Vampire: the masquerade - Blood Feud

About

4-32 Players | 120-180 minutes

Category: Fantasy, Horror, Mafia, Negotiation, Political

Mechanisms: Action Points, Area Majority / Influence, Auction/Bidding, Modular Board, Role Playing, Simultaneous Action Selection, Storytelling, Team-Based Game, Time Track, Trading, Variable Phase Order, Variable Player Powers

Vampire: The Masquerade – Blood Feud is a highly thematic, team-based, strategic game that plays 4-32 players and is run by 1-2 storytellers who also interact and play. The game integrates the very popular story world of Vampire: The Masquerade where players can play as a warring vampire clan or a human faction in the fight for New York City. Teams choose their ambitions, allowing for multiple paths to victory, such as being bloodthirsty, manipulative, greedy, or somewhere in-between.

The game features heavy narrative and special scenarios that encourage the player to role play. Each individual player gets their own unique backstory and can customize their character with super natural abilities as the game progresses.

Blood Feud is dubbed a “Mega Board Game” because of its size and scope. It takes multiple tables and a large space to place as players collaborate and move through different game stations. However, unlike a traditional mega game, Blood Feud can be run by a single game master, provides more structure and clarity, and has a play time of only a few hours rather than half a day.

More info can be found on the Vampire: The Masquerade - Blood Feud Kickstarter.

PROVIDED SERVICES

• Editing

• Proofing

PROJECT OVERVIEW

My role was lead editor and proofer for the game rulebook, all components, and related files. I worked as part of a small team at Brieger Creative. I had an assistant editor / proofer assisting me, and a graphics team member I worked closely with that laid out the final graphic design for the files. I also worked with Blood Feud’s game designer to clarify game rules.

This project was quite large! The rulebook ended up at 104 pages. There were 400+ cards, 17 game boards, and several involved punchout boards full of special tokens. There were several additional files like game box text and player reference sheets. Overall this required several rounds of careful editing and proofing. Adjustments were made between each version of the project as the client and IP holders required some fundamental changes and had new ideas to make the game as good as possible. For most graphics, such as game setup images and game examples, I created rough placeholders for the graphic designer to use as a guide for their final work.

Project Highlight: HIRING A Game Developer for Editing

My official role on this project was editing and proofing. However, this job would have been impractical and resulted in a much lower quality if left to a standard copy editor. I have the distinct advantage of also being an accomplished board game designer and developer, as well as being an avid game player, so I’m able to bring a unique skillset and perspective to any project I work on.

Rules often needed to be expanded or adjusted due to issues I brought up. On a few occassions, I realized the potential to streamline sections of the game to deliver the same experience in less complex yet equally engaging ways that the designer then later implemented. For instance, Ambition cards that could previously be bought at the Marketplace and the Council were moved to just the Council Station to make that role more special and relieve the large amount of interaction already happening at the Marketplace. Another case was the number of Bonus actions at each station was condensed to be easier to process and have each tier of bonus actions be more meaningful. I shifted around information among the game’s boards and even which boards were at certain stations for cleaner gameplay. Recognizing the way player pieces would be used and having a basic understanding of game manufacturing, I caught some late overlooked issues like double-sided punchboards that had incompatible layouts on each side and character ID cards needing letter labels to be quickly identified. There were several user interactions I helped cleaned up, like consolidating face down decks and their discard piles into single face up decks that made better use of table space and avoided unneeded re-shuffling.

Using the mindset of a player, I was able to figure out how to best layout the rulebook in a logical, clear fashion that worked well for learning the game and as an easy reference. The mega board game was essentially four interconnected games at once, so the rules had to be super clear for each part and appropriately tied together. The setup section went through heavy re-writes to accomodate how the experience would actually play out - game master does initial prep, players form teams, and then final setup based on player choices - minimizing downtime and keeping the up to 32 players organized. Faction guides were a late addition and it was largely up to me to decide how to present their unique combination of art, flavor text, special setup, rules, and strategy tips. I worked terminology changes into the game including “combat strength” and “miniatures” that was more familiar and intuitive to all players.