What is missing from VtES?

jamesatzephyr wrote:

I'm not at all sure why a combat deck should be able to win the game on turn 3 or 4, by eating more or less everyone's first and second vampire. Pick a solid multi-rush deck and boom.

I'm also unsure why a terrible player doing something stupid like putting out a bunch of terrible weenie minions should make the game just end after twenty minutes.

A deck that can pull off 10 rushes and 10 guaranteed burned vamps in 3-4 turns would surely currently dominate the TWD archive. So I respectfully call bullshit on that If anything; if a player can get VP's for burning minions, it WILL become harder to burn minions as people will adapt their decks to that.

Realistically, I suspect this will just give combat decks a little boost.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Completely undermining the predator-prey mechanic, the push-pull of spending pool and defending pool, and just turning the table into a free-for-all punch fest should weigh heavily on the "not so beneficial" side of the equation.

True, so award VP's for burning your prey or predator's minions only, check

As for your other comments, that's exactly what I want to offset.
I would like to see 4-8 (1-1.5 hours) round games, not 8-12 (2 hours or timeout) round games.
I also suspect game length is a major factor for a dwindling player base.

There are two ways to do that, drastically change the cards in the game (painful and hard) or change the victory conditions (cheap and easy).

I'm gonna work on this idea some more and propose it to my playgroup(s) in at least trying it out, it might be something worthwhile or totally crap. Best way to find out is to playtest and ignore doomsaying

GreyB wrote:

True, so award VP's for burning your prey or predator's minions only, check

So you get a VP for stopping another player playing? great — that sounds like so much fun (not).

As it stands, it's not in the combat decks interest to crater their prey. It make's it harder to oust them (on 20+ pool) and their next prey will receive no pressure. In a 5 player game that means the combat deck then receives a lot of pressure.

You can will with combat decks; but they're a challenge to win with and that's not a bad thing.

Ke. wrote:

So you get a VP for stopping another player playing? great — that sounds like so much fun (not).

So we should stop awarding VP for ousting players?

I've said it before, I see no difference between receiving a world of hurt from a bleed/vote or rush deck. If I can't defend against a certain deck, my game is ruined anyways. If I know I am going to be bled or voted to death, moving forward will only help my predator, result "I CANT PLAY".

The "not being able to play" argument is and always was a bullshit argument.

Ke. wrote:

As it stands, it's not in the combat decks interest to crater their prey. It make's it harder to oust them (on 20+ pool) and their next prey will receive no pressure. In a 5 player game that means the combat deck then receives a lot of pressure.

So the 1 VP for demolishing your prey/predator's vamps will make combat decks a bit more viable, check.

Ke. wrote:

You can will with combat decks; but they're a challenge to win with and that's not a bad thing.

Exactly, it's much harder to win with a combat strategy than with any other strategy, therefor combat needs some help. Not proposing to make combat more painful, but give it a VP option.


The main purpose for a VP system change is to speed the game up however.
Play around with objectives until we reach an average play time of 1 to 1.5 hours.
I just gave an example. Don't like what I propose? Put in your own suggestions, work with the idea or simply abolish the idea.

The 2 hour average play time IS a problem.
You reach a mexican standoff nearly every game, thats nearly an hour every game just sitting around waiting for an opportunity with only trivial actions to perform. With a VP system change, you can make that 1 waisted hour more interactive and shorten the game time.

GreyB wrote:

Ke. wrote:

So you get a VP for stopping another player playing? great — that sounds like so much fun (not).

So we should stop awarding VP for ousting players?

I've said it before, I see no difference between receiving a world of hurt from a bleed/vote or rush deck. If I can't defend against a certain deck, my game is ruined anyways. If I know I am going to be bled or voted to death, moving forward will only help my predator, result "I CANT PLAY".

The "not being able to play" argument is and always was a bullshit argument.

Allow me to point out the elephant in the room: VTES includes strategies that make it a shitty game. Combat decks and wall decks that don't bleed/remove pool and make the game not fun to play? That makes VTES a shitty game that is not fun to play. This is true at least for constructed multi-player games. There is no reliable way to always mitigate "not fun" strategies in constructed play, hence all the hand-wringing about timeouts and how much "not fun" these strategies are. So what's missing from VTES in my opinion is the existence of preconstructed decks that will interact well in a two-player game. This is a different way to play than constructed multi-player games, and it may not be for everybody, but I've had fun playing using preconstructed decks in two-player games. And it has the benefit of completely removing the shitty parts of the game.

Other games also have this issue. It's not exclusive to VtES. Ever played against a pure counterspell deck in magic? No one ever said it was fun, but it's totally a legit strategy.

Vtes 2 player, the way our group does it:
Don't include bounce library cards. (Telepathic Misdirection, ect.)
Start with 4 transfers.
We didn't try and muddy it up with this or that. Just make simple changes and move on.

GreyB wrote:

So we should stop awarding VP for ousting players?

No, it's one thing to oust players quickly and a completely different thing to deny them a chance to even act. Preventing a player from taking or blocking a single action only does their prey good, it completely unbalances the table and typically means your grand prey will win.

A combat deck that destroys it's preys minions without a viable ousting strategy is counter productive — the quicker players learn this, the better.