Vampire: The Masquerade Rivals - or is it just the Rivals Expandable Card Game? Now that the Hunters Expansion is out, I'm curious to see how this card game is marketed moving forward. I've talked about the base game and its expansions previously, but there's been a couple of releases over the past 6 months that I'm here to talk about. Sadly, the only thing keeping me from playing this game more is a lack of regularly-available players, which is a shame! I’ve got 2 expansions to talk about: The Heart of Europe and The Dragon & The Rogue.

Just a note - I'm not *super* knowledgeable about the World of Darkness universe, so if there's a reference or something that I miss, that's just because I have no clue. There's also the possibility I played cards wrong, so let me know if I messed up something!

The Heart of Europe

This expansion introduces a new city deck, Prague, to the Rivals card game. The city deck provides a set of antagonists/scenarios/victims for the players to deal with in addition to the other players. It's one of the best parts of the game, as it puts the players on edge because they don't have to *immediately* start attacking each other. The base game came with the San Francisco city deck, and I'm assuming the Hunters/Vampire "set" will have another city deck. This makes me think that the idea is to have a new "city deck" for each year of the game, which will add some variety to the game.

Most of the various events & mortals are pretty standard cards you'd expect to find in said city deck. So the biggest change in this city deck are the Second Inquisition operatives that hunt your vampires. In Prague, you are facing "Team X Operatives", which look to be members of the church more than just random government agents. In the base game, the "Special Affairs Division" operatives worked together to deal more damage for each card that came out and stacked intelligence to be able to pierce more secret Havens. The Team X Operatives stack on top of each other when they come into play, and have different effects based on the total number of operatives.

Unlike the S.A.D. operatives, I feel like the Team X cards were better to manipulate the other players with. With the S.A.D. cards, you just didn't want them to pile up so you didn't get so much damage at the end of each turn. For the Team X cards, you only are getting damage on the 1st and 3rd card. The second card makes you discard a card, which I found to be better for "gaming" the system a bit. Sometimes, I really wanted to discard a card for a reason, or make it so that other players discarded a card. Just like the other operatives, mitigating one damage is actually pretty easy to manage, so keeping one Team X operative around is not a big deal.

As you might expect, I like this expansion more than the base game city deck. The Team X cards feel less "bland" and add to the manipulative feel of the board game. While I believe the new Hunters city deck will "replace" this deck for the next year, but if you haven't gotten this deck yet and you are playing the game casually, I think it is a worthwhile pickup!

The Dragon

Tzimisce vampires could not be Jedi: they are all about the attachments. For a moment, I was reminded of some of the core clans, but I realized that those clans were specific about Titles and/or Retainers. The Tzimisce just want any and all attachments that they can get. For instance, the agenda in the precon deck gives you victory points each round for the number of cards with 3 or more cards attached to them. So you can be behind a lot in the beginning, but once you get your board set up, you can make a HUGE comeback really quickly.

As you might expect, this means a lot of cards are themed around attaching cards to other cards. Home Improvement is a card that improves your Leader depending on how many cards are attached: one card lets you mend a damage, two lets you draw a card, etc. Secret compartment is one of those instances where keeping Team X operatives on the table can be a good thing. The card makes it so that when you have to discard cards, you can put them under Secret Compartment instead of discarding them, so it helps build that engine faster. Finally, you have the Vozhd. Holy crap….the more retainers you attach to this card, the bigger and beefier it gets. With 2 health and 2 damage for each retainer attached to it, you can deal some final blows to people when it drops on the table.

The Rogue

Instead of attachments, the Ravnos want tokens on their characters. *Any* type of tokens: fear tokens, blood tokens, etc. The precon agenda gives you points when put influence on a character with multiple tokens already on it. However, it's only the *first* time on your turn that you put influence on a character. I kept thinking about different combos to keep farming these points but I'd have to keep redoing my turns because I forgot I only get it once. The Ravnos vampire Shweta helps out with this by taking influence from an opponent whenever it deals damage by itself. Any opportunity to take influence from another player is always a plus in my book. It limits the amount of things that they can do, and gets them closer to losing, so win/win.

The coolest part about the Ravnos is the cryptolect. The cryptolect makes vampires 1 less influence to recruit. So you can act like a thin blood and have a mob of vampires on the board, but they are much more powerful vampires that allow you to do more cool tricks. Haya is a vampire that gives you extra damage to mortals for each vampire in your party. Put 4 vampires on the board, walk out onto the streets and you can have any easy win taking out a mortal that you need the benefits for. Then, you can use your second action to attack again, putting the screws on your opponent(s).

Conclusion

1. The Heart of Europe deck makes me glad that this is a constantly changing thing in the game. Means that Renegade can bring more variety to the game in other ways besides just printing new clan decks.

2. Between the Tzimisce and the Ravnos decks, I think I prefer playing the Tzimisce deck. Playing more defensive up front while you build up a powerhouse is such a fun way to play.

3. I got spoiled by this game early on, as I still think the Malkavians are my favorite clan to play still. Kinda ironic that the scheming and plotting appeals to the Rogue in me, yet "The Rogue" part of The Dragon and The Rogue expansion wasn't as appealing to me.

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