Those who aren’t fans of the show have a harder time. First, since they don’t know the lore, it’s harder to get into the game. There’s a lot of, “Wait, who is this person?”“What does this mean?” and “Why is this important?” questioning that goes on. Also, non-fans seem less tolerant of the game’s breezy play style. They seem to expect something deeper, more challenging, and thinkier and are often (in my experience, anyway) disappointed with Buffy. During each round, each player is given four action tokens to spend as desired to move through the town, fight monsters, conduct research, or use their character’s special ability. Players take turns using one token at a time until all tokens are spent. Players should work together to determine the best use of their actions to stave off the monster invasion and protect the townies. Plot cards for the Big Bads. Given this is a co-operative game it’s also quite flexible when it comes to players dropping in and out – someone can simply action their characters on their behalf. Conclusion Buffy is a challenging game and will become more challenging as time goes on, but the challenge curve is linear. It gets gradually harder rather than rapidly escalating to a point of unfixable horror like you see in Pandemic. I’m not 100% convinced that’s a more emotionally accessible design – I think it probably comes down to individual preferences. Would you rather be instantly killed by a tiger bite or slowly asphyxiated by a python? If Pandemic is the former, Buffy is the latter. It makes the challenge more tractable but at the cost of potentially putting you in the position where you have failed a few turns before you realise it. Throughout the game, you’ll also be able to collect items and artifacts to boost your skills and help you fight. Events will pop up that direct you to place more vampires and demons on the board, as well as causing detrimental effects to the heroes. Every time you think you’re making headway, you’ll face some new peril that threatens to undermine your heroic efforts.

It’s a solid design, attached to an appropriate premise. Unfortunately, threaded into this are some of the most frustrating interlinking game systems that I have seen for a long time. It feels like it has design sensibilities that were out-dated even ten years ago and it just doesn’t really fly in this day and age.For a semi-co-operative game, the interaction is minimal. For the majority of the game, you’re just doing your own thing. There’s not really any reasons to need to work together, aside from just taking a bad guy each. And there’s no real way to sabotage others, making it a little unnecessary to even have a winner. This could probably just be a co-op game. Closing Comments on Legendary Buffy Worse, it feels like a game that hasn’t realised that games about a franchise should be about the franchise and not about the fandom. All the framings in Buffy are intensely targeted to the jargon and language of the fanbase, rather than the language and stylings of the show. The ‘big bad’, the ‘monster of the week’, the ‘townies’. It’s all part of the metatextual terminology of the fans and I find that off-putting. Ironically, this could have been a fantastic feature of the game because the television show was nothing if not knowing. It understood the ridiculousness of some of its conceits and played with them. It was self-aware of its own tropes and not afraid to make fun of them. It was cheerfully irreverent of its own mythology and that was one its most genuinely endearing elements. Here we have that laudable feature, but applied in entirely the wrong direction. It’s not fan service. It’s fan fan service. It’s one level too far removed from what would make this element extraordinarily effective. It’s bit like a Buffy game designed by a Pandemic fan that only knew the show through the conventions of its wiki. While this is sufficient for a number of games (I’m not bored, yet, after 20+ plays), true Buffy fans are going to long for more content to keep things interesting over the years. There’s plenty of room for expansion here and I hope the game gets its due. The Buffyverse needs Cordelia, Oz, Anya, Tara, Dawn, Dark Willow, Faith and so many more to feel “complete.” The nature of a co-op game is that they tend to be quite resilient to intersectional inaccessibilities because the burden of interactivity in play can be allocated where it is most easily handled. I would be more critical though of the game’s accessibility in the event that a visual impairment intersected with a memory impairment because of how much additional burden that would put on comprehending game state. Aside from that, I’m not sure there are any specific accessibility intersections that aren’t already adequately covered by the teardown text.

As is often the case in co-op games you all win together or you all lose together. The cause of success and failure in Buffy is hard to pinpoint because when things are bad it’s because the group as a whole let them get bad. That means nobody can point to a particular player and, fairly, say ‘this is all your fault’. That’s great. I don’t even know any more. I would have once said that Buffy was a wonderful example of the re-appropriation of a misogynist trope – that it’s great to see a scenario where the pretty girl is the one rescuing everyone else. But Joss Whedon has revealed a lot of his true nature over the past few years and it’s correspondingly difficult to be too enthusiastic about the authenticity of the feminism reflected in his work. This part is best left up to the views of each individual reader. Literacy is more of an issue as this is a constant requirement of play, and in contexts where players don’t have a shared language this is likely to be a deal-breaking problem. Crib-sheets or other compensations will not be at all appropriate given the amount of both required. Gameplay in Buffy is very similar to many familiar cooperative titles including Pandemic, Eldritch Horror, Forbidden Desert, or Flashpoint: Fire Rescue. If you’ve played any of these (or most other major co-op games), you’ll instantly recognize many familiar mechanisms and ideas.Here’s the basic gist of play. You take on the role of one of the Extended Family of Scoobies. You can be Buffy, Xander, Giles or Willow as you would expect. You can also choose to be Angel or Spike if you like. Each player gets a limited pool of actions they can perform each turn. Each draws from a shared menu of abilities, but also a special Super Ability that is unique to them. Each character will also have a couple of inventory cards representing consumables. Wooden stakes, weapons, magic supplies and so on. Each of these will have some combination of additional actions they permit while you have them. They will also provide a bespoke special powers that activates if they’re discarded. If you have a wooden stake in your inventory for example you’ll kill vampires you fight rather than stun them. If you discard the stake, you’ll kill the vampire without spending one of your precious action points. Different locations in the game have different power that you can access, which makes it seem like there’s an extent to which you need to defend and optimise your control of areas to accomplish the tasks. It’s a solid pitch. For those familiar with Eldritch Horror, one look at the board will have you making direct comparisons between the two. The design of the Sunnydale board bears a lot of similarity to Eldritch’s board. Eldritch is by far the heavier (and longer) of the two. Buffy feels a bit like “Eldritch lite,” though. You’re moving from location to location, resolving events, and dealing with baddies. Both are good games but given a choice, I’ll take Buffy due to the theme, lower complexity, and shorter play time. Just be aware that, despite the looks, Buffy and Eldritch are two very different beasts.