Nice to read you are thinking about VampiRing!


1 - The Dark Mirror (vampire reverses damage)
2 - The Stone Sacellum (vampire doesn't move)
3 - The Black Ring (vampire doesn't metamorphose)
4 - The House's Horn (vampire goes Home)
5 - The Silver Dagger (vampire hits double)


Well, firstly some of your names for the cards are clearly better than mine.

Bearing in mind what you have said about the imponderability of extra possibilities, we looked at the game mechanics to make things simpler and with a slight change things work quite well.

I enjoy the challenge of working out where your best move is going to be but I find with four players there are so many possibilities that my decisions at least early in the game are purely about survival - only when the players have been eliminated do I look to be more aggressive.

So what we did was make the game more complex and more simple.

We divided the action cards into two categories -

Game state changes - these we defined as cards that effect all players -

Only move clockwise
Only transform in one way
Glue
Changing the nature of a specific block
No damage
Double damage etc

Some of these cards make our game more predictable since they are played prior to the movement and transformation being picked. The choices that players make will be influenced by these cards.

Then once these changes had been revealed we allowed players to play Movement and transformation as well as impact cards:

Impact changes

These cards usually effect only one player and would be targeted accordingly

Poison
Healing
Stumble etc

We haven't play tested the new idea but th theory seems sound