• Game: Bloodsuckers
• Publisher: Fireside Games
• Designer: Justin and Anne-Marie DeWitt
• Genre: Area control card battler
• Players: 2-4
• Playtime: 20-60 minutes



• What's Hot: Good theme integration; some novel concepts including great content presentation; highly approachable and easy to play; offers an unusual team-based game in a genre that typically tops out at two players; homespun charm



• What's Not: Workmanlike; not particularly inspired or innovative; card variety/balance is questionable

by: Michael Barnes

Fireside Games came out of nowhere in 2009 with Castle Panic, a simple family-friendly title that managed to bring co-op tower defense gameplay effectively to the tabletop in a highly accessible, tightly designed package. Their 2011 issue is Bloodsuckers, a 2-4 player card battler with mechanics that fall somewhere in between Knizia’s Battle Line and a CCG. It’s framed in a modern vampire theme not unlike AEG’s Nightfall. Unlike that open-ended deckbuilding game, Bloodsuckers is self-contained and features only two fixed decks, although partnership team play is available. Like Castle Panic, it’s a simple and approachable design. Unfortunately, the game isn’t quite as singular or unique despite some very well-implemented elements.

It’s a typical, modern Vampires versus Hunters scenario in the Blade tradition—meaning that the humans go machine gun-to-fang with the titular bloodsuckers. The struggle depicted is not only for the five locations representing the town of Blackwoood, but also for the surviving citizens. In a given round, a location is selected from a stand-up easel that indicates the number of neutral characters at that location, which in turns sets the number of contested cards for the subsequent turns. The hospital will be a simultaneous fight over five different survivor cards, the Church over three. In this way, it’s also possible to control the length of the game by limiting locations played in a game.

Once a location is selected, play occurs across a mat where the survivor cards are placed. Both Vampire and Hunter players assign character cards to each contest, with the characters all bringing a single special effect to the battle. Over the course of the battle (which occurs over an abstract 24 hour period including day and night phases with attendant bonuses) players get to do three actions (which are bankable for later) to perform various functions. The chief action is to play attack cards that increase a counter on the back of each character card. Attack cards are not cumulative, so only the most currently played card’s numerical value is recorded. Various effects can jostle numbers up and down, and at the end of the battle whichever marker is highest on the card’s scoring track wins the character.

One of the neat things about the game is that the characters are double-faced so that each can represent a Vampire or a Hunter. The idea is essentially that you’re recruiting more vamps or Van Helsings to join the fight. There are other variables, including Impact cards that offer typical card game effects and Strikes, which can eliminate vampires or cause Hunters to get bitten. Of course, bitten Hunters turn into vampires at dusk. There are also Dodge cards to trump Strikes.

Effectively, the game is a fairly standard “contested location” card game not unlike several Knizia games of this nature or more recent examples such as John Clowdus’ Omen: Rage of War. It definitely works, apart from some questionable card balance and a lack of variety in card types, but it also feels a little too workmanlike despite its cool theme and some nice tension generated by the one-upping ro-sham-bo gameplay. It just doesn’t have that out-of-the-blue sense of surprise that Castle Panic’s concept did. Instead, it feels like a fairly standard, good-but-not-great hobby market card game.

The team play rules are a differentiator, as most games of this genre tend to be two players. That being said, I found the team play to be fairly unsatisfying and my better games were typically head-to-head affairs. But I do like that the option is there, and it does speak to Fireside’s commitment to provide families with fun games with good themes and lots of interaction. The problem is that adding more players really just increases the number of shuffling score counters on each character card, there isn’t as much co-op style codependency as there ought to be.