The game includes a stand-up holder for Evil cards, which allows them to stand up and still remain hidden from the good players. The player characters have special abilities that are thematic to the Buffy universe; Giles is good at finding things, Willow can do more stuff with magic, Xander can help everyone, Spike and Buffy are good fighters and Angel is good at manipulating the artefact deck to the players advantage. While this is sufficient for a number of games (I’m not bored, yet, after 20+ plays), true Buffy fans are going to long for more content to keep things interesting over the years. One black die is the Evil die, rolled to see just how many bad guys get to move in a given turn, indicated by the size and number of white flames on the side of the die facing up.

The event cards are, again, very generic and lack a deep sense of theme - one card restricts movement to a certain number of spaces without much of an explanation as to why, others stop the special abilities of locations again without explanation or thematic description. However, the ease of getting powerful items is off set with the danger of drawing an artefact that is unhelpful, such as the box of Gavrok adding further complications that needed to be solved by the players. The Buffyverse needs Cordelia, Oz, Anya, Tara, Dawn, Dark Willow, Faith and so many more to feel “complete. It’s no more aggravating in theory than rolling a dice, but you can’t mask the fact that this brings a massive dose of ‘Lol, draw better cards’ into the design space of play and it’s incompatible with how the rest of the game plays.Finally, when three monsters of the week have been defeated and their three clues collected the Big Bad will reveal itself, changing the board in some way unique to them, and adding effects to event cards.

Cue this third attempt at a Buffy board game, this time from Jasco Games who think they can nail it. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Board Game, you help Buffy and her friends defend the town of Sunnydale from an onslaught of vampires and demons, while ultimately attempting to foil the big bad\'s plot and prevent the Hellmouth from opening. Unfortunately, threaded into this are some of the most frustrating interlinking game systems that I have seen for a long time. The game doesn’t replicate the show’s stories in anything but the vaguest terms, and it doe Before any of that happens you’ve got to decide what characters will be entering the fray and just who the Big Bad is going to be.If the Apocalypse Tract fills up with dead townies and accumulated wounds to Buffy and her gang it is game over. A board game can only cover so much ground, so when you’re playing with people who can recite lines from the show and know why certain thematic elements are used, it’s much more fun. Because Cordelia and especially Oz and Tara are omitted, the tangled dating web and confused sexuality topics are avoided. Skillful play can mitigate these things to an extent, but there are games where you just get hosed by fate.