New Game Round-up: Blood Feuds in Vampire: The Masquerade, and a Battle for Survival in Final Girl

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. You may play as one of the warring vampire clans such as Ventrue, Tremere, Gangrel, or Toreador, or perhaps you'll chaoose to become one of the human factions fighting for their own desires, such as City Hall, the Mafia, or the Arcanum, with many more from which to choose.

Additionally, the game integrates the story world of Vampire: The Masquerade by adding storyteller scenarios that add an optional narrative approach to the game. Players also gain disciplines, which give them powerful supernatural abilities unique to their character. Lastly, teams will choose their ambitions, which allow for multiple paths to victory, such as being bloodthirsty, manipulative, greedy, or somewhere in between.

Blood Feud is dubbed a "Mega Board Game" because unlike a traditional board game, it isn't played at a single table. Blood Feud requires a large room or two separate rooms with 2-4 tables. One game table features the Cityscape and Orders, the map where players move their forces around the city and order them to fight and take control of important territories. The other game table features the Council and Market, where players use their best diplomatic and resource management skills to make sly trades, buy upgrades and player level-ups, and make large political decisions that will shape the destinies of teams to determine whether they win or lose! In order to win the game, teams earn victory points through the completion of legacies, which are secret objectives that can consist of all sorts of tasks and achievements earned through gameplay.

In this culmination of the Hostage Negotiator series, you will play ten years in the life of a negotiator — that is, if you don't retire in shame sooner. In each "year" or campaign round of the game, you will resolve a career card that presents you with some narrative event that relates to or could impact your career based on the choice you make. Then, in most but not all years, you will be called to the scene of the latest hostage situation. Now, the result of each negotiation will impact the overall campaign and you'll be tracking your career stress, your personal stress, your merit level (for promotions), and your rank, among other things.

After the negotiation, you resolve a personal card and are once again faced with a narrative event to resolve and, based on the result of your negotiation in that "year", will be rewarded (or reprimanded) accordingly.

Playing on a famous horror movie trope, Final Girl is a solitaire-only game that puts the player in the shoes of a female protagonist who must kill the slasher if she wants to survive.

In game terms, Final Girl shares similarities with Hostage Negotiator, but with some key differences that change it up, including a game board to track locations and character movement. You can choose from multiple characters when picking someone to play and multiple killers when picking someone to play against. Killers and locations each have their own specific terror cards that will be shuffled together to create a unique experience with various combinations of scenarios for you to play!