VagrantSong First Impressions Review (Patreon)

Last week I received a copy of VagrantSong from Wyrd Games and I wanted to give you guys a first impressions review before I write a full one for the general public next week. This is because the game is still in pre-order stage and I think you should all seriously consider getting a copy ordered either directly from Wyrd Games themselves or through your local stockist. I do not usually condone pre-orders; but the system is helpful when the product is good.

VagrantSong is good.

It's a new take on the Complex AI Boss Battling Game (CABB) genre, offering a 30+ hour campaign with multiple different bosses that takes a fresh approach to the mechanics while still offering the same core experience that one would come to expect. I'll walk you through an overview of what you get for the price; what the game plays like and then cap this with a summary of why I think this is one of my top three games of the year (Along with Sleeping Gods and Descent: Legends of the Dark).

Inside VagrantSong's surprisingly slim box are the following components:

• Train Board
• Rule Book
• Scenario Book
• Bindle Bag
• 6 Dice
• 6 Vagrant Sheets & 7 associated standees
• 230+ Cards
• 80+ Tokens and Markers
• 20 Haints (Bosses)

Everything is nicely packed with a very well organised insert that holds most of the components very well. About the onlt issues you'll find is that the card wells are a couple of milimiteres too short and the haints/vagabond standees do not have great places to sit.

Speaking of which, the way that VagrantSong can manage to pack in more than double the number of bosses over Kingdom Death is by use of standees instead of miniatures. I must admit, considering Wyrd's reputation for incredible miniatures I was caught a little off guard by the standees; but they work well at keeping the size and cost of the game down. They're acryilic standees with printed characters.

There are physical costs to be considered about these standees though, acrylic wears and scratches more than most other possible materials and also the bases that the standees use are too large to keep permanently attached to the standees. On top of that, even if you could, there are insufficient bases for all of the Haints in the game – you've got 10 bases for 20 Haints. I'm not sure if this is just because I wasn't shipped enough with the game or that is intended – but given that I can't keep the bases attached to the Haints in the box I didn't check if there were supposed to be enough for one each or not.

The cards are high gloss, with most of them are small sized because they are kept on the table and a few are larger because they're used for story events. Tokens come in a few different sizes, they're all round, but they have variation in diameter to distinguish the different functions each one has. They're either terrain; bindle & event tokens (more on this later) or status effect tokens.

It's a nice production and it's clear that a lot of the decisions made are there to keep the size and costs of the game lower.

The Setting

You play one of a group of cartoon Vagabonds in roughly the Deep South 1920s; you've all been brought onboard this train by a mysterious stranger and through the course of the campaign you'll face various lost souls; helping them regain their humanity and saving them (rather than beating/killing the bosses)  in the hope of solving the mystery as to why you are here in the first place.

The Vagabonds

There are six Vagabonds who you can play during the campaign; the system is rather flexible – giving room to play between two and four vagabonds at a time and switch them around both in numbers and choices with relatively little cost. This does allow for players to drop in and out of sessions without always having to use the same number of vagabonds for every scenario.

The vagabonds themselves cover a wide range of different playstyles and tropes. You have the Empress who is a relatively straightforward close range attacker designed to lead by going first in a turn; the Cursebearer who prefers a very aggressive playstyle where you stick close to the Haint; the Revivalist who supports the others at a medium distance; the jack of all trades long range Songsmith, the slow rummage focused Wayfarer and the Runaway who is two characters for the price of one thanks to her loyal Pup!

Each Vagabond starts with two skills, three action points/coins and sometimes a Junk (item) card. The skills in particular are worth mentioning in a little more detail because they are all either left or right side skills. Each character has two slots on the left and right sides of their character sheets and skills have diamonds that indicate if you are allowed to slot the skill on the left or right side. This extra little wrinkle is neat and adds a little more substance to the skills you gain during the campaign.

In addition to skills and Junk, each Vagabond also has health points in the form of Humanity (between 8 and 10 points) – when Humanity is reduced to zero a skill gets 'wounded' before resetting the Humanity track to max. This means each additional skill gained is another set of Humanity. If you run out of Humanity and have wounded all of your skills and broken all of your junk you'll end up playing on your 'westbound' side (with its own special rules) and if you can't get back to the normal side you'll get punished at the end of a scenario.

Haints & The Bindle & Rummaging

That brings us to the bosses; the game's bosses are called Haints after the Southern US term for them and they vary in a huge amount. Haints are controlled by drawing a token from the Bindle then consulting their AI page for the scenario. The Bindle is a pool of tokens: Candle, Iron Nails, Apple, Salt, Rabbit's Paw and sometimes Events. Tokens can be drawn by Vagabonds rummaging on their turn (they have a limit to how many tokens they can hold, usually 2) in addition to the Haint's AI draw and this is one way that the behavior of the Haint can be controlled, as tokens are drawn and used they go into piles on the board and are not returned until they reach a certain number through a mechanic called cycling (which varies depending on the token type, for example Apples cycle at 2 and Iron Nails cycle at 5). All of this means that while you can't be entirely sure what exact move a Haint will perform on their turn; you can get a rough idea of the odds and play accordingly.

Also many haints have moods which will switch depending on certain circumstances; for example they could switch moods when the bindle cycles. This gives them a new set of behaviors and at times can even make it feel like you're facing a whole new Haint. There are also a set of rituals for each scenario that the players can achieve; each of which will (usually) provide a benefit for the players.

The last piece of the puzzle is the event tokens, these are sometimes placed on the board where you can go and investigate them, but sometimes they are placed into the bindle and when drawn they do things specific to the particular Haint.

All in all this combines together to create a system that allows for the percentages of a given action to shift from one turn to the next while still allowing the players some control. You can exclude the more powerful Haint actions by denying the tokens through holding them (something the Wayfarer is very good at doing because of how he interacts with Rummage tokens). It's a wonderful reimplimentation of the 'dice bag' from Arkham Horror: The Card Game and combines theme with mechanics really well.

Moments & The Camp Phase

There are different Moments that you read depending on if you were victorious or defeated during the previous scenario. Losing does not automatically mean game over – but it does make the game harder, like a lot harder. In essence you'll always get to reach the end of the campaign, but your chances of a good ending do depend on how well you do along the way.

In between each scenario there is a camp phase where players can spend coins to upgrade things or save them on a special track. Here you'll get new skills; new Junk; heal up and perhaps even perform a sceance to give you a boost during the next scenario. There's a lot of options available and the only random/unknown parts of this are the specific Junk card offered by the cat DC and the specific benefit of the seance.

I particually like the banking system where you pay spare coins to DC and unlock extra moments, I won't spoiler anything specific here but it was very cool.

You'll also all get an In-Between card where players either individually or as a group make decisions; the impact of these cards varies, but the first one for example has each player inidivudally choose one of three different actions and that will maybe do something for you in the future. Again, as this is campaign specific I don't want to be more detailed than that.

Summary

That's pretty much it for this brief first impressions overview of the game; I am going to be writing a larger review and posting it on BoardGameGeek next week. But I wanted to give you all the jump on that because this game isn't one you should be sleeping on – it has a similar asthetic to Townsfolk Tussle; but a longer campaign and enough variation to make it unique within the CABB genre.

As I front loaded this review with my recommendation all I can do is repeat that here. This game is really, really great – get your pre-order in if you are even remotely excited or interested by what I've written here:

The Link is: https://giveusyourmoneypleasethankyou-wyrd.com/products/vagrantsong?_pos=1&_psq=vagran&_ss=e&_v=1.0

If you want to read more VagrantSong's official page is here: https://www.wyrd-games.net/vagrantsong

Next week we will return to Kingdom Death with the Sunstalker's Showdown and it's also looking like within the next month or so we might, maybe, get to see what's inside the 1.6 Overdue Update Pack!