Can you defeat or sneak past vampires to complete your objectives in Ancient Blood – Order of the Vampire Hunters a story-driven cooperative game with standalone and campaign game play from Dark Gate Games?

Pros

• Solo Play
• Aesthetic
• Dungeon Crawl
• Campaign/Standalone

Cons

• Campaign/Standalone
• Price Point
• Early Bird

The Page

I like Gamefound pages because it makes it so much easier to navigate. And you can see everything all at once in terms of navigation. But that really isn’t the point of talking about the page. But I will say that the rules section is good and because I can navigate directly to there I don’t mind that it’s later on the page. Also if you want to see the miniatures you can see them as well and they are fairly grotesque.

The Game

The game play looks interesting with elements of choose your own adventure and dungeon crawl and boss fights in it. I watched the BoardGameCo video on it which tells a whole lot more about how the game plays:

It is tricky to talk about because, like he said, the information on how the campaign plays is limited in his video. And it’s fairly limited on the the page as well. This isn’t all that odd for games because you don’t want to spoil the story. But it also feels like I’m just getting general details on how the campaign will work and not details. Even for the game play it feels a little bit light as to how the game actually works.

That said, I do like the fact that there are morning and night time phases of the game. And as expected, vampires don’t like the sun. Also as expected, they are dangerous at the night. Alex from BoardGameCo talks about how he lured a group of six vampires into a room, busted open the window and dusted all of them.

But that does lead to another question/concern for me. Some cooperative games with a solo mode have what is called true solo. That means you can play it controlling a single character to play the game. This doesn’t appear to be the case. This looks like you either have specific numbers of characters that need to go into a scenario or you need to play four. Now, in the video that didn’t seem to be a problem for Alex, but will it be for me. I think it’s something worth noting that might trip some people up.

Back or Brick

So is this game a back or a brick? I really want to back it, but for me it’s a Brick. With that said, it’s more the time of the year and finances that are keeping it from being a back. The game play sounds very interesting and vampire hunting as a concept for a game I really like. But even if finances were readily available for this Gamefound Crowdfunding Campaign, I’m not sure I’d back it.

Why, because I have a lot of campaign board games. I have beat three of them, Gloomhaven, Tainted Grail The Fall of Avalon, and Sword & Sorcery. I have games like Etherfields, ISS Vanguard, Isofarian Guard, Oathsworn, and let’s not forget about Frosthaven coming in. And I have games like Solomon Kane, HexploreIt, Midarra, and more on my shelf too play. What about this game stands out over the others I want to play? For me it’s mainly the theme, which might not be enough.

Plus, the price, which I didn’t talk about but I put as a con, is a little bit higher. I think that the Slayer Pledge is a solid value, but the Hunter Pledge seems a little bit steep. This is a campaign that I’d want to see what all gets unlocked before I back it. Because just with what there is now, or what there was at the start, it seems a bit light compared to an Awaken Realms, Mythic Games, or CMON project.

How about for you, is this a back or a brick?

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