Game Overview: The Hunger, or Forever and Ever Lasts Only 15 Rounds

At first glance, Richard Garfield's The Hunger sounds like the second coming of Paul Dennen's 2016 game Clank!: Both are deck-building games in which you start in a shared location, then travel along a branching network of paths to collect things, with the need to return to a safe zone before the end of the game because otherwise you automatically lose.

Actually, at second glance they're still pretty similar.

That said, The Hunger can be treated as its own thing because the game feels less generic than Clank! in its subject matter, and it provides different incentives to players for what they might want to do.

In the game, you are all vampires, and you are spending the night traveling the nearby land to feed on humans. The game lasts 15 rounds, and if you are not back to safety at the end of that time, the penetrating rays of the sun will make you wonder why you didn't order through GrubHub instead —although I suppose that you can feed on only one or two delivery people before they stop providing service to your castle.

Every player starts with the same deck, and on a turn you have only three cards in hand with which to do things, namely move somewhere, then hunt. Your starting cards have a decent number of movement points, and you can move as many spaces as the number of points on the cards you play on your turn — but whatever you don't spend on movement can be used for hunting, albeit with a general restriction of only one hunt per turn. Too much bloodshed makes the human targets antsy, I suppose.

The sun creeps in to threaten us...

The hunt board has one more row than the number of players, and each turn you slide unchosen cards to less expensive hunting grounds — from a hunting cost of 3 to 2 to 1, with cards eventually piling up on the 1 location — to put out fresh meat. Aside from humans, the hunting deck features new vampiric powers and familiars, creatures that will stay in play by your side to grant you new abilities.

While humans as a rule make a good meal, some humans are better — or let us say, more agreeable to the system — than others. Humans range from 1-5 points, and they often feature special powers that will have you second guessing whether you should dine on them because like plenty of other food that's a bit rich for your system, humans keep repeating on you. When you acquire new cards, you place them in your discard pile, which means when you shuffle those cards to form a new deck, humans will end up in your three-card hand, and most humans have 0 movement points — which is understandable given that you have transformed that mobile individual into a legless bolus that's now making you feel bloated. In general, the more you eat, the worse you'll feel.

Check out my sectarian six-pack

That said, you'll probably still keep feeding on people as otherwise you'll go hungry and your competing vampires will laugh at your measly bloodcount on the scoring track. The challenge is to eat the right people and juice your digestive tract to keep them passing through your system without stopping. Some vampiric powers let you draw an extra card or two when you start the turn with a human in hand, while another grants you bonus movement points. Certain locations on the game board allow you to digest a human of the proper type, removing them from your deck entirely, although the memory of that meal still stays with you, which can be important for endgame scoring.

You start the game with a mission tile, keeping one of two that you were dealt, and over the course of the game you can stop at crypts to pick up additional missions. Some give you a special power you can use once during the game, while most allow you to score points based on how well you complete the listed task. You might score extra for feeding on humans worth only 1 or 2 points, for example; or for eating more humans of a certain type than everyone else; or for collecting bonus tokens from the game board, each of which is worth 2 points and carries a tiny bonus power; or for reaching the labyrinth at the end of the path and collecting a rose to show how soulful you are.

The victims have been bled

With crypts and bonus tokens and wells that let you hunt a second time (but only on the 1 track) and locations that aid your digestive processes and a single tavern that offers three random cards for a low, low price, you'll find yourself pulled in many directions on the game board, often wanting to travel further than everyone else since you'll then have first crack at the daily specials revealed at the start of the next round.

The trouble comes from you not realizing how much those meals slow you down later. I've now played five times on a review copy from Renegade Game Studios, the English-language partner of Origames, the original French publisher, and inevitably in their first playing people find themselves lumbering toward home in the second half of the game, barely moving due to all the blood they're carrying.

The most ambitious eater I've seen to date

On the novice side of the game board, the safety zone encompasses all of the mountains, with you losing 5 to 25 points depending on how far away from home you end up — yet despite those negatives staring you in the face, you often spend the last turn or two trying to justify one more meal. Surely I'll move two spaces next turn, right? That will make my penalty only -10 instead of -15, which means it makes sense to eat all of these cards on the 1 space, right?

With more experience, though, you get a better sense of how quickly you go through your deck, which means you can better judge how many times you might have your meals pass through your hands, which means you can better assess what to eat when and how it affects your movement and what the value of a mission might be. These assessments will be complicated by the player count, however, because you'll see far fewer cards in a two-player game, which means your efforts to collect, say, members of the nobility depend more on chance since less of the deck will be revealed.

For more thoughts on gameplay, details of how turns unfold, and examples of missions available, check out this overview video: