Vampire vs. Werewolf

The supermassive rule-crazy Vampires vs. Werewolves VII has come to an end. This was an incredibly weird game. At first I thought it was going to be dreadfully random, what with all the secret roles and the endless list of game-altering items. And indeed there were many points of the game where things just exploded, such as the hilarious night where four people managed to die thanks to convoluted interactions between roles.

I was never really able to wrap my head around everything at once, but some players were, and those players were able to make  brilliant deductions and very clever strategic moves. The endgame actually came down to the very last vampire and the very last werewolf, whereupon the game was decided by… a convoluted interaction between the items those players were carrying. Oops.

I think that’s a weakness in rule-crazy Mafia games. The unpredictable happenstances are definitely amusing, but they do nothing but hurt the game from a strategic standpoint. You can’t really control your own destiny beyond a certain point; no matter how good you are you eventually have to roll the dice. And man, I hate dice. (See previous post re: slot machines.)

I was turned into a vampire fairly late in the game, and ended up losing because the gamestate leaned one way at the very end rather than another. It was almost a spectacular finish though. Just would have been more enjoyable without the blue shell!