Vampire the Masquerade: Rivals ECG - Core Set

I've enjoyed my plays of this game so far. Primarily I play this 2 players with my partner, so there is one note. It recommends you play Toreador vs Brujah as your first game, however the decks are tuned for 3+ players, so for the Brujah deck you'll have to swap out the agenda. Otherwise this has been an enjoyable game and brings back the feelings of playing the old CCG Vampire the Eternal Struggle.

I am a huge believer in the concept of the competitive expandable card game, having been an early adopter of Netrunner, Doomtown, and L5R. VtM Rivals is no Netrunner, and coming here and expecting that level of mechanical sophistication and smoothness of play will leave you disappointed. In many ways, I'd say the card game VTM Rivals is most like is Doomtown, with support for up to 4 players -- and, unlike Doomtown, I think VTM Rivals does a pretty good job of supporting that format! VTM Rivals assigns each player a Rival, and, while they can attack anyone, only killing your Rival (or otherwise achieving your personal goal condition) is ultimately going to win you the game. Unfortunately, I don't know that the base mechanics of the game are good enough to give the game the lasting power that a card game needs. Every mechanic feels just slightly unrefined, like I'm playtesting something that still needs tweaking to find the actual fun. And there are many, many disparate mechanics! A card game being easy to teach is so important to supporting a community, and VTM Rivals is not exactly that. It ultimately feels like a rough draft of a much better game. Is it worth playing? Yeah, I think it's interesting if you're into card games, and I imagine you're gonna be able to pick it up relatively cheaply. We'll see where it goes with future expansions, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.