Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Game

Released at the height of Buffy’s fame the board game is surprising and actually pretty **** good, rather like the show its based. Considering this come’s from Hasbro who are never known for exerting themselves with licensed property’s besides slapping a new set of images on a Monopoly board, this is pretty good.

Ooh! A quick word of warning! there are two Buffy games Don’t go near the other one. Ebay buyer be warned.

For a mass market game this really captures the essence of the show whilst also being simple but fun to play. In a mechanic now popular among dungeon crawls one player gets to be the big bad and the others the scooby gang attempting to foil his dastardly machinations.

And here’s one of the first cool bits, this is actually 4 games in one. Included in the box are the villains from the first 4 seasons of the show and playing with them changes the goals you will need to complete that play.

The actual game is pretty straight forward including that old staple roll and move. The bad guys go first moving around the board and gathering cards which will give some nifty skills and sacred artifacts that do all kinds of kooky things. Depending on the Bad playing it alters what the objective is for the players and whilst its not huge game play changes they do add a nice thematic feel to proceedings, usually revolving around the gang having to track down specific items so as to dispatch that episodes villain.

To make things worse for the good guys all the evil players cards are kept hidden from them whilst all of their cards are kept visible. Play continues by moving about the board and then fighting by rolling dice. A quick pause for moment to mention components, some of it are great, a decent board with actual 3d elements a pewter Buffy symbol, but the dice ew, cheap plastic blocks you needed to sticker yourself.

There’s a bunch of neat touches throughout the game, again these tie into the theme really nicely. There are homes that uninvited vampires can’t enter (unless they have evil card that will let them, that’s led to a few nasty surprises) in the center of the board there is a circle representing the cycle of the moon and sun, some of the movement dice will cause this to activate which can effect some of the characters in interesting ways.

For instance when it gets to the full moon some characters will transform into werewolf’s, if you’ve seen the show you’ll know about Oz (played by Seth Green) when he transforms he bin’s all the cards he’s carrying and charges around the board berserker style chomping on vamps, a great idea but can actually stuff up the players turn if he’d collected the weapon to destroy the villain. When its sunup all the vamps scuttle for cover like cockroaches when the kitchen light is turned on and getting cooked if they can’t move fast enough. Some of the bad guy’s can even sire vampires transforming a good character into a bad and if its one of the more powerful characters that can really put a crimp in your day.

Returning to this game I’d forgotten just how much fun it was and how closely linked it was to the shows theme, it was defiantly ahead of its time featuring a great deal of ideas and rules that are now commonplace in a lot of the modern games. (Arkham horror and the Battlestar games come quickly to mind as well as Descent)

its a real shame that Hasbro never released any updates to the game, due to the modular nature of the bad guys and cards etc season packs could have easily been released, adding new characters and villains and switching up rules. If it came out today via someone like FFG that would be exactly what we’d get (come on Fantasy Flight – show some Buffy reprint love?)

Whilst I couldn’t recommend it for the prices it can go if you get the chance to give it a whirl its not bad for something getting on for 15 years.

Happy Slaying!