A brief synopsis…
Photo by Marko Saari
Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (VTES) is a multi-player card game based on the popular role playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade, and part of White Wolf Publishing’s World of Darkness series.
You, the player, take on the role of a “Methuselah” – an ancient vampire, who manipulates the actions of younger vampires to wage war against his or her rival Methuselahs (the other players at the table) by destroying their power and influence in the world. This is done by removing all your rival’s “Pool” from the game.
To play the game, players come to the table with their own custom built deck. Each deck consists of two stacks of cards — a Crypt (aka the Vampires), which has to include at least 12 cards, and a Library that can be between 60-90 cards.
Each player starts the game with 30 pool counters, which represents both the life of the player and is the main currency of the game. Players will spend most of their pool to “influence out” each of their Vampire minions (every vampire has a cost of between 1 to 11 pool), who can take actions against the other players, as well as defend their controller’s pool from outside attack.
Graphic by VEKN.Net
The game moves clockwise around the table, with each player getting their own turn to have their minions perform actions. The game uses a Predator-Prey relationship between all the players at the table. Every player is focused primarily on ousting the Methuselah on their left-hand side (Prey), while defending themselves from attacks by the Methuselah to their right-hand side (Predator).
Once a Methuselah’s Pool has reached zero (0), they are automatically removed from the game and their Predator receives a Victory Point and gains six pool. At the end of the game, the player with the most Victory Points wins.
VTES has many diverse strategies to achieve victory. Players are also encouraged to make deals around the table in order to aid weakened players from being ousted too soon or to slow down other players from being too dominate and running away with a quick victory.