“I once met a man from an old land, who told me of the creatures of the night please understand,
he was a hunter by trade, before me a bloody wooden stake he laid, he muttered the blood is the life,
looking at it I wonder why not use a knife, I asked what he did hunt with a stake, he said vampires before they wake, he used the stake I had no doubt, I said the dead do not go out, he knew I did not believe
so he did apologize and took his leave.” — The Poette
Now that I have the new 7TV v2 rules, I wanted to try them out of the tabletop to see how they ran. So, it was the next game up with my Tuesday night gaming group. I pulled out my case of Pulp figures and some Crescent Root buildings and headed to the shop.
I was hoping for four players, but I only got three. So, I divided the forces into three hunting parties. I would play the objective, a vampire. I set up a village table, spreading out the buildings and placing a little scatter terrain. Each force would be twenty points. I allowed each player to select their own team and provided the figures to them.
The board had six objectives. One would be the vampire sleeping, while the others were just victory points. The player would have to use a star or co star to check/claim the points. If that character got knocked down or eliminated, they would drop the point and it could be picked up by any model.
Once the vampire was found (it would be on a roll of one or the last objective (whichever came first), It would activate last each turn. It needed to be captured and carried off. To be captured, it could either be captured or eliminated. The first time it was eliminated, it would return with D3 wounds at the end of the round. So it would be a difficult pray!
To make things harder, the players could not attack one another, until the final act portion of play. The exception is that they could attack, if no other models could see the attacking model! We rolled up random entry points and got started.
The different groups went though the town and search the buildings to find the Vampire. We were about half way through the deck until it finally happened.Fortunately for the hunters, they were able to get two wounds on the dark master before he even got out of his coffin!
The vampire awoke and immediately turned to a bat and flew away from the surrounding foes. Everyone made a mad rush to catch him and were able to put on the last wound. The vampire was down! Then the turn ended and the evil menace raised like a specter and was back to take his revenge (with two wounds to boot).
The Vampire started to dominate players and turned them against themselves. With the final act now in play, the galant hunters all turned against one another to take the prize. As dawn was minutes away, the Vampire used his powers to fly away to safety. They he galant adventurers then stood standing around looking at each other wondering what happened….
The game ended with all teams still having their stars in play. A couple of extras had been Eliminated and the vampire wounded. It would come down to objective tokens collected. When counting up the gold coins, it was professor Smedley and has rag tag crew that came away with the victory and maybe enough Shekels to launch another expedition.
The game played well generally. The new cards helped a lot, as there was much less confusion about special rules than in the past. The no combat scenario rule had the unplanned effect of ensuring that all the players had large token pools at the end of the game. So, I will not be doing that again! Splitting the deck into three players was probably a mistake. It worked fine, but resulted in players having to wait a little too long for their turn to come around. It is clear that you really should only have two sides with 7TV, even if that means multiple players per side. That has been my approach before and I think it will be better for me to stick to in the future.
- Manteuffel