Buffy the Vampire Slayer CCG Lookback Review

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer CCG was a great game that got a stake through the heart before it’s time.

So I’ll make a sacrifice to Osiris to resurrect it!

This game translates the world of Sunnydale into elegant cards and cunning game mechanics. You can play as Buffy, Spike, Faith, and other characters from the series inside a gaming experience that is never the same twice.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer CCG Game Play

It’s a CCG so the first thing you need to do is get a bunch of cards and build a deck.

The resource deck as it’s called will be 40 to 60 cards big and will contain actions, items, skills, events and characters. There are some deck-building restrictions but we don’t need to go into all that here but it’s shuffled together.

You have a plastic essence card of your main character. If you choose a goodie you have heroes and companions in your deck, baddies get villains and minions.

You also have to bring along a challenge deck of 7 different challenge cards which are shuffled into the challenge deck.

Lastly, a location deck featuring 8 cards.

So you have a random start player but if one player is a Villain they go first and will start by choosing if the game begins at night or during the day.

Players alternate playing one of their location cards into a 3×3 grid. The centre is always Sunnydale Park and you place in the 3 spaces closest to you, and the middle right space.

Your main character card, the one matching your essence, is placed at one of your locations. So if you picked Buffy’s essence you will start with a level 1 Buffy character in play.

The game is played over 7 phases with players going back and forth in each one until both players pass.

1 – Prologue

Draw a challenge card and put it onto a location you control, this is a must.

You can also play an event card or an action card that can be played in this step.

2 – Draw

Discard any cards from hand you wish and draw up to 5.

3 – Refresh Characters

Characters are tapped (rotated 90 degrees) when activated, fatiguing them. Here you can refresh them.

4 – Movement

Unfatigued characters can move to adjacent locations with Sunnydale Park adjacent to ALL locations. If you move from the park to an opponents location it will fatigue that character.

Almost all characters move 1 space, day or night. Vampires can not move in the day but move 2 spaces at night.

5 – Play Resources

There are a load of different cards and actions to take:

Play a Character: Put a level 1 character on any of your locations.

Ascend a Character: From level 1 to level 2 or level 2 to level 3 if you meet the destiny requirement. More on destiny points later.

Attach Skill or Item: Both of these card types follow the character when they move. Skills fatigue the character learning it so they must be refreshed to do so. The character needs to have the correct trait to be able to attach these cards.

A character can only hold 2 items but you can discard to make room.

Swap Item: Between two characters at the same location, assuming they meet the trait requirements.

Resurrect Main Character: If they happened to die, you can bring them back as an action from the discard pile at one of your locations. If they’re in your deck you’ll have to wait until you get them back.

Play an Action card from hand or use an Effect on a card in play: If it says it can be played in the resource phase.

Pass: Players can pass but can still continue playing on their next action. When players consecutively pass this phase ends.

6 – Conflict

Once again there are a tonne of things to do:

Fight: Choose your character who is attacking and the character at their location they will attack. The defender can fatigue another character at that location to fight instead, this is known as “Stunt Doubling”.

Both players draw 5 cards and take turns playing them for fight abilities or adding them to the talent stack. When players have finished doing this the fight is resolved.

The player with the higher relevant stat (Butt-Kicking by default but it can be changed with actions) wins. The losing characters are discarded and the winner gains a destiny point but both sides lose on a tie. If a players main character is lost, they lose a destiny point.

Challenge: A player chooses any amount of characters at a challenges location to attempt that challenge. The challenger draws 5 cards and the defender draws 3.

Like a fight, players take turns playing cards but the challenger is trying to meet or exceed each stat on the challenge while the defender can play cards to raise those stat requirements.

If successful, the challenge is discarded and the challenger gains the number of destiny points shown on the card. Fail, and the challenger loses a point.

Play an Action card from hand or use an Effect on a card in play: If it says it can be played in the resource phase.

Pass: Players can pass and continue on their next action. When players consecutively pass this phase ends.

7 – End Step

Flip the Day/Night card to the other side and switch the start player to the other player and start it all again.

If a player gets to 10 destiny points they win the game immediately. You can also win if control the park (have only your characters in there at the end of a turn) for 6 turns in a row.

Theme

I do like the theme here of course. All of the character’s stats make sense and the cards have abilities that represent what they’re supposed to.

For example, the Watcher Training skill gives you +2 Butt-Kicking, Demonology 101 gives you the Demonology trait etc

OK, so Drusilla could get Watcher training so it’s not perfect but it all kinda works.

Everything there is from the TV show.

Setup & Rulebook

Simple really. Setting up Sunnydale is slow but it’s a huge part of the game.

I mentioned this in my Magic the Gathering lookback but I LOVE the deck building part of these games.

The rulebook is very good. It’s not that complicated a game so the rules are nice and clear.

Components & Artwork

The cards are standard quality. The partly opaque thick plastic essence cards are really nice, much better than the standard card ones.

The art is made up of scenes from the TV show which I really like.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

Like any CCG this isn’t going to be easy. Maybe a learning game with open hands until they’re comfortable with the rules? It should only take 1 game.

You can build a deck that contains rules-light cards I guess. You could easily make a deck that has a bit of everything but nothing too complex.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer CCG Summary

So this is a pain, I really enjoyed this game and it ended early. It covered only seasons 1-3 so I guess you could say it covered Buffy in High School completely but there was so much more to explore.

I guess I’m grateful that there weren’t another 4 sets of a fairly expensive CCG but it would have been nice to see cards from Dopplegangland or play as Chipped Spike. I guess we would have had 5 sets of Angel too!

Back to the game that was, it’s really fun. You can play as Buffy or Cordelia and load up on charm and try and get points quickly from completing high-value challenges and avoiding fights.

My fave way to play was as Angelus and fighting everyone! You could pull over opponents characters then beat them down, and complete the odd small value challenge here and there.

I have some good memories of playing this back when the UK had a GenCon. We played all day tournaments and even sealed deck which works well here (You won’t know who your Essense card is until you open it!)

I’m not sure I’ll ever play it again but I still have 2 decks, a full collection and some good memories.

Jesta ThaRogue