As a fan of the Vampire: The Eternal Struggle card game, I looked forward to playing Nightfall, as it has the added bonus of being about vampires fighting werewolves fighting hunters of monsters. I was also intrigued as it is considered to be part of the growing family of ‘deck building’ games. I was not disappointed, as it has really atmospheric artwork, and excellent synergies between the different cards.

You start the game by dealing out ten cards to each player, which are your starting cards, and all of them are minions that fight for you. You then do a little mini-draft of cards, using a set of cards with ‘draft’ written on them, as each draft card corresponds to a set of cards identical to that draft card. This is a bit fiddly, but it gives each player an ‘archive’ of two cards that only they can use, and defines what cards go into the common pool, similar to the kingdom in Dominion for example.

On your turn you must attack with any minions that you had laid previously, then you can lay cards from your hand on the table in a linked ‘chain’, after which your opponents can add to that chain. Having resolved those cards you can buy new cards from your archive and or the common pool, and then you do a clean up phase of your cards. The turn sequence is simple enough that we found ourselves missing out parts of the turn sequence, which can be crucial if you miss any opportunity to improve the quality of your deck of cards.

Going through combat in detail, each minion has a combat rating, so it might do 0, 2 or even 5 damage. You choose who to attack with each minion, and your opponents block the damage with their own minions, or take damage to their deck by adding ‘wound’ cards to their discard pile. You rotate minions when they take damage, as each side of the card has a number of chevrons corresponding to its remaining ‘hit points’. Once you have resolved combat you put your minions in your discard pile or remove them from the game if they are one of your ten starting minions (with some exceptions), so they rarely hang around on the table. 

When you get to laying cards, they have a large coloured moon in one corner, and either one or two small coloured moons next to it. If you lay a card with a small purple moon and a small red moon, you (or another player) can lay a card with a large purple moon or large red moon on top of it (creating a chain of cards with a sequence of corresponding moons). If you buy cards from the archive and common pool carefully, you can have the right set of cards in your deck to create really good chains.

Every card has its own special abilities, so once every player has had a chance to lay cards, you then resolve them in reverse order, with each player resolving their own cards. These abilities allow you to draw extra cards, destroy minions, do damage to another player and so on. Some of these cards will also be minions, so once you have resolved the ability you place the minion in front of you, ready to defend an enemies attack, and then attack an opponent on your subsequent turn (if they survive).

Then you get on to buying new cards, and every card has a cost between 2 and 6 ‘influence’. You automatically get 2 influence in each turn, but you can also discard cards from your hand for 1 influence per card. So in the early part of the game you tend to keep discarding cards to bring new cards into your deck, because you get to draw them again in a subsequent turn anyway.

During the clean up phase, you really need to get rid of your wound cards, because they clog up your deck and hand management. You can discard any number of wound cards and draw 2 cards for each wound discarded, after which you draw cards so that you have 5 in your hand if you don’t already. So even if you are getting beaten badly, by discarding wounds you can get a lot of cards into your hand, but this doesn’t help if you haven’t managed to build a decent deck of cards by this point.

It takes a couple of games to get used to the basics, what with the chevrons, the coloured moons and the special abilities and so on. Slow learners will definitely get beaten on a regular basis, and get beaten badly. In a multiplayer game this is alleviated by cross-table alliances, but if you cant get the concept of chaining cards to each other you are rarely going to win.

You continue to play until you get to the bottom of the wound deck, and then each player counts up the number of wounds they have suffered. The player that suffered the least wounds wins the game, so you can modify the playing time by increasing or decreasing the number of wound cards. The number of wound cards already varies depending on the number of players in the game.

The win conditions therefore lead to a situation where you try to spread the damage around and take as little damage as possible, to make sure that everyone has more wound cards than you. In a two player game you need to be quick in building your deck and get some damage on your opponent early, because once you have a few wound cards in your deck it really slows you down. Once one player is behind by a margin of 5 wounds or so it can be difficult to recover and reduce that margin of loss.

The artwork in Nightfall is great, the cards are good quality and the game is really interesting in terms of design and game play. It can be unforgiving however, you don’t have much time to explore different strategies in buying cards, and with all of the different options it can be confusing. It is worth persevering though, as Nightfall can be very rewarding when you get your deck working smoothly.