Vampire Sucks

I've recently been playing some of the less popular games in my board game collection, bringing back things that haven't been touched in some time. One was the simple card game Vampire, from Reiner Knizia.

If you know anything about German board games, you know that Reiner Knizia is a man that has designed a lot of very clever games. You also know that "theme" isn't usually very high on his list -- for example, one his more well-known games, Ra, was re-skinned and released as Razzia, changing from a game about the monuments of ancient Egypt to a war between rival gangsters. You know, cause those are similar.

But I think none of his games (that I've played, anyway) have as laughably incidental a theme as Vampire. The rules tell you you're a vampire hunter going into six different locations to slay vampires as they gather in numbers there. The way this works is you have a deck of cards in six colors (plus a few wilds). Each card has one or two vampire heads on it. On your turn, you draw two, then either discard one to one of the "vampire gathering areas," or you "go on a vampire hunt," which is supposed to be a flavorful way of saying that you play a set of three or more cards of the same color in front of you.

Some artist was paid to dutifully render appropriately gothic images on these cards, but the entire thing is a sham. Still, as I said, this is not entirely to be unexpected where Knizia is concerned. It's not a dealbreaker. The question is, is there a fun and/or strategic game to enjoy under the flimsy skin? Often, that answer is yes.

But sadly, not so here. The "strategy" consists of not discarding a card that will put three or more cards in any one of the six discard piles. There's an interesting scoring mechanic that should in theory drive strategy -- in final scoring, you count all your "slain vampire heads," but the player with the smallest set in each color doesn't get to count that particular set. There should be a balancing act of playing larger sets for more points versus playing small sets to end the game more quickly. (It ends when one player has played a set of all six colors.)

Nope. In practice, that falls down too. This is a game for 2-5 players, and basically it works like this: the more players you have, the better it works to play small sets as quickly as you can to end the game; the fewer players you have, the better it works to wait and play the largest sets possible, even if you aren't the player who triggers the end of the game. It doesn't even take one game for everyone to learn how to play optimally, and then it just comes down to luck. Who will draw the right color cards, or the cards with two vampire heads instead of one?

I suppose it's unfair to think of this game -- clearly intended to be simple -- as anything but a game to fill 20 minutes, either at the end of a long game night, or at the beginning while waiting for everyone else in your group to arrive. But even on those terms, there are far superior short games to choose from.

Having now played it again, I expect Vampire will vanish back into the game closet for a long time to come.