Vampire Village is not about building a village for vampires — and thank goodness, after the blandness that was SiliconVania. Instead, it whisks us to exotic Central Europe, where the crossroads of the west have attracted a veritable convention of vampires, werewolves, witches, and demons to feast on the citizens of your hamlet. Not the best spot for a thriving community, but the schools were good. Designed by Maxime Rambourg, half of the team behind The Loop, it’s a hate-drafting game with surprising bite.

Defending a helpless village.

When I call Vampire Village a hate-drafting game, there’s really no better way to describe it. Pretty much everything revolves around two drafts, and there’s no small measure of cruelty to the whole thing.

The first draft is the less horrible of the two, a straightforward take-one-and-pass-the-rest affair that sees everybody acting at once. This is how you build your village. The cards themselves are straightforward. Most show buildings, another portion of your hamlet that will likely be laid desolate before too long. Many buildings boast shields, color- and direction-coded for defending against besieging beasties, and all but a few populate your town with snacks. I mean villagers. Yes. Villagers. Solid human villagers who most certainly should not be consumed for the raspberry juice within. To prevent said snacking, there are also heroes, who will readily exchange their lives to protect the innocent. Translation: they’re gonna die like chumps.

It’s the second draft that makes Vampire Village so nasty. Everybody at the table draws three cards, showing various monstrosities. Each type is different. Demons can’t be conventionally defended against. Vampires are unburdened by special rules, showing a strength number and nothing else, although they also tend to boast a higher attack ceiling than their compatriots. Werewolves are weaklings until they merge into a pack, at which point they become overwhelming rather quickly, while witches tend to become more powerful when your neighbor has lots of them, forcing you to be a little bit cautious about which cards you pass.

Which is tricky, because from this trio of cards you take one for yourself and pass the others to both of your neighbors. Then the process repeats, resulting in six terrible, horrible, no-good monsters for each player. Only then does the attack begin. Monsters batter themselves against your defenses, sometimes being halted by your shields and heroes or — more often — chowing down on entire neighborhoods.

The whole thing repeats a second time with better buildings and far nastier monsters. Then you tally up your surviving villagers, how many monsters you kept out, and that’s the game.

Which kind of monster sex do you prefer?

The appeal of Vampire Village lies in its transparency. Where most drafting games are about grabbing what you need, Rambourg makes this one about passing along what your neighbors don’t need. This is less evident in the first draft; there’s only so much you can do with buildings, although in some cases you can withhold a helpful card from a beleaguered neighbor, especially in the second round.

But it’s really the monster draft that does it. Those first few monsters are flipped face-up before the second trio is doled out, giving everybody a glimpse into their neighbors’ weak spots. Similarly, thwarted monsters stick around after the first round, making successful defenders even more likely to stumble going forward. These factors provide an essential crunch to every decision. If the village to your east has successfully warded off a couple of werewolves — an easy enough thing to do — then sending another pup their way might be just the thing to tip them into the chasm. Likewise, you can send a witch to your neighbor because the village to their other side has an entire coven flying around on brooms. Winning is a matter of outrunning your friends rather than escaping the bear behind you, so it’s wise to trip them up every chance you get.

It’s mean. So beautifully mean. But it’s a meanness that falls within a specific Goldilocks Zone. For one thing, it’s a brisk game, maybe thirty minutes long, sufficient to get invested enough to call your friends bastards when they hand over a nasty vampire or a fourth grey werewolf, but not so involved that anybody cares all that much about the fate of their village. If anything, the game presents these buffet drive-bys as grimly comedic. Losing a building kills the weakest attacking monster, turning defeat into… well, still a defeat, but a conveyor belt of defeats that gradually lose steam. Sacrificing a hero still kills a monster, but this time you can eliminate the strongest one instead. That is, if your hero knew how to slay that particular bogeyman. Otherwise they die as poorly as the rest. It’s all so silly, so quick, that there’s very little sting.

Hm… who to draft…

This doesn’t make Vampire Village a perfect game, mind. While its lightness is a strength, the sense that nothing really matters extends to the game at large. It’s entirely possible to be sitting pretty, having carefully defeated all comers, until a neighbor sends you a single card that sets the grinder into motion. Watching your entire village get stripped bare in the final attack emphasizes this remoteness. Why does it matter so little that fifteen villagers were treated as carelessly as a child handles water balloons? Is lack of investment necessarily a good thing?

By the same token, it’s an easy design to imagine being more robust. As one friend put it, a version of this game that put more oomph into its drafting, perhaps with villages that were a little more clockwork, built with interlacing supports — something like the spaceships from Vlaada Chvátil’s Galaxy Trucker, doomed but for the duct tape holding them together — could have been truly special. As it stands, Vampire Village borders on the disposable. It’s good for a few sessions, puts hate-drafting front and center as one of tabletop gaming’s unsung pleasures, but never truly sings. It’s good. It could have been more than good.

My meager surviving village.

For a game that’s as light as air, though, Vampire Village is a pleasant surprise. Hate-drafting deserves more time in the limelight, and Rambourg has managed to center the concept without letting it get overly personal.

Unless Geoff sends me another six-value vampire, that is. The bastard.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A complimentary copy was provided.