Thank you to our brilliant friend Marc for being a guest this episode! Watch the video on Youtube. Below is a description of our future-horror solo survival game, Digital Vampire.
THE ELEVATOR PITCH
Digital Vampire is a small-box, solo survival game based on a deck of cards. The player must overcome obstacles and navigate their way through a dystopian cityscape towards freedom and selfhood. To do so, they will rely on their own resources but will also frequently be compelled to use their smartphone, which offers vital information, communication and distraction. There’s just one problem: their phone harbours an insidious vampire who will gradually work to sap their energy and keep them trapped in their sub-real existence.
THE LOOK
The game comes in a box designed to resemble smartphone packaging, with minimalist graphics and a modern, screen-friendly typeface.
Design and illustrations are similarly early-00s/10s digital style, with squoval icons, lower-case font, and lots of white space.
A small number of cards divert completely from this style and are full-size, semi-photorealistic, digital horror scenes in a dark palette.
Components include:
- The Event deck (~30 cards)
- The Smartphone deck (~30 cards)
- The “Self” deck (~30 cards)
- 1 plastic “Credit” coin
- The Draining Board and Vampire marker.
The Draining Board resembles a circuit board with a number of parallel paths between a “start” node and a “final” node. Each path consists of ~20 sections separated by nodes. Some nodes have symbols representing immediate drawbacks.
THE AIM
Turn by turn, the player aims to complete challenges set out by cards in the Event deck. Each challenge requires a certain number of “good” coin flips. Every success leads the player further along in their adventure, closer to their desired destination. Failures, however, will feed the vampire, allowing it to move along its track on the Draining Board (towards a lost game) and to limit the player’s access to their Self deck. If the player can complete the final Event card before the Vampire reaches the finish node of the Draining Board, the player wins.
SET UP
The player creates the Event Deck by separating out the Beginning and Ending cards, shuffling the rest of the Events and building a stack with Beginning cards on top and Ending cards at the bottom. They shuffle and place the Self and Smartphone decks on the table and put the Credit coin within easy reach. The Draining Board is set up with the Vampire marker at the Start node (node 1). The player draws 4 cards from the Self deck to form their starting hand.
TURNS
Each turn, the player draws the top card of the Event deck and plays it to the table. An Event card consists of one or more of the following:
- A story paragraph, outlining the obstacle or opportunity ahead
- An instruction (e.g. draw a Self card)
- A challenge
- A “devil’s bargain” for a challenge
- A bonus or a penalty for completing/failing the challenge
A challenge is always presented as a number of successive coin flips which must be “good”. The base difficulty is 1, maximum difficulty is 5. Certain Self cards can be played (permanently placed in the discard pile) to affect the outcomes of coin flips; for example, a Self card might allow you to re-do one flip, or to assume 1 “good” flip from the outset, etc.
Challenges will often offer a bargain: draw 1 or more cards from the Smartphone deck in return for an automatic success. Roughly half of the cards in the Smartphone deck are neutral, and the rest “suck” (contain 1 or more negative outcomes). A negative outcome from a “sucky” card is usually: “place this card on top of your Self deck. Once drawn, immediately discard it.”
If the player fails to complete a challenge on an Event card, the Vampire marker is immediately moved one node on the Draining Board.
Alternative Vampire cards: might return completed Event cards to the Event deck, ask the player to discard Self cards, or advance the Vampire marker along the Draining Board.
Alternative Self cards: might provide contingencies (e.g. play at any time to immediately cancel a Vampire card) or allow the player to move the Vampire marker backwards a number of nodes on the Vampire board.
Bonuses for completing a challenge: might be removing one or more cards from the Event or Self decks, or drawing a new hand of Self cards.
SUMMARY
The story continues, with the hero facing challenges both mundane and weird as they try to escape their unhappy future-life. The player continues drawing Event cards and resolving them, either by successfully completing each Challenge, or accepting the penalty for failure. They try to manage their available resources from their Self cards and take calculated risks on the Smartphone Deck. At times their phone will provide easy wins, at others it will create setbacks and sap their energy and Self.
If the Vampire marker reaches the Final node of the Draining Board, or if the Self deck is exhausted, the player loses, and the hero has had their energy and individuality drained.
If the final Event card is resolved before either of these happen, the player wins and the hero reaches a happier ending.
WHAT MAKES THIS GAME UNIQUE?
Digital Vampire is a solo survival game which focuses on risk and reward, boiled down to binary success and failure via the flip of a coin. The adversary is represented in-fiction by the hero’s smartphone; at times a resource which can be used to make tasks easier, at others a dangerous soul-sucking entity. The design and writing of the game seek to highlight and heighten the ways in which our modern devices and environments have been designed to keep us contained and dependent.
Big Crow Games 