidan and Ankara Citadel to put out a bunch of cheap Sense Deps and Nightmare Curses is actually a pretty great idea, and hopefully Tony will get it working with a little more reliability.

I told Tony and Max about the insight my deck's godfather, Darby Keeney, had revealed to me when I'd asked him about it. The deck looks less sleazy than vanilla stealth/bleed, because it's doing extra tricks and has more cogs in the machine than just Govern/stealth/Conditioning, but it's actually more sleazy because it's so much less reliant on lucking into good matchups. Tony agreed that it's as sleazy as a used-car salesman, so we talked about putting a copy of Well-Aimed Car into my deck, as the deck does have a smattering of incidental maneuvers and presses, and a third of the crypt happens to have Potence as well. While waiting for the other game to finish up, we killed some time marvelling at the high prices of boardgame expansions and lamenting the twin sadnesses called Potence and Celerity. Eventually, the other guys completed their chapter in the Grand Jyhad and we re-convened for another game.

Game Two - Sticking Rocks In the Meat Grinder
me (Harbingers blood denial) -> Ben (Gargoyles) -> Tony (Nosferatu fightin' royalty) -> Max (aus/dom/obf stealth/bleed) -> Matt (Gargoyle Laboratory)

Ah, this was more like it. Whatever conditions had caused the weird dimensional warp which had landed me in what appeared to be a French tournament metagame were apparently dissipated by this point, so there was plenty of combat to be had. Being squashed between the two gargoyle decks made me very happy that I'd chosen to play a deck packing S:CE on top of both permanent and transient damage prevention.

Ben brought out some new school Gargoyles, Tony brought out Cock Robin, Max brought out William Biltmore and J. Ozzy White, and Matt brought out Erinyi and a bunch of Tremere. I had Solomon Batanea and Babalawo in play just in time to block Matt's first Create Gargoyle action, so he switched focus to building up Erinyi instead. She got a Dominate skillcard and was twice Experimented upon with great Biothaumaturgicality. Since she wasn't a slave, though, I could safely block the bleeds of the Tremere and just bounce hers to Ben.

Ben and Tony got into a couple of tussles, which inevitably ended badly for Tony, in spite of his Preternatural Cock Strength. Ben taught us all a valuable lesson in how you can play a combat deck, sit next to another combat deck, and not automatically self-destruct, and the theme of that lesson was Damage Prevention. This was a lesson I've already learned, so I managed to keep all of my vampires out of torpor in spite of being surrounded by a bunch of strength increasers, Razor Bats, Lead Fists and a whole shedful of Raking Talons.

I got Mordechai into play and managed to make him a laibon for the first time ever. He also got Well-Marked during the same turn. That's about it for how extensively my actions affected the table; I did some building up and messing around with my vampires, but didn't impact anyone sitting next to me very much. In spite of the fact that I've never gotten anything short of a game win when I've played this deck, almost every time I play it, there's a period during which I feel like I'm out of sync with the rest of the table, which is moving more quickly than I am. This always fills me with worry. As an example of how the rest of the table was doing stuff while I fiddled and futzed, Matt spent himself pretty low by bringing out more vampires, so Max did the obvious thing and ousted him. That was fine with me. Since my Harbingers have a lot of bleed bounce, I didn't mind one or two girthy bleeds at stealth coming at me every turn.

I put an Antediluvian Awakening (a card I've recently fallen in love with) into play, which finally made me feel like I was generating some forward motion. Ben chewed through all of Tony's vampires and finally managed to land an ousting bleed, but he'd spent so much blood doing so that most of his vampires had to hunt. Morechai had successfully completed Operation Dumbo Drop by this point, and he was able to block those hunts and introduce Ben's minions to Mr. Stampy. My Ossian also hit a few of Ben's guys with a hearty GRRR before one of them fought back and crippled him, but he'd done his job and Ben's ready region was a shambles. I re-gifted Ben with several of the bleeds that Max gave me, and then managed to squeak one through myself to oust him.

Max was apparently low on stealth, as I managed to catch two of his vampires who attempted to bleed me and smacked them around a little bit. I had also finally drawn into a Lazerene Inquisitor and began stripping blood from his guys. Max decided that his chances of climbing over the top of my intercept before I could take his vampires down weren't reasonable and decided to concede.

Maabaara was once again my MVP card. I had assumed it was garbage before I threw it into this deck, and I'd only done that because the deck used to have one copy of each of the Harbinger clan cards in it. It's proven itself to be highly valuable every time I've drawn it, even in spite of the fact that I usually use it in a boneheaded fashion to retrieve master cards, which is much less efficient than using it to recur minion cards. (As further proof of how smart I am, it happened on three separate occasions during this game that I put a card on top of my library and then was amazed two minutes later that I'd happened to draw the exact card that I needed, before remembering that said draw wasn't such a miracle after all.) This deck needs a fairly significant overhaul, as the abundance of laibon tech isn't working out as well as I'd like for the amount of effort I put into shoehorning it in, and I'm seriously considering adding a second copy of Maabaara and a couple of Parthenons to maximize my use of it.

Who Let the Bridge Troll In Here?

Here's the deck which I played at our V:TES storyline tournament.

"I've Got a Key In My Pocket"
Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 5 max: 8 average: 6.75
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3x The Arcadian (DOM MYT OBT, 8)
1x Pherydima (DOM MYT obt, 8)
2x Omme Enberbenight (dom MYT OBT, 7)
1x Roderick Phillips (DOM MYT obt, 7)
3x Isanwayen (DOM MYT OBT, 6)
2x Dame Hollerton (DOM myt OBT, 5)

This crypt is built for MYT/OBT, a discipline combination that was difficult to obtain before Heirs was printed. Specifically, Arms of the Abyss/Earth Swords always looked like a tight combat package to me, but without a crypt to support it, there wasn't much point in trying to make it work.

Heirs was a really great set for the Kiasyd, in a quiet way that nobody seems to have really blown their trumpet about. It might just be that since Kiasyd have always been one of the best bloodlines, the new tech that they got wasn't remarkable. Contrast that with the !Salubri, for instance, whom everyone got excited about as a direct result of them very suddenly going from "special needs" to "hey, wait, are these guys actually good now?"

Library [82 cards]
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This used to be a smaller library, but the largish combat module cycled quickly enough that I ran out of cards regularly enough to increase the library size. I didn't ever get close to running out of cards during the tournament, though, likely because I had a hard time keeping my hand moving during most of those games.

Master [14]
5x Blood Doll
1x Giant's Blood
1x Great Symposium
1x KRCG News Radio
1x Pentex(TM) Subversion
1x Perfectionist
1x Storage Annex
2x Wash
1x Wider View

Not much to comment on here, as this is mostly wrenches and hammers rather than anything fresh and exciting.

The Storage Annex seemed like a good idea, as there are a lot of cards in this deck of which there is only one copy but which may not be useful as soon as they're drawn, but it didn't really work out in play. Would've been better as another Perfectionist.

This was the last of my Wider View experiments, and my conclusion is that having just one Wider View is useless in a deck. Either use a lot of them or don't bother at all.

At one point during the finals, Dave asked me if I had any rush in the deck, and I just laughed. I really don't play many decks that use action cards which say anything about entering combat on them, but some Haven Uncovereds might be a good idea for this deck.

Action [9]
1x Abbot
1x Dominate Kine
4x Govern the Unaligned
1x Graverobbing
1x Gremlins
1x Riddle Phantastique

A bit of a grab bag of options here. Never managed to make a Graverobbing happen, and I don't remember Abbot ever being useful. If I wanted to make this deck better, obviously there should be about twice as many Governs.

Action Modifier [4]
2x Conditioning
1x Foreshadowing Destruction
1x Threats

Again, to improve the deck, some of the toolboxiness should be stripped out and more bleed mods should be added here. I'm a firm believer in the school of thought that it's better to have fewer bleed mods and make sure that they land where you want them to, rather than using a lot of them and just hoping that they stick, but even with that frame of mind there's not enough offense here.

Action Modifier/Combat [6]
6x Fae Contortion

In theory, these are great with the Arms/Swords combo, allowing you to shrug off Immortal Grapples, slink away from your opponent's strike and then stab them with dirt. In practice, they give you a fairly solid plan B for ousting, allowing you to sneak past preys who don't have any intercept and land some bleeds.

Action Modifier/Reaction [3]
3x Murmur of the False Will

No good, these. The number of times that I was bled by a vampire older than all of my guys while staring at one of these cards in hand has convinced me that Murmur is only worth using if your average crypt size is rather large. For those decks, I think Murmur is quite good, as it gives you something useful to do with your bleed bounce during the two-player endgame, but for other decks, it's all too likely that a sadness will ensue.

Ally [2]
1x Draeven Softfoot (Changeling)
1x Mylan Horseed (Goblin)

Draven was great, acting as a floating Flak Jacket for times when I didn't want to commit combat cards (like when blocking bounced bleeds). Mylan is theoretically great, but I didn't ever get him into play during the tournament.

Keep these guys in mind if you decide to do the obvious thing and add some Songs of Pan to this deck. A Song will kill both of these guys dead, as they're very unlikely to land a bleed (particularly when you announce that the bleed is for two).

Combat [22]
9x Arms of the Abyss
2x Darkling Trickery
9x Earth Swords
1x Oubliette
1x Shadow Body

This worked out very well, when it worked at all. It would be quite possible to play with discipline and only fight when it's opportunistically useful to do so, in which case you could cut down on the number of Arms and Swords.

The two S:CE were escape hatches from combat which I never came close to needing. They could easily be cut or replaced with Tastes of Vitae.

Equipment [3]
1x Sport Bike
2x Tinglestripe

Tinglestripe seemed like a good, cheap, efficient combat permaent to back up my combat transients, which is always useful in a toolboxy deck like this one. Since I wasn't having any luck getting into useful combats, though, the Tinglestripes were worse than useless. I still haven't decided if that's because of the specific circumstances of those games or if the card just isn't worth playing in general. I'm leaning toward the latter.

Event [1]
1x Scourge of the Enochians

I knew this wasn't going to matter during our tournament, but as I mentioned in the tournament report, I didn't change this deck at all for the event. In theory, this is a really good card for bruise/bleed decks, since it cuts down on the number of minions you need to chew through in order to get to your prey's pool. Since I'm the only player in my playgroup who plays weenie decks with anything like regularity, I'm not sure if this is borne out in actual play or not.

Reaction [13]
2x Eyes of the Night
1x Faerie Wards
3x On the Qui Vive
4x Redirection
3x Wake with Evening's Freshness

Faerie Wards is really excellent, especially when Omme plays it and it only costs one blood. The younger vampire clause on it really hurt my chances of playing it usefully, though, and I think this card might have to be filed next to Basilisk's Touch under "Mytherceria cards which are only useful if your name happens to be Marconius."

My theory here was to have enough intercept to block casually stealthy actions, between the permanent intercept, the Eyes of the Night, and Aura Absorption at basic, but it seemed like I never had enough intercept to block anything that I actually cared about. To improve the deck, the intercept can safely be ditched.

I think I may have drunk more Storm Kings than I realized while building this, as it's definitely short on wake tech, a weakness which I felt keenly during every game of the tournament. For a deck this size, I normally start at eight wakes and add more if necessary, and this deck definitely needs at least that many.

Reaction/Action Modifier [4]
4x Aura Absorption

As mentioned above, I'd ditch these entirely if I was going to focus on streamlining the deck.

Retainer [1]
1x Mr. Winthrop

Also to be cut, if the deck should eventually be turned into something good.

Not sure if I'm going to keep this deck or not. The combat package is wonderfully toothsome, but it's not trumpy enough to be used as the sharp end of a straight-up rush package, and bruise/bleed is an archetype that I really don't have much love for. I can see how I could make this deck good, but I strongly suspect that it would also make the deck less fun to play. If I do keep this, it will probably be relegated to casual play only. It has too much potential for bad matchups to possess much in the reliability department when facing sleeker, more honed decks.

Zombie Realpolitik In the Wild West

Well, not all at once, unlike what the title suggests.

We had five people show up to our Monday night session, which is normally V:TES plus the occasional other game. Since we'd had our tournament the day before, it didn't seem like anybody really wanted to play more V:TES right then and there. Josh had suggested earlier that we try to scrape together a game of Bang!, which I was totally into, since I've got a copy of the game but hadn't yet ever played it. Everyone else seemed congenial, so we slapped cowboy hats on our heads, bellied up to the bar for a shot or six of rotgut, and prepared to squint at each other malevolently.

Game One - If I'm a Cylon, Does It Take An Action to Reveal?
At the beginning of a game of Bang!, every player is assigned a secret role, which defines his victory condition. The Sheriff, who reveals his role as soon as he gets it, is trying to kill everyone who isn't a Deputy. The Deputies win if the Sheriff does. The Outlaws want to kill the Sheriff. The Renegade wants to kill everyone except the Sheriff, and then kill the Sheriff. As you can see from that synopsis, only the Renegade's victory conditions are in any way complicated. This will become important later.

In theory, this game could involve a fair amount of bluffing and negotiation, given that nobody knows for sure what the other players are trying to accomplish. In practice, at least during this game, almost everyone opted for a "shoot first and interrogate the corpse" methodology instead. I suspect that this is usually the way the game plays, since the vast majority of the cards are either kill-you or save-me cards. Having little or no technology available to try to suss out other players' roles without violence means that about the only way to try to figure out who's who is to throw a couple of bullets at people and see how they react. That's good design, given that Bang! is meant to be a quick play. Forcing players to start shooting as a means of gathering information keeps play from stagnating into he-said/she-said politicking, which is definitely not how the West was won.

Ben was our Sheriff, and started out by building up his position with a long-barreled gun, an iron plate under his shirt, and a horse. Josh screwed up early on, telling Ben that he had no intention of stealing Ben's gun, a comment which arrived apropos of nothing and immediately aroused Ben's suspicions. I managed to make an even bigger mistake right after that. When I had gotten my role card, I'd glanced at it and immediately forgotten what it said - I was tired and Josh was going over the rules of the game at the time, so what I'd looked at fell right out of my head. I looked at my card again, to see what in tarnation I was supposed to be doing, making a joke about revealing myself as a cylon as I did so. Ben assumed that the only reason I'd have to look at my card a second time was because I was the Renegade and hadn't fully understood the victory conditions for that role, as all the others are so simple. Since I was actually an Outlaw, I didn't put up much of an argument against that logic.

Ben took potshots at Josh and Max to see what they'd do. Josh shot at Matt, and Max went after Josh with gusto. Max must be the Deputy, then, right? Ben threw Matt into jail, which was the one mechanic in the game that I found really annoying. (While in jail, you don't get to play at all, and there's nothing you or anyone else can do to get out of jail - whether or not you're released is purely random.) I played some cards to build up my position and didn't act aggressively toward anyone.

Max kept plugging away at Josh, who got gunned down in short order, revealing that he was the Renegade. That gave Ben pause, since he was now unsure of my role, but he quickly decided to throw me into jail just to be on the safe side. Several turns passed in which Ben and Max didn't do anything while Matt and I rotted in jail, which I knew meant that Max must be the other Outlaw. If he'd been the Deputy, he would've been shooting at Matt and I. Ben didn't twig to that, though, given the smart trust investment Max had made with Ben earlier, by following Ben's orders and blasting Josh when he was told to.

Matt and I freed ourselves from jail at about the same time, and Matt decided that the thing to do was to light a stick of dynamite, which passes around the table and randomly blows up one player. Unfortunately, he got tossed back into the clink right afterward, and sat there staring at the dynamite in his hand before it blew him to pieces. That revealed that he was the Deputy, so all pretenses were put aside and Max and I laid into Ben with everything we had. That turned out to be rather a lot of flying lead, and though Ben managed to dodge bullets like he'd taken the red pill for a couple of turns, we soon laid out the Sheriff before he managed to put either of us down. "Deserve's got nothing to do with it," indeed.

Game Two - Backdoored by Squidbillies
Max had just bought the Game of Thrones boardgame, so we set it up and prepared to battle it out for control of Westeros. I was the white guys in the north, Ben was the green guys in the south, Josh was the yellow guys in the mid-east, Matt was the red guys in the mid-west, and Max was the black squidbilly guys squished between my territory, Matt's and Josh's.

AGoT is an area-control game with a few mechanical hiccups meant to evoke the atmosphere of the books on which the game is based. Those design choices are quite effective at getting the feel of the novels across, but unfortunately what makes for compelling fiction doesn't necessarily correlate to what makes for compelling gaming.

The setting is faux-medieval England, but unlike most fantasy settings, it hews closer to alt-history than it does to Tolkienesque flights of fancy (at least in the first few books, which are what the game models). This means that there's no magic to speak of, no great heroes who can destroy entire armies, and no horses or boats that can travel with the speed of the wind. In short, this is the kind of setting where just getting to the battlefield is a logistical slog, and the battles themselves are rarely decisive, as armies tend to be routed and regroup rather than being utterly destroyed where they stand.

To reflect this, AGoT uses the strangest set of mans mechanics I've seen in an area-control game. Everyone starts with a very small number of mans, such that there are neutral territories between every players' individual starting territories. In and of itself, that's not so strange, but it's determined completely at random when players get new mans, meaning that there's no safe way to expand your holdings beyond a territory or two from where you start, and no way to safely defend the territories you're leaving behind. The game mitigates this a bit by making your mans quite a bit more doughty than the mans in most area control games; most battles result in retreats rather than a loss of mans, so as long as you've kept a clear path of retreat behind your advance, you're unlikely to have your overall force strength reduced.

I have no problem with games possessed of a high degree of randomness, as long as that randomness suits the theme of the game. I really like Yetisburg and Mall of Horror, and both of those are as dependent on luck as they are on strategy (or maybe even moreso). The AGoT setting is certainly one in which I can get behind the randomness of when your mans muster, but it baffles me as to why there isn't a Monies For Mans mechanic in the game. That would have perfect thematic resonance, as mercenaries play a hugely important role in the novels, and would also help to alleviate the turtling/iceberging tendency that we saw in our game, and which I imagine happens in most plays of this game. Such a mechanic would incentivize players to try to take Monies territories, and would force tough decisions between conquering Monies territories (which could be used to buy more mans, but which might also be needed for other uses) and Mans Factory territories (which give you more mans for free, but are unreliable).

Our game started slowly. We got a lot of cards that let us bid monies for big cardboard pieces: a sword, a bird and a chair. I managed to get myself fairly well-positioned along each of those power tracks, simply because I bid as much as everyone else and was the furthest distance from Josh, who had the chair (which let him break all the ties that came up) and knew that I was the least threatening to him, and so let me be the highest amongst the tied players. None of these things seemed to really have much effect on the game at that point, but there wasn't anything else going on, so everyone moved to occupy Make Monies territories and then spent those monies on these auctions, with the end result that no one really did much of anything and mostly maintained their starting positions on the power tracks.

Ben and I secured some uncontested territories in our respective ends of the island, and Josh overreached himself a bit and lost some mans in battles with both Ben and Matt. Max pushed south to mess with Ben on the high seas, leaving me alone to start greedily eyeing his Mans Factory territories which weren't too far from my southern border. I hadn't really been paying much attention to the way that the ocean spaces worked, since I only had one boat and couldn't see much use for it. The few times I tried to push my boat south, Josh stepped up and defended his sea lanes, but he didn't really seem to be able to leverage that ocean power to any useful end, so I kind of wrote off the oceans as anything worth worrying about.

There were a few more inconclusive skirmishes in the middle of the board, with the other four players pushing each other around a bit, but with nothing conclusive happening there. We finally got our first More Mans command from the game, and I prepared to head south to unseat Max from some of his lightly defended northern territories. My push was a success and he was forced to fall back. Since I didn't have enough mans to leave a reasonable defensive force behind me, though, he was able to use his command of the sea lanes to backdoor his way into my northern territories. Drunken squidbillies piled into my ancestral home and pushed my mans stationed there southward to join my other forces, which would have been a tragic tale of woe if not for the fact that I couldn't work up the will to care. Though I'd been ousted in the north, the new territories I'd conquered in the south compensated for the lost lands exactly, so it didn't make any difference.

Josh had been getting his face pounded in by Ben during all this, and Ben had managed to acquire five Mans Factory spaces. Due to geographical restrictions, none of the rest of us could stop him, even if we teamed up. The game was almost over anyway, and we had about an hour left before the store closed, so we decided to call the game with Ben the winner. It wasn't a particularly satisifying play experience for me. Ben won by turtling, Max and Matt and I iceberged around the board, and Josh got his teeth kicked in because he was the only one really trying to conquer more territory. An area control game which discourages you from trying to control more areas than you start with is a pretty flawed premise, and there's definitely a lesson to be learned here about trying to0 hard to capture flavor at the expense of dynamic gameplay.

Game Three - Zombies Want Sexy Clothes
Mall of Horror isn't like other zombie games. In other zombie games, you move your mans from space to space, look for weapons to kill zombies, and try to keep yourself alive long enough to complete some kind of objective. In Mall of Horror, you move from space to space and look for weapons to kill zombies with, and you definitely want to keep your characters alive, but the objective here is to make sure that other peoples' characters get eaten before yours do. The game doesn't end until almost all of the characters have been eaten, so your objective is to look as helpful as possible while being as spiteful as possible.

It's a French game, complete with hilariously mistranslated manual, whose central mechanic is hidden voting. That voting mechanic is location-based, meaning that only players who have their characters in an appropriate location get to cast votes to resolve what's happening in that location. So, players who have characters in the security office get to vote on who among them will be security chief for the round, characters in a location that's being attacked by zombies vote to see who gets pushed to the front of the crowd and eaten by the living dead, and characters who are in the parking lot vote to see who gets to search the supply truck for useful equipment. Players who have more than one character in a location get more votes there, but since you can only move one character per turn, it's also easy to lose one of those characters if that location gets overwhelmed with zombies, which creates a nice decision-making tension between spreading yourself too thin and putting all your eggs in one fragile basket.

By the time we got around to playing MoH, my brain was pretty fried, and I honestly don't have real firm grasp on the chronology of this particular zombie holocaust. Chalk it up to the overwhelming horror of this "uncomfortable situation" (a phrase straight from the rulebook). I'm quite sure that the following events occurred, in more or less this order: Max had two of his three guys eaten in one turn, throwing him into a highly defensive posture; the Cachou "Sexy Clothes" store was closed as a result of there being too many zombies waiting there for someone to buy lingerie; Matt very quietly managed to keep all three of his characters alive long after the rest of us were reduced to one or two guys.

The game ended with the kind of climactic lightning round that characterizes the best endgames of MoH, in which the security office was too overwhelmed with zombies for anyone to venture there to check the security monitors to see where the next incoming wave of zombies would be appearing, several of the locations were closed entirely and the rest all had zombies waiting outside for fresh meats, and everyone had run out of equipment cards and so had nothing to rely on except luck and persuasion. Additionally, everyone other than Matt was down to one character, which meant that the rest of us would need to team up in order to keep him from winning.

Matt was able to outfox us all, though, putting both of his remaining characters into the same location. Since the zombies in a given location only eat one character, even if he lost the vote and was chosen to be eaten, he would've been able to choose his higher-point character and thus win. It was a great, out-of-the-box play on Matt's part. In the end, though, it didn't matter, since Max got caught in the parking lot and ripped limb from limb, ending the game.

Afterwards, we discussed the highly random nature of the game, and a few of the people who've played it multiple times expressed some dissatisfaction with that. I've since come up with few houserules that I think will add some more strategery to the game (one of which is to make everyones' dead characters come back as zombies, which is so genre-appropriate that it seems like it should've been a bigger part of the game in the first place), so we'll give those a shot next time we play this one.

Battling For Lines In Boston

I hadn't been planning to attend our V:TES storyline event, largely because I wasn't able to think up anything interesting to build for it. However, the week before the date of the event, I realized that I had already built two decks which sported storyline-compliant crypts, both of which I wanted to play more in order to tune them. So I headed south, to battle for lines. Battle with lines? Against lines? There were lines, and there was battling, so it all worked out in the end.

The decks in question are a Harbingers blood denial deck and a Kiasyd combat toolbox. I didn't make any changes to either one for the event, and I decided to choose the Loyalist faction, simply because that meant I'd be much less tempted to use the special card that choice granted me if I had a moment of weakness during play. Guide and Mentor has such a small effect on the game that I didn't think I'd ever feel the desire to tap it.

I'd played the Harbingers deck quite a bit more than the Kiasyd one, but I was worried that the elves would be a much more enticing prospect than the skulls for people who might really want to win. I really hate contesting, so I considered asking the other nine players who showed up for the tournament if either of those decks would cause issues with their own deck choices. In the end, I decided that everyone would probably be playing Baali and the scarce clans, and went with the Kiasyd. Mostly, that was a good guess, though my other metagame guesswork turned out to be totally wrong.

Round One - Suicide Prevention Hotline
Greg (Trujah vote) -> me -> Chris (Trujah vote) -> Prescott (Salubri) -> Matt (Baali stealth/bleed)

Greg brought out some titled Trujah, I brought out some elves, Chris brought out some titled Trujah, Prescott confused Matt by bringing out Matthew, and Matt brought out WhoEatsALottaBroccoli. Chris and Greg were both playing Lilith's Blessing, and each of them decided not to pay any pool for their vampires by abusing Villein and Blessing. As a result, it quickly became clear to me that I was never going to oust Chris, and Matt wasn't able to get much going against Greg. Matt bled with his three vampires each turn, but didn't really play any cards. I assumed that he was playing a bad deck, as Matt has a tendency to enjoy playing bad decks.

All this meant trouble for Prescott, who decided that his precarious position naturally meant that he should spend himself down to almost no pool. Chris obliged this suicidal urge by calling an unblocked oust-vote, but for some reason Greg decided that Chris shouldn't get the oust and voted it down. Maybe Greg thought he could sweep the table? By the time his next turn rolled around, Chris had apparently decided that Greg was right and that he shouldn't oust Prescott, so he played Golconda on Prescott's 10-cap. Meanwhile, Prescott had seemingly had a George Bailey revelation and decided that he wanted to live after all, so his vampire found religion and he found some pool. After that, nothing interesting happened. Everyone had bloat and lacked the muscle to move forward, so we hung our heads in shame and submitted to the dreaded zero-oust timeout.

My only real relevance in this game was to separate the two vote decks so that they would mostly agree to help each others' votes. This should have meant that Chris and Greg could run the table, but both of them made inexplicable choices, and the rest of us didn't seem to have much to do. I failed to get into any meaningful combats, which I began to realize was the point of my deck. I thought I'd built a deck geared toward an even mix of meaningful combat technology, ousting power and defense, but the latter two were definitely lacking, which was worrisome.

Round Two - Remember That Thing We Talked About?
Dave (Salubri wall) -> Greg -> Max (Gargoyle bruise/bleed) -> Jen (Kiasyd stealth/bleed) -> me

Jen was more committed than I was to this tournament, so she had actually put in the effort to build something new for the event. That was good, because it meant that she was able to use vampires from groups that I hadn't allowed myself access to, which meant that we were able to mostly avoid contestation issues in three consecutive games.

Dave brought out Solomon Batanea, who was the worst minion who could possibly show up in my prey's ready region. Intercept and combat defense? I didn't roll into town with a Plan C. Nonetheless, I resolved to try to give Dave as much free rein as I could, since I figured that Greg wasn't going to be interested in paying for his vampires, just like in round one. He wasn't, but he was quite keen on mangling Max's pool. Max lacked bloat or rush, so he decided to power forward. His bleeds all slid down the conduit of Jen's bleed bounce into my lap, but that worked out pretty well for me, since I wasn't going to be able to block Jen anyway and blocking Max allowed me to cycle combat cards which would have been utterly wasted against Dave.

As luck would have it, Dave was experiencing some critical issues with his hand at the same time that I drew into a big chunk of oust. Dave had gotten Matthias into play, but wasn't doing much to stop Greg, who had already ousted Max at this point, so I decided to see if I could punch through Dave's defenses and start working on Greg's pool. Amusingly, Dave and I had been talking about whether or not Pentex is problematic for the game before the tournament had begun, and now Dave found his untapped +1 intercept minon scared of a van outside his apartment. After that led to my victory point, I was forced to concede that while Pentex might be bad for the game, it was certainly good for my game. Jen and I struggled gamely on, but Greg didn't have much trouble blasting through us, walking away with four VPs.

Round Three - The Broccoli Gambit Unveiled
Max -> me -> Matt -> Jen -> Peter (Trujah vote)

Matt brought out WhoEatsALottaBroccoli again, but this time showed me that my initial assessment of his deck had been wrong. It wasn't that he'd built a bad deck, but that he hadn't drawn what seemed to be the key to his deck, Call the Great Beast. Amidst a lot of talk of Broccoli Lessons and Vegetable Hats, I managed to fend off Max's bleeds, using my supposed combat offense as bleed defense. As Jen hammered into Peter, Matt's CTGB got a Contagion, which I was totally cool with. Jen ousted Peter and everyone else continued to grind away at their respective preys, with both Matt and I having some success.

Omme got Condemned to sit in front of the computer and play Doom rather than take actions, which hampered my ability to go forward somewhat, but thankfully Max started turning his attention elsewhere. He used Lucinde to rush one of Jen's vampires, and shortly after that Matt ousted her. Lucinde then paid the CTGB a visit, sending the Beast to naptime after Matt realized that he hadn't given it Presence and so couldn't play the Majesty in his hand. I assured Max that if he diablerized the Beast I'd vote to keep him alive in the blood hunt, and he agreed that this was a good idea. For a change, I managed to keep my word during a tournament, and didn't vote to burn Max's diablerist.

Not too long after Matt lost his star vampire, I unleashed the oust that I'd been piling up in my hand for most of the game, including a Conditioning that had been sitting in the Storage Annex since turn three. He blocked one of my bleeds but ran out of wake after that, and I nabbed a VP. I dropped Pentex on Lucinde and torporized both of Max's other vampires with the first Arms/Swords combats that actually managed to have an effect on this tournament, at which point he conceded.

Final Table - Arms Can't Help You Now
Jen -> Dave -> Ben (Nagaraja intercept/combat) -> Greg -> me

I had third choice of seating, meaning first actual choice of seating, and decided to prey on Jen rather than Dave. I'd like to claim that this was a clever way to glean more play data for my deck, since preying on Dave would have put me into the same initial predator/prey relationships that I had in round two, but actually I was just tired and thought that I'd have an easier time ousting Jen than Dave. That turned out not to be the case, but not because of anything either of them did, so choosing the other available seat might not have made any difference.

Greg chose to prey on me, which I thought wouldn't be so bad. Trujah can't generate a whole lot of stealth, and I had a fair sprinkling of intercept in my deck, so I figured he'd have a really tough time getting through me. Before we started transferring, Jen and I talked about our crypt options, and I saw that I'd be forced to play with The Arcadian and Omme, as my other guys were about to appear in her ready region. I figured I could dig around for a third minion once I'd stabilized my postion and beaten Greg back a bit. File that under "best laid plans."

I brought out The Arcadian first, so that he could Govern down to Omme. Before either of us had a second minion in play, Greg attempted to initiate some hostility towards my pool. I had an Arms and a Swords in hand, which made me feel safe, so I blocked. Greg promptly played Domain of Evernight at basic and Outside the Hourglass at superior, dumping me into torpor before there was a window for me to play any combat cards. Annoying, but not a huge deal, as I had no problem self-rescuing on my next turn. I proceeded to get out Omme at the same time that Greg got out a second Trujah. With Omme's priscus title, we now each had an equal number of votes in play. I knew he had votepush in his deck, but figured that Omme's votes would at least slow Greg down a bit.

During all this, Jen was bleeding heavily into Dave. She got him down to three pool and then sputtered out. Dave launched headlong into activities such as drawing a line in the sand, digging his heels into the ground, scrabbling desperately for purchase, and so on and so forth. He managed to build back up a bit, eventually having one vampire with Sight Beyond Sight and the Bowl of Convergence and another with +1 intercept. He explained to Jen unequivocally, several times, that he was going to put her vampires into torpor every time he got the chance to do so. During all this, Ben bled steadily into Greg, without apparent effect on Greg's plans. (Remember, Greg chose not to pay any pool for his vampires during this tournament.)

Greg took another action to reduce my pool while The Arcadian was tapped, Omme was untapped, and I had no wakes in hand. I still had that same Arms and Swords in hand, so I figured I'd block, since the chances of Greg dropping the Domain/Hourglass combo again weren't very good. What could go wrong? Of course, Greg unstoppably torporized Omme, which very neatly left him with votelock. The next Trujah in line chowed down on delicious elfmeats, and I was down to one minion. I tried to explain to Greg that I was pretty sure his move had been a mistake, since I now couldn't do anything at all to Jen for the rest of the game, because all of the other guys in my uncontrolled region were already controlled by Jen.

V:TES isn't normally much of a spectator sport, but I did have a good time watching Jen and Dave interact, which was good since I didn't have much left to do in the game at that point. Jen attempted to take a Guide and Mentor action to get an archetype for Kassiym, and Dave blocked him and sent him to torpor with a string of four prevent/press cards. That made for some highly compelling comedy, as we got to watch this conversation iterate itself exactly, four times in a row, with increasing vehemence on both sides:

Dave: "Press to continue."
Jen: "But I'm not doing anything to you right now!"
Dave: "I already told you that I was going to do this."
Jen: "Fine."
[repeat]

I drew a Great Symposium shortly thereafter, and had enough pool to grab my second copy of Omme and get him into play. Greg was unimpressed and called votes to oust me, which Ben wasn't able to block. I retired from the table at this point, because some of the other people who hadn't made the finals were starting up a new game elsewhere, so I'm not sure exactly how the table shook out. I do know that Jen won in the end, adding a Kiasyd/Loyalist victory to the rolls.

Non-V:TES Bonus Round - Vikingmans
Prescott wanted to play more V:TES, for some bizarre reason. Thankfully, we were able to talk him down from that particular ledge, and Matt taught us how to play Eketorp.

Eketorp is a worker-placement game like a lot of others, except that in this game your mans are vikings, not farmers. So rather than getting to the area first and taking more stuff than other players' mans deployed to that area, the mans in Eketorp fight each other if there aren't enough resources to go around. Those resources are used to build your base, and your mans can also be sent out to smash other peoples' bases.

As with most games, the preliminary rules explanation made the game sound much more complicated than it actually was. Each turn, resources drop onto the board randomly, everyone secretly assigns destinations for their mans, the mans fight it out and carry home resources, and then mans who got beat up earlier in the game get better. Pretty simple stuff, but it's got a lot of interaction between the individual mechanics that add nice bits of tasty design.

For example, combat is conducted via War - each player has a hand of cards with numbers on them, both players play a hidden card, and the higher card wins. But there are two fun twists to that system. The first is that the card you play is given to your opponent, so winning with a high card guarantees a win for one of your opponents at some time in the future. The cards you get from other players in this manner don't go into your hand right away, though, which is the other clever mechanic. You don't get to pick up the cards you've received until your current hand is empty, which gives combat a more strategic feel than it first appeared to have. Rather than just using your highest card during your most important fight of the turn, you have to consider what the long-term consequences of giving away such a powerful card are, and try to mitigate those by giving that card to one of the players who's not doing well.

Everyone had a good time playing this, though there didn't seem to be any particular long-term strategies so much as reacting to a continually evolving situation and trying to outguess your opponents. I'm not sure if that's due to the nature of the game itself or just because most of us playing had never played it before. For a relatively light, fast-playing game, it was a lot of fun, and it's definitely a game I'm looking forward to playing again.