For game designers, licensed properties are not easy beasts to tame. While they come with the promise of big sales and high profiles, they also bring a lot of heavy baggage to the party.
In some sad cases, that baggage weighs down the design and forces the game to struggle to carry the ideas of the license along with the usual heavy load of such “trivialities” as being entertaining and being worth your time.
Then there are those games that, under such pressure, soar and become some- thing better — something exceptional. Something that enhances the True Fan’s enjoyment of the original thing, acting as some sort of . . . uh, geek-love amplifier? Nerdgasm ray? Work with me here. I’m no Joss, people!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Game is one of those exceptions. The game pulls this rare feat off by recognizing everything that makes the TV series work.
Let’s break it down.
The Big Bads: While the TV show had its monster-of-the-week episodes, us fans always knew that the season had an arc that was building toward something nice and nasty: the villain of the piece, the “big bad.” These were the threats we weren’t sure how Buffy and her friends were going to overcome.
Taking on the first four seasons of the show, the board game gives us the Master, the Judge, the Mayor, and Frankenstein Adam. But like any master villain, they don’t show up alone: you’ve got Spike and Dru, not to mention Darla, Faith, Mister Trick, and more. Angelus waits in the wings — if he’s summoned, the Angel Helps You Out card won’t do the do-gooders any good.
One player takes on the role of evil, and has a lot going for her. The big bad starts out with three minions from the supporting cast, always goes first in the game, and can badly thrash most of the opposition in a straight-up fight. A die rolled at the start of evil’s turn determines how many of its pieces it can put into service before the “white hats” get their chance to stave off another Apocalypse. Add to this a deck of evil cards with nasty tricks and plenty of opportunities to draw from it, a victory condition tailored to what the big bad does best, and a continually renewable supply of minions by way of the Hellmouth, and it looks pretty grim for Buffy and the Scoobies.
You know, just like in the TV show.
But the Scoobies have some mojo of their own. Quick, to the Mystery Machine!
The Scoobies: All the other players — up to four of them — divide up the roles of the Scoobies: Oz, Xander, Willow, and Buffy. (Some of the players take on multiple roles when there are fewer than five at the table.) This really plays up a part of the show that shined over the years: the emotional connection among the white hats, and their teamwork in helping the Slayer beat the big bad. A Slayer that stands alone is a dead Slayer, whether you’re talking about the TV show or the board game.
Going in sequence, the good guys run around trying to pick up cards from the various good-guy decks:
1.Help Cards: They bring in other supporting characters for a boost, whether it’s the Amazing Jonathan or Buffy’s mom;
2.Research Cards: These enable helpful spells and other majik tricks;
3.Weapon Cards: They’re weapons — full of the stuff what slays.
All of the do-gooders can get into fights, though for the not-Slayer set, it’s not their forte. But that doesn’t matter. True to the way things work out in the TV show, each good guy has something he or she does best. Xander can carry more help cards, Willow can carry more research cards, and Buffy’s all about the weap- onage. And Oz . . . well, we’ll get to Oz.
The show’s patented teamwork is foregrounded by the way play is sequenced. With everyone on the good team going before Buffy, they can each do their part to help her shine at what she does best: boot head and kick butt. Characters can pass cards off to each other, allowing for a cascade of Scoobies-brand team-ups. Xander grabs the best help cards, and passes one off to Willow. Willow uses the help card to ramp up her efforts to cast a spell she’s researched. The spell sets up circumstances for Buffy to boot maximum head. . . .
End to end, the game reinforces the theme of cooperation among the good guys and competition with the big bad. Solid stuff.
The Trappings: Play takes place on a game board that represents a simplified Sunnydale. All the important locations are there — the school, the Hellmouth, various homes, the university, the Initiative, the library, the magic shop, and, of course, crypts and graveyards. The homes are special. Bad guys of the bloodsuck- ing persuasion can’t come in unless invited. The occasional invitation card does pop up in the deck of evil, of course; the heroes can’t ever feel safe. Different cards will be drawn depending on where a character goes on the map.
As the dice get rolled and the pieces move about the board, the moon phase counter advances. Appropriate to the show, it’s nearly always night in Sunnydale. During the new moon, evil gets to draw twice when it draws cards. During the full moon, Oz drops everything he’s carrying and turns into a hulked-out, wolfy killing machine. Then the full moon period passes and he is, typically, naked and sur- rounded by vampires he’s just torqued off. Once every 13 “ticks” along this clock, the sun comes up — just for a moment — and sets all the bloodsuckers on fire, forcing them to run to the nearest cover. (13! I love the attention to detail there.)
And then there are the artifacts. Stationed at the four corners of the board, these are inevitably the targets for an early-game mad rush. As items of great power, artifacts in play change the game significantly depending upon whose hands they fall into. Buffy with a magic sword? Aces! The Master with the mark of the Anointed One? Doom!
Sound familiar?
The Fights: Sooner or later, it comes down to some kung-fu action. Buffy gets to run through an assortment of weapons. Oz occasionally wolfs out and throws down. The vampires come out to play and get all . . . fangy.
Using special fight dice, the game gives us some six-siders that show one of six outcomes: a miss, a fang, a stake, and three flavors of pain (punch, jab, kick!). Different characters roll different amounts of fight dice. In werewolf mode, Oz (and Veruca) count the fang as a hit. With a wooden weapon, the Slayer gets a chance to dust a vampire when the stake icon shows up. With the right evil card — Sire a Vampire — a bloodsucker might even get to turn one of the good guys into a minion of evil, if she rolls enough fangs on the dice.
It’s fast, furious, and full of fan-flavor.
Mirror-Mirror Episodes: The show’s best episodes, and all those fanboy and fan- girl what-if-X-happens moments, shine through as the game plays out. Oz turns into a werewolf at inconvenient moments, dropping that crucial artifact in favor of chewing on Drusilla for a while. Willow, Xander, or Buffy get turned into vam- pires — flipping over their play-area marker to reveal the fangier version — and start booting head in the name of evil (ah, costuming department, we love you so). Bad Faith might start taking down Buffy’s best friends. The Demon Mayor might strike at just the wrong moment, force Angel to go all Angelus, and win the day, ruling over the burnt remains of Sunnydale with chipper reptilian cheer.
It’s the stuff of magic, my friends. The stuff of fan fiction!
Getting a licensed game right is hard. Getting it right enough that the fans cel- ebrate what you’ve done is even harder. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Game, like its heroine, faces this challenge down with a wooden stake in each hand, and dusts it flat-out.
But it’s more than just that. It’s practically a given that Buffy geeks (like me) will love this game to fangy pieces. But strip away all the licensed trappings and you have a solid game in its own right, with just the right mix of complexity and ease of use. Moreover, it offers a fascinating blend of both cooperative and com- petitive play — a precursor, perhaps, to greats such as Shadows over Camelot.
To put it another way, non-Buffy fans can and do enjoy this game. And that’s a remarkable feat all of its own. The design is good, whether you’re a breathless Whedonite or a battle-hardened board gamer. And if you’re one those who haven’t seen the show — and haven’t caught all the references I’ve been tossing out in this essay — then maybe, just maybe, after playing the game, you’ll want to.
And that, my friends, is what earns Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Game its spot as one of the hundred best.
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