If you discard the stake, you’ll kill the vampire without spending one of your precious action points. The Master begins play with Spike, Drusilla and Darla active as his minions, and the goal of killing Buffy.

At around the midway point of the life tracks, the color lightens up, showing that the characters are wounded, and more vulnerable to stakings and sirings. Most of them add a basic action, and some have discard effects as well or instead of the basic actions. The game is broken down into two main phases; the action phase for the players and the monster phase for the baddies, monster of the week and the Big Bad. Unfortunately, Buffy suffers from the same problem that many co-ops share and that’s the problem of quarterbacking or alpha-gamer syndrome. This is a real shame as the artwork that is there is fantastic and if it had been spread across the entire game it would have been wonderful, as it is.You have to work together, using all of your resources — including special abilities for the character that you play, whether Willow, Spike, or Buffy herself — to defend the helpless townies. I only watched a few episodes of the show during it’s initial run in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, but I had plenty of friends who loved the show and consumed everything Buffy. The rules themselves are well explained and laid out in a nice glossy rulebook that also includes an example of play that is always helpful as well as the usual appendix of FAQ and clarifications for the cards and location abilities. The upshot is that there's enough room on the board to lay the cards sideways instead of longways, if the cardboard piece gets too frayed to fit properly. Having to deal with a Monster of the week, while trying to save Townies from regular Vampire and Demons, while also under the looming threat of a Big Bad gives a ‘series arc’ feel to the game.

The Big Bads have somewhat themed plot cards and events but these aren't as strong as they could be and take a little digging to get to.And there are bits of the design of the Buffy board game that demonstrate that this wasn’t a simple cash-in or idle grab for some low-hanging IP. I was just taking my Hero turns and keeping in mind how Townies can become threatened and not thinking about much else. The games mechanics are actually very in-depth for a hasbro title, and create a game environment that is far better than anything I could have thought. Everything is done very professionally with this company and always lets you know every step of the process.

For example, while the Gentlemen are in play no-one can speak, or else a wound is added to the Apocalypse track when a person speaks! And the group will lose some confrontations resulting in the destruction of carefully gathered items. Presumably he is, however, meaning if the good guys can work him down to wounded, Buffy has a decent chance of staking him.As I watch the series now with my youngest daughter, I’m seeing where some of the abilities and card titles came from. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game looks nice, the original artwork is great but there is not enough of it, all the vampire tokens are the same vampire, all the demon tokens are the same demon. My love of board games goes back to my childhood and passion for building relationships with others. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I can’t even recommend it to Buffy fans, unless their entire understanding of the show is to be found in the fandom.