BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER BOARD GAME

Product Information

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 game is broken down into two main phases; the action phase for the players and the monster phase for the baddies, monster of the week and the Big Bad. This is quick, and the challenge is getting weapons to do it, or using other special items or abilities.

Players race across Sunnydale, slaying Demons, dusting Vampires and collecting the much-needed items to face against the monster of the week to uncover a clue to the big bad's plot against Sunnydale and the world. However, occasionally the game will throw you its own moments of minor panic as it spawns a townie in an area thick with the undead and then rings a metaphorical dinner bell. The event cards are, again, very generic and lack a deep sense of theme - one card restricts movement to a certain number of spaces without much of an explanation as to why, others stop the special abilities of locations again without explanation or thematic description. At the end of the round, all those baddies will converge on the civilians and if one of your gang isn’t there to prevent it, the death will get registered on the apocalypse tracker that is counting down to the end of the world.The Master begins play with Spike, Drusilla and Darla active as his minions, and the goal of killing Buffy.

These ‘event checks’ are needed for a number of things and every time it happens it feels like someone left a placeholder mechanism in the rule-book and forgot to replace it with something that is actually good. The rules are written in a way that can sometimes be confusing, making if difficult to play the first few times until you work it all out. Otherwise, like most board games, I see it being great fun for a while, but you'll find yourself playing it less and less when everyone knows the ins-and-outs of the game. Willow can use her special action to discard as many Magic Supplies cards as the player likes, and in turn kill a Demon anywhere on the board for each card discarded. More often than not decisions are made based on physical throughput rather than any deeper consideration.Once the third plot is flipped over the villain fully reveals himself or herself, at which point they are usually placed on the board in a specific location and a special effect kicks in. Now another Buffy gaming generation is born, but is this first offering from that generation better than its predecessors?