Vampire: The Masquerade – Rivals Expandable Card Game

I put this right after the catapults in the category of “how the hell did they not get sued when they released it?” The catapults, at least, made a serious effort to move away from Hasbro’s old little monster. Here, I see the MtG Portal of Jyhad/VtES: different art, different names, the same keywords, and a sense of familiarity that does not try particularly hard to hide.

At its core, Rivals keeps the theme and the multiplayer gameplay that make VtES, for me, the best CCG/LCG for four or more players. The difference is that it gets there without piles of tiring rules pages and without those battles that can really get on your nerves. The basic promise is clear: the politics and tension of the vampire world, in a more direct and accessible form.

That also changes how the interaction sits at the table. The game aims to preserve VtES’s multiplayer feel without forcing you to constantly untangle heavy procedure or exhausting conflicts. For a new audience, that lighter flow could easily be its strongest point, especially if the group is already used to playing multiplayer LCGs.

Coming from VtES, though, I was left with the same taste of disappointment that Federation Commander had given me after five years of Star Fleet Battles with an opponent who genuinely knew the game. It felt too slight, too light, and, oddly enough, relatively difficult for me to get into its rhythm. I would place it firmly in the “try before you buy” camp—unless you are a group that often plays multiplayer LCGs. A group of friends of mine in England, who played a lot of four-player AGoT LCG, had written epic comments about this one, and I can completely understand why.