VagrantSong by Wyrd Games: Review (Patreon)

The Cooperative AI Boss Battler (CABB) Game genre has in recent times seen an absolute explosion of games launched through kickstarter, upcoming and released. VagrantSong is the latest in this stable, choosing to follow the cartoon styling that Townsfolk Tussle went with rather than the more standard fantastical styling of Wild Assent or Oathsworn. I guess at this point this makes the cartoon boss battler officially a sub-genre in the CABBs and to be honest I couldn't be happier with that, especially if the game is as refreshing and innovative as VagrantSong aims to be.

It is the early 20th century and the players take the roles of vagrants lured onto a ghostly train by a loose skinned, white gloved stranger. On board you discover others who are in a similar situation to yourselves, but barely moments later it becomes clear that this train is no ordinary one; it's filled with the souls of the dead.

Now I do have to take a diversion here and make a couple of things clear; VagrantSong is walking a very thin line in respect to its design and setting. There are numerous elements that have old echoes of America's past, and while I did not find anything disrespectful in VagrantSong itself – one must acknowledge both the use of this particular artstyle; the time period, the setting and the use of words such as haint itself. I am not accusing VagrantSong of anything; but to ignore that this game is designed in the Fleischer Animation style and that it is using the Gullah Geechee word for ghost with haint; would be unwise at a minimum. There is a heavy legacy of racism and oppression linked to the hosepipe arm animation style and one must always be careful when employing this style.

Again; to stress this point, I personally have not found anything (yet) that felt like a cause for concern. I fact; as we'll talk about soon; the game seems to be respectful, promoting diversity, and aiming to be a force for positivity throughout its mechanics, setting and story. It is simply important to highlight these areas because they are very difficult subjects for games to navigate in an appropriate and sensitive manner. Which means, it is absolutely right for anyone to hold VagrantSong under a microscope if they take issue with the game choosing this set of clothes to wear over its mechanics. If you do not understand why and want to delve deeper into the topic about about why this can be an issue; I'd recommend reading the Unwinnable article on Cuphead which goes into more detail about the difficulties of creating content using this style of animation.

That is all I am going to write on this matter; from here on we are going to be looking at the game itself and judging it on its own merits rather than the spectre of the past that hovers behind it.

Overview of the Game

Set up at the start of the first scenario.

In VagrantSong you will take the role of six Vagrant travellers who find themselves trapped on this strange train filled with the weird and macabre dead. Through your skills and intellect you will seek to survive by helping the lost souls you encounter in each scenario. Through music, speeches, songs, doggo hugs and plain basic violence you will try and guide the lost back from the void towards humanity, hopefully helping them find eternal rest.

Players will control between two and four of the six possible Vagrants; with a system designed to allow players to drop in and out between sessions or even change which Vagrant they are using for the campaign. The entire campaign takes around 30-35 hours to complete and takes place over multiple different scenarios with a fair variety in the experiences they offer. While most of the time you will be facing a Haint and seeking to restore its humanity, this is not always the case – some scenarios have other tricks up their sleeves.

At the end of the journey; you should understand more of what the train is, who is behind it and why you are here, but ultimate victory and freedom from the train rests solely in the hands of the players.

The Vagrants

Players will choose a Vagrant as their respective playing piece in the game's world; they will receive a standee that represents their character on the train board. A Vagrant Card which shows all of their stats; Humanity (health); Movement, Rummage limit, Bust (fighting), Investigate and Patch Up (self healing). They will also have a unique Passive Ability; two skills and in the case of the Wayfarer one Junk (items). In addition to this they also get three action coins which are placed on various areas of their Vagrant/Skill cards in order to activate their options for the turn. We'll go into each bit in more detail after we look at the Vagrants as a whole.

The Vagrants are a fairly diverse set of characters; though they do each land within a rough vagrant/vagabond trope. The cast is split evenly between male and female, has a wide range of ages and also has three characters who appear to be people of colour. So there's a lot of diversity to choose from here; both in their styling and in their playstyle.

The Cursebearer is an aggressive close range attacker who causes humanity gains on a haint when they haunt her. Her skills are very short range and can only affect Haints, which makes her ideal for players who enjoy an attacking based playstyle. She does however have slightly lower humanity than normal, so there's a balance to be walked when using.

The Empress is another aggressive character, who again has exclusively Haint focused skills; she is worse at investigating, but better at self healing – something which matters given that she is tied for the lowest humanity in the cast. In compensation for this her skills have a longer reach and can potentially give other Vagrants extra humanity or additional actions. She's also the critical hit character, as the first time she rolls a 'booming boxcar' (6) she gets an additional bone (dice) to throw into the check.

In sharp contrast to these two is the Revivalist; while this Vagrant is terrible at direct combat; he are capable of regaining humanity when attacking and even restoring his team mates. He has the maximum starting humanity of 10 and he is also capable of on board control; moving the Haint or Vagrants through his Copal Incense skill.

The Runaway is two characters in one package as she comes bundled with her Pup. This gives her a huge area which she can cover; but she is split between two pieces – one of which is far more limited than the other. She focuses around close to the Haint positional play and does best when she coordinates well with not only her pup but also the other vagrants.

The Songsmith is a diverse range based Jack-of-All trades character who seeks to split out his actions every turn in order to benefit from his passive. His skills are very flexible and he is the only Vagrant with a starting skill that he can repeat every single turn (more on this later). But he is slower than the other Vagrants. Not a major issue offensively, but defensively it can leave him in trouble a lot more than others.

Finally we have the Wayfarer and his little bird. The Wayfarer is a rummage based Vagrant, he seeks to gather a load of rummage tokens and use them to either power up his abilities or for their own unique individual effects. This; in addition to his low movement, means that he takes a while to get going in a scenario and a lot of the time will just be providing long range support. He is the other Vagrant with only 8 Humanity (alongside the Empress) so that cements his role as being one that keeps back from the Haints as much as possible. For the record, I enjoy the Wayfarer's playstyle most of all. Borb.

Each Vagrant also has their own unique skills that they can gain through the campaign and players are allowed to switch up their builds; numbers; Junk and even Vagrants between scenarios. The game doesn't want to lock you in with a Vagrant you're not enjoying – but the price you have to pay can be quite high if you've progressed far enough to unlock exclusive skills.

Skills have an interesting design wrinkle to them, each skill has a little black half diamond on it; either located on the left or right side of the card. This means that the skill can only be 'slotted' into the side of the where it would complete the diamond. Giving each Vagrant up to two skills on the left and two on the right hand sides of their Vagrant Card. While you can switch skills about in between scenarios; this limitation applies and it can make for interesting decisions (and lots of agonizing).

The Vagrant's Turn

When the Vagrants have their turn they will choose what order to activate in; some characters, like the Empress may prefer to go as early as possible in the player order – but this is optional.

Once a Vagrant has been selected; they have three action coins to spend (plus any gained through bonuses) and they will use them by placing them either onto their skills or on the generic actions printed on their sheet. You can see an example below.

Here the Empress has chosen to move once and then activate her Strangely Resonant Speech with two of her action points (the star coin tokens). Movement means that she can move three spaces during her turn (orthogonal) and the skill means that at some point during those she can use her skill with two dice.

The Strangely Resonant Speech can only target Haints (that's the H); it has a range of one to three spaces and you roll as many dice (bones) as you've put coins on the card (in this case that's two bones). Any results of a 4+ are a success, a six gives an additional dice to roll (plus the Empress' passive if it is applicable) and in the case of this particular skill – if three or more successes are rolled, then another Vagrant within three spaces will gain two (coins) humanity.

Now the tricky thing about the skill is; once it has been used, it can't be used in the following turn. So the Empress will need to have an alternative plan for her next turn.

This is just one example however; there are many other options if coins had been placed on the other actions. So we'll look through each of those next:

Movement (shoe) allows your Vagrant to move X spaces orthogonally per coin placed onto that area. Most Vagrants move 3 spaces per coin, but a few are slower than that.

The bag is the 'rummage' action; for each coin placed on here you'll grab a token from the Bindle (the other randomiser in this game, represented by a cute little chequered bag) and keep one of them; returning the rest to the bindle. These items have various uses: Iron Nails can be thrown to give Haints humanity, Candles can be placed to distract the Haint over it targeting a Vagrant, Salt can be used to nullify a Haint's action targeting that Vagrant, the Rabbit's Foot is an extra one shot action coin and the Apple will heal wounded skills. There is more to tokens usages though and we'll discuss that when we get to the Haint's turn.

The Bust (fist) action is a basic attack; described as 'giving the Haint an old-fashioned walloping' to help them remember their former life. If anything this is probably the least thematic part of the game; while a basic attack is certainly essential, it being physical violence rather than some form of empathy based manoeuvrer is a tiny bit jarring. The Vagrants are split between 4+; 5+ and 6+ being successes for them, and most of the time you'd rather use skills anyway.

Investigation (magnifying glass) is used when a Vagrant is in the same space as an event token. You'll roll one dice per coin placed there and compare the number of successes to the scenario table. You can't ever be sure what the results will give you until you roll, but generally if you are going to investigate you want to be spending as many actions as possible – because typically you want 2+ successes for the good outcomes. The Runaway and Cursebearer are the best investigators in the group.

Patch Up (Sticking Plaster) is the last standard action all Vagrants have. It allows them to regain 1 Humanity per success, it's not as efficient as most of the healing based skills certain Vagrants have (except for the Revivalist who is super good at this and can use it to heal others); but it is good to have available at all times.

That's almost everything you need to know about the Vagrants in particular except for Junk!

Junk is the name given to items in this game; which sit in the bottom slot of your Vagrant's card. Most Vagrants can only hold a maximum of one junk (The Wayfarer can have two) and that means you have to be very selective with what you bring into a scenario.

Junk can be found during special events in a scenario or it can be purchased from the horned black cat DC in between scenarios. It gives Vagrants a solid power boost, but being limited to a maximum of one per Vagrant means you are going to be making sacrifices by leaving stuff behind in the 'belongings' pile.

Otherwise you can consider this stuff to work pretty much like items in any game; they'll give you various bonuses depending on circumstances and exist to increase your vagrant's power overall.

With Junk dealt with it's time to get into the Haint and the Bindle.

The Haint's Turn, The Bindle and Rituals

After a Vagrant has had their turn then the Haint will take a go; this is a natural balancing tool that allows the Haint to keep pace with the Vagrants thanks to its I go, you go structure. It is one of two ways that the Haint scales to match the number of Vagrants along with how much Humanity it takes to reach the Haint's 'Threshold' where it will Break, reducing its break value and if you break the Haint while its break value is already at 1 then the Haint is saved!  This increase in humanity based on the number of Vagrants is the second portion to the player scaling.

There is a fairly serious downside to these scaling methods however; one of the things which does happen in the larger group sizes is that the Vagrants near to the Haint can end up taking a lot of Humanity losses without having any way to move in order to reduce this. The trick here is to ensure that these losses can be repaired by having other Vagrants heal them, or by use of things such as salt or candles in order to distract or mitigate the Haint's actions; because otherwise they're going to be getting wounded often and fast. This isn't like other CABBs with a fixed balance of four player pawns vs. one AI pawn; the slider moves up and down depending on player count and we actually found two or three Vagrants to be more enjoyable than four – with the exception of playing with really strong, experienced CABB players who are already familiar with the flow and framework.

The player of the Vagrant which just acted will draw a token from the bindle and consult the scenario chart for the given haint + mood. This will list an action that the Haint will undertake; along with any specifics for targeting and similar. Haints can move; attack single targets, attack with AOEs, inflict status effects and much much more besides. They do not roll dice for their attacks; Humanity loss is automatic.  If they move through a Vagrant during their turn then they'll inflict their haunted effect and then the bindle token is placed on the cycle track along with any other tokens discarded by previous turns or through usage by the Vagrants for effects.

Each different token type (except for events) has a separate cycling total; Iron Nails for example need 5 tokens discarded to trigger a cycle; whereas the Rabbit Foot needs just two. Cycling is often a punishing experience for the Vagrants; you don't want the Haint to cycle a lot; but it will have to cycle at least some.

The Bindle is also where Vagrants will draw their rummage tokens from and it can contain event tokens too. Events are numbered and when you draw them you will take a look at the scenario table to see what they do. Some Events are even placed on the board in advance, giving the players spots to go and Investigate. They are highly varied with what they do and provide the bulk of scenario based variety along with the Haint's AI.

One of the neat parts of this system is the control that the players have over the Haint's AI. If you are holding on to all the Apples in the game for example, then you know that the Haint will never trigger its Apple AI result. Eventually these apples might make their way back into the bag by usage, but for now you have a better idea what the Haint will do. It's a really great system that essentially creates a shifting dice bag that spits out different results and probabilities constantly during the game. Arkham Horror the Card Game also uses a 'dice' bag and benefits greatly from it.

In addition to all of this, some Haints also have 'moods' determined by a happy face; sad face coin. When the coin flips their behaviour changes; sometimes dramatically, and this can change the texture of the fight a great deal.

Haints are not blocked by terrain (due to their ethereal nature) and can even drift through Vagrants (something the Cursebearer punishes them for) but a lot of the nuance and detail for each Haint is locked up in the scenario it appears in, so to talk about it more here would be spoilers which I am trying to avoid.

Rituals are special objectives for a scenario, they will tell you what you need to do to achieve them. Here are the three from the first scenario (fronts only, no spoilers). When you complete them you'll get

Humanity, Wounding and being Westbound

When a Haint harms Vagrants then they lose humanity (the reverse happens to Haints as noted above); when a Vagrant suffers humanity loss that brings them to zero; they must wound one of their skills or break one of their items. They then reset their Humanity to the max and repeat. This means that Vagrants with multiple skills and Junk have significantly more humanity than others. For example the Wayfarer starts with 32 (8x4) humanity total while the Empress has just 24 (8x3).

But in a particularly neat move, running out of humanity doesn't remove you from the scenario; instead you become Westbound. Gaining a special Westbound action and flipping your Vagrant Card over to its Westbound side. From here you start at 1 humanity (cannot drop below 1, others will take the damage instead) and you can in fact return to normal during a scenario if you restore your humanity to maximum.

One of the shames here is that there are no Westbound Standees for each Vagrant, there is unique art, but it only applies to the card. I would have loved a set of separate Westbound Standees to really make this moment feel as strong as it should.

Wounded skills, broken items and Westbound Vagrants are all dealt with during the Camp phase; which happens after a scenario; no matter if you win or lose (and you lose if all Vagrants become Westbound).

The Camp Phase

Say hello to DC, he has junk for you!

The Camp Phase is where players rest up, heal, develop their vagrants with new skills/junk and experience a bit more of the story.

First up you'll clean up the scenario, restore humanity; flipping back over from Westbound, but any broken junk or wounded skills do not flip back. Then you get to go shopping. You'll have 3 coins per Vagrant (plus potentially bonus ones) to spend. The camp's “Build Up” section will have a bunch of options you can purchase, including skills; healing, purchasing the random junk card offered by DC (the mysterious Cat who turns up); rummaging for tokens to start the next scenario with, banking coins with DC for some mysterious bonuses later and performing a seance.

Most of the options here are viable and that makes all of your decisions here quite meaningful, getting more skills and junk means more powers and more humanity to protect you from going Westbound. But also additional rummage tokens can be incredibly useful as they represent “free actions” (And help power up the Wayfarer's rummage based attack) and the Seance is always beneficial; you just won't know exactly how. Likewise saving coins with DC promises some benefit later down the line; but it is not clear what until it happens.

After all of that you get to 'Witness the In-Between'; this involves a deck of cards where you draw the top card and everyone makes a choice. Either the choice of the options is individual (and therefore the consequences are individual) or the group will have to make the decision together by voting.

This is also the point where you can save your progress (you do it before Witnessing the In-Between., and that's a little tricky to do because the game doesn't have a great storage system for keeping progress saved, but you can manage it with decent organisation.

Components

So I left the components until last to discuss because honestly they are something that traditional CABB players might not be entirely happy with, but the vast majority of board gamers should enjoy. VagrantSong comes in a very slimline box that has set locations for the vast majority of its components. Now I will say that this works if you store the box horizontally, but the tolerances are too small if you keep it vertically and the cards will slip around and get mixed up.

On the whole however; the main issue with the insert lays with the game's most stunning and potentially problematic element. The standees. These acrylic standees are beautifully illustrated and look very unique on the table, but there are costs involved for players who own a game like this. For a start the standees will scratch against each other in the box. There is no neat, specific slots for each standee to be held in; instead they are left to slide about inside some wells and that will cause wear and tear. Speaking of which, the bases are acrylic rings that have to be slotted in, which damages the acrylic each time you do it. The normal solution is to only do this rarely, but you can't do that where VagrantSong is concerned because they do not fit in the box when attached to the bases and in addition there are not enough bases for all the Haints to have one each.  Honestly cardboard standees with smaller clip on bases may have worked better here, or just better storage for all of the standees to be permanently attached to their bases. Perhaps a second edition will include a layer for keeping the standees assembled and safe.

However, that is it on the complaints front for the physicality of this game. Everything else is really well put together, the cards are tough, high gloss with clear text and they're well identified on the backs. The dice are decent without being flashy, all of the tokens are gorgeous and the Bindle Bag just makes me giddy with happiness about how cute it is. This game is a stunning and wonderful physical production that justifies every part of its price tag. The rulebook is well laid out; the scenario book is a clear walk to follow and all of this little haunted tour is devoid of any frights outside of the ones in the scenarios. Wyrd has just come out of nowhere and dropped an incredible product that delivers the boss battling experience with flourish and in a way that makes it enticing for those of us who do not paint miniatures.

The Summary

A new gold standard has been raised for the Complex AI Boss Battlers; and it has been done without being heavily derivative of the previous entities mechanics. VagrantSong takes a thematic jumble of concepts then blends them with some really innovative, enticing boss mechanics and ends up with something that any board gamer can engage with. This is the game which you should be comparing all new boss battling games to; because the question always should be – can you do what you're doing, but for the price tag that VagrantSong offers?

This is not just the ideal Boss Battling game for the first time player, but it's also an entertaining and challenging romp for experienced players. While everyone can, with patience, reach the final boss – success depends on your actions and achievements along the way. Just because it's hard to lose completely in VagrantSong doesn't mean it's easy to win.

The use of the Bindle in particular is a superb choice for AI; this standardised set of tokens not only breathes life into a huge amount of different bosses; but it also allows for players to directly engage with the behaviour that the bosses have and control/influence the outcomes in meaningful ways – either directly through the use of items like Salt or Candles or indirectly through rummaging and storing tokens that trigger scary items (at the risk of making Cycling happen more often).

I also found that as long as you are fine with the subject matter dealing with cartoon ghosts and a little ghostly gore (decapitation, holes showing rib cages) plus the suggestion of making deals with devils them then this game is fantastic to play with younger gamers. It is especially suited for teens; as it's not too complicated to get to grips with and is incredibly forgiving towards players getting defeated (both individual and the group). This is not to say that the game is easy to win the campaign for; but you are almost always going to get to progress a decent amount and have a good time with them. Just as a parent; make sure you consider if the game's themes are appropriate for your children or not.

Considering the genre and the sheer amount of content, both physical and mechanical;VagrantSong is a fantastic value proposition for a player, but it is worth noting that this game probably only has at max two or three full campaign plays in it before you end up having seen everything it has to offer. That is still around 60 hours of play, and that's very good value – but if you only intend to play the campaign once, be aware that this is all the game offers. There are no procedurally generated dungeon crawls like Descent or Middara, nor are or semi-randomised boss ordering experiences like Townsfolk Tussle or Wild Assent, or even wildly branching paths such as in Oathsworn's story. This is a curated experience, and while it's a thoroughly enjoyable romp – you may not care to repeat it once you're done.

Without a single hesitation, I invite you to enjoy this wild train ride filled with spooks, spectres and phantoms. All aboard!