Vamp Order - How to Play. Complete, Clear, Concise Board Game Tutorial

Stalking through Transylvania, you'll outsmart rival vampires, terrorize the locals, and dodge Van Helsing, all to prove you're Dracula's most loyal servant in Vamp Order. And today, we'll be teaching you how to play Vamp Order, game designed by Tito, and published by AV Games. And check out the link to the project page in the video.

Hi everyone, it's Stella. And Tarrant. Welcome to Meeple University. And hey, if you enjoyed this video after watching, like, subscribe, and comments. You know what to do. Right, now let's get to the classroom. In Vamp Order, Dracula is advertising for a new right-hand vampire, and players are the applicants, competing against each other to best impress Dracula.

Players will move through the locations, collecting resources, hunting the general populace, hiring the most helpful pupils, raising minions to do their bidding, trying to avoid the hunter Van Helsing, and more. Players time their actions with the cycles of night and day, and after the third noon, whoever has gained the most power by impressing Dracula with tributes, resources, and more, will win the game.

To set up, shuffle and randomly place the 12 location cards in a 3 by 4 grid. You'll have a different layout each time you play. Begin them all on their night sides, and place the round tracker board with the cube starting at the first midnight. Place this east-west tracker in one of the two directions.

This makes sure everyone knows which direction the sun will rise from. These are all of the different shuffled decks of cards: horror, tribute, Dracula, prey, pupil, minion, high table, and holy church. Before you begin, you'll remove all cards which show a red dot in the lower corner. And this includes all of the minion, high table, and holy church cards.

These are used only in solo play. Horror, tribute, and Dracula cards simply remain in their decks. For the pupils, deal a face-up row of six to the Institute of Dark Arts board. And for the prey, take this 2 by 2 night board, and then fill a 4 by 4 grid of face-up prey cards with the night board in the center.

Check each card for the black smudges in the corner, and for each, place a dark blood token onto the prey card being pointed at. We'll learn more about what this means, and what this could trigger, a little bit later. Make common supplies of all of the different resources: dark blood, red blood, blue blood, coins, vigor, perversion, influence, fear, letters of permission, pastoral rings, Dracula's favor, and minions.

Nearby, place the other two side boards. The black market board, where most, but not all of those resources can be traded, and the price for each resource starts at the top of its column, which is the cheapest price, and the cemetery board, which starts empty. There's also the high table board. You can set that nearer the side for now.

Find the gray meeple representing the vampire hunter Van Helsing. He's your common enemy through the game. He begins on the holy church. Nearby, keep these related components: the attack board and attack dice, and the fear tracker corresponding to your player count, and the fear die. Mark this tracker at zero with a fear marker.

Give each player a player board, a colored screen, a coin, a vigor, and a red blood, a horror card, which is held in hand. You can look at your card, but keep it secret from the others. And your four wooden pieces. Place these on the central boards. Minions begin near the cemetery board. One of your vampires begins in the vampiric village.

Your other goes in the central space of the high table board. Do note, it matters for gameplay whether your meeple is standing up or lying down, and to begin, they should be standing up. Keep your power markers nearby, ready to go onto the score track when you score your first point. Choose a first player, and in a five or six-player game only, the fifth and sixth in turn order gain a second red blood.

You're now ready to play. In Vamp Order, you, your minions, Van Helsing, and even Dracula will interact and take actions as players try to compete for Dracula's favor. So, before we get into the specifics, let's take a look at an overview of the flow of play. The game resolves in 20 rounds, and each round has five main phases.

First is movement. In turn order, each player moves their vampire meeple following movement rules to a new location. Second is actions. Again, in turn order, each player's vampire activates the action in the location that they've just moved to. Third is minions. Each player with an active minion who is standing up moves and takes an action with that minion.

You don't begin with any minions on the board, so it will be at least a few rounds before this phase occurs. Fourth is Van Helsing. Van Helsing moves towards the player who has the most influence, possibly resulting in various types of attacks and penalties for vampires he encounters. Finally is dusk or dawn, and the next row from east to west is flipped either from night to day, or from day to night, possibly with benefits or penalties for players whose pieces are on those locations.

You'll then proceed to the next round following those same five steps. Across the 20 rounds, there will be five intermediate scoring and reset phases, each of which is triggered by the board going fully day or fully night. When the board goes fully day after rounds 4, 12, and 20, this is called noon, and you'll perform high table intermediate scoring.

These three phases are where you'll score most of your points. It's an opportunity to cash in resources to gain victory points. These are called power, and represented by this green goblet icon. This is a mini game in its own right, as players need to position themselves tactically while they make these exchanges in order to make the most of it, and not be left holding resources they can't exchange.

When the board goes fully to night after rounds 8 and 16, this is called midnight, and you'll go to a separate, smaller intermediate scoring called tribute, where players blind bid a certain resource trying to gain favor and other resources, and where special Dracula powers and actions are drawn. This means that all scoring is heavily dependent on the resources you gain, and then how you tactically spend them, bid them, and use them in the intermediate scorings.

This is why all players have a privacy screen. The vast majority of your resources are kept behind this, so that players don't know how much you have. The only exceptions to this rule are shown here. You must always keep your influence and your fear outside of your screen, so that all players can see them, as well as any cards you've placed on your player board, and the size of your hand of horror cards.

You'll keep the details of these cards hidden. It's just the size of your hand which must be shown. At this point, I'll also give you a quick thematic understanding of the various resources. There are eight basic tradeable types of resources, which are money, red blood, vigor, dark blood, blue blood, letters of permission, influence, and pastoral rings.

You can infer their relative values from the price ranges on the market board, with dark blood being the cheapest among all of the resources, and the others ascending from left to right. Most of these can simply be collected and spent at the high table for points, with some of them also being the costs of other actions and functions in the game.

The exceptions here are dark blood and letters of permission. Those cannot be exchanged at the high table. They are used solely for the enhancement of other actions. There are two other resource types: perversion and fear. Perversion can be spent at the high table for points, but it can't be bought.

You can only gain it by being a nasty, evil vampire. You will basically find that any thematically evil actions are going to give you perversion. The other is fear, and fear is bad. Specifically, this is how fearful you are of your surroundings, not how fearful the villagers are of you. Not only can you not trade fear for points, but every fear you have at the end of the game is going to lose you one power point.

So, you'll always want to do your best to minimize your amount of fear. Now that we understand the overview and the types of resources, let's go through each phase in detail. First is how vampires move around. In movement, each player will take one turn to move their vampire meeple in clockwise turn order.

You must move and you must finish in a different location to where you started. You can move as far as you want subject to restrictions and you may need to pay costs for part of the move. All movement is orthogonal. In a two, three, or four player game, you always get your first step of movement for free.

If that move took you to a night location, then you get your second move for free whether that is to a night or day space. If you took your first movement into a day space, then you do not get a second free movement. At five or six players, this changes slightly to give you more movement range. In this case, your first two moves are always free and you get a third free move only if your first two steps were both into night locations.

Once your free moves are complete, you may continue moving as far as you want at a cost of one red blood per day location entered and one vigor per night location entered. Finally, in your destination, occupy a valid action space. The location may have a primary action space which can accommodate at most one vampire, a shared action space which may accommodate any number, or it may have both.

You can consider the movement continuous. That is, if someone has taken the primary space this round or they still occupy it from last round, you can consider it full and cannot place there. You can't finish in a location with no valid action space. So, red would not be able here because there's no shared space to go to.

Red must choose somewhere else to finish. Do note to occupy this space on the night side of the holy church, you must be holding at least one influence. You don't have to spend it, just be holding it. Be aware that Van Helsing either blocks or interferes with movement in his location. But, I'll take you through the details of that a little bit later when we talk about Van Helsing in full.

Once all players have finished their movements in turn order, all players then resolve their chosen actions, again, in turn order. There are 12 different locations. They each have their own actions and some have either slightly or even wildly different actions on their day and night sides. At the bank, gain money.

Four primary or three shared night, three primary or nothing shared by day. It's much easier for a vampire to visit a bank under cover of night. The Eternal Night Bar and Lounge is a great place to be seen at night. Gain a vigor and an influence. Going clubbing by day is not quite as cool, so you still get a vigor, but you don't gain influence, instead gaining a red blood or discarding a fear.

In the holy church by day, gain an influence and a fear and take the first player token for the next round. Ignore this bottom part. Like with the cards we removed in setup, this red dot indicate that this part applies only in the solo game. The holy church by night has a completely different action and we'll come back to that later.

Whether by day or night, the black market has the same action which is to buy or sell any combination of resources at the black market board. Make each single token exchange separately. To make a purchase, pay the current purchase price for a resource and take that resource. Then slide the cube one step down if able.

To make a sale, return the resource, gain coins one fewer than the current purchase price for that resource. So, here it would be four coins instead of five for the influence and slide the cube one step up if able. Minimum sale price can be lower than the printed price. So, here I'd still sell this ring for four, but only to a minimum of one.

So, selling this red blood would still yield one coin. You may make as many exchanges as you wish. One thing you can exchange for is the letters of permission, but you may also exchange for these at Dracula's castle. By night, purchase as many letters as you want for three coins apiece. While by day, each three coins gives you an influence and a letter.

At the forest, whether day or night, discard two fear. Not only do you feel safe hiding in the trees, but this may also help you to hide from Van Helsing. And again, we'll go through all the Van Helsing rules a little bit later. The different options at Vampiric Village will give you some combination of red blood, dark blood, vigor, and coins, as well as the chance to draw new horror cards.

Draw these from the deck to your hand. Horror cards are played from hand to resolve their effects once off, largely to interfere with your opponents. And I'll pause from discussing the location actions for a moment to explain how these cards work. There are three main types of card, advance, attack, and defense.

The top of the card also shows you where you can play the horror card. Horror cards always target a specific location. And so, if it says night or day or a combination of both, you can play it on a location during one of the game's normal rounds. While if it shows the high table icon, then it's specifically resolved during a turn in the high table phase.

We'll look at how to use those ones a little bit later. You can play an advance on your turn before taking your move, or you can play an attack on your turn either before or after taking the action in your destination. In each case, choose any location on the board which matches the card's day or night designation and pay the dark blood cost to reach that destination.

This will always be one dark blood if you target your own space or an adjacent one and a further dark blood for each extra space further away. Blue targeting this space, for example, would cost one, two, three dark blood. The only difference between the two is that advance cards cannot target your own space.

However, the dark blood costs for all other spaces are the same between the two types of card. Then resolve the card's effect. Specifically, every one of the on-board advance cards is to expel a player from a priority space, freeing it up for you to move into with your move. Where the card has a shared space as well, you simply bump the vampire there.

If that vampire hasn't yet moved, you simply bump them out and they'll later move away from there. While if you expel someone who has already moved this round and there is no shared space for that player to go to, they must move for free to an adjacent empty space. Each valid vampire in the target destination suffers the effect of the attack unless they block it using a defense card like this.

Here for example, yellow will have targeted both red and blue by paying a two dark blood cost, while any player who wish to block would have to pay that same dark blood cost. In this case, they are targeting the location of the original caster. Defensive cards cannot be blocked by other defensive cards.

You block only the effect yourself. Other players present will still suffer the original horror. After playing any horror card, unless its effect was fully blocked, place it face down in an open space here on your player board. If there are no open spaces, discard one to make space. Your total hand limit for unused and used horror cards combined is five.

If you ever draw above five, then you must immediately discard down to five from your unused cards. How to get rid of these used cards, we'll see a little bit later. Phew! All these vampiring is hard work. I need some help. Well, fortunately, we can take an action to hire some. Whether at day or night, the action at the Nosferatu Institute of Dark Arts is to hire pupils.

Choose one or two face-up pupils from windows corresponding to the current day or night. Pay the costs. This will always be one letter of permission per pupil and may include some dark blood. Take all the pupils you'll gain and then slide the cards to the left, replenishing from the deck, and add your pupils to this section of your player board.

Each of these comes with an ongoing special ability. You may hold at most two cards in these slots, and if you ever gain a third, choose one to discard face down into the pupil side of the cemetery. The next actions are what your vampires hope will impress Dracula the most. Hunting. From the prey deck, there are three types of prey you can hunt: villagers, nobles, and religious.

And you'll hunt them in the human village, the king's castle, and the holy church, respectively. Doing so may come with fear or other bonuses, and note that you can only hunt for the religious at night. The hunting option is not still present on the day side of that location. When you hunt, you'll gain one or two of the matching type of prey from the 4x4 prey grid.

If you're hunting by day, you may take prey only from the outer edge of this grid. If you're hunting by night, you can also take off the night board. If taking two prey in the same hunt, they must be adjacent prey in a valid location and of the same type, and you gain one fear and one perversion. Having taken the prey, leave those spaces empty in the grid, and then gain all the resources printed on the prey cards, as well as any dark blood tokens which were on the cards.

Villagers will tend to come with the most basic rewards. Nobles have better rewards, which naturally will include blue blood. While religious generally have the best rewards, which always include a pastoral ring. During the hunt action, claim only the rewards on the top half of a religious card. This part down the bottom comes later.

Place your new prey onto empty slots in this section of your player board. If full, you may discard other prey to make space, those discards going face down to the cemetery. We've now seen the three different types of cards which can end up on your player board. And as we've also seen, you can generally freely discard to make space for more.

But one of the major ways you can gain benefits from your player board is by visiting the laboratory of the eccentric Dr. Frank. This has the same action on both the night and day sides, and these involve discarding cards to make exchanges. Thematically here, you're selling off a lot of what you've gained to Dr.

Frank for experimentation, which, consistent with a lot of your other nefarious activities, is going to get you a lot of perversion. You may make any number of exchanges. You can discard unused horror cards from your hand for two coins and a dark blood. Discard used horror cards for perversion. This is the only way to free these spaces up and get you your full unused hand limit back.

You can discard prey for a dark blood and perversion. And when discarding religious prey, in addition, gain the resources in the lower half of the card. Finally, you can discard a pupil for two perversion and two dark blood, but at the cost of losing one influence if you have any. Discarded prey and pupils go to the cemetery.

Finally, whether day or night, you may go to that very cemetery and do some digging. Digging prey, digging a pupil, or both. When digging prey, you may dig up any number of cards from this deck, as long as you pay the total cost before digging your first. Here, for example, paying four dark blood and two coins to dig two prey.

On the day side, simply shuffle the prey deck, and then draw that many cards. You gain the resources as printed on any villagers or nobles, and you gain the resources only from the lower half of any religious. You do not gain the top half. Then remove these prey cards from the game. There's nothing left to salvage.

On the night side, the cost is higher, but for each draw, shuffle the prey deck, draw two cards, look at them, choose the one you wish to keep, and shuffle the other back into the deck. Your other option is exhume a pupil to become a minion. Simply take the top card, doesn't matter what's on the other side, and put it face down in this slot, discarding from here if necessary.

Mark your minion as active, and place your minion meeple standing upright on or adjacent to the cemetery. Once your minion is on the board, it is a little helper who can take extra actions for you. But at a cost. As we just saw, when you raise a new minion at the cemetery, it will be upright and active.

And a minion remains active until it performs an action in the minion's phase. We'll talk about the minion's phase shortly, but when a minion performs the action, you'll resolve it, and then flip it to inactive and lie it down in place. Not all minions will act in every round, so it's possible to begin a round with an active minion.

You may choose to reactivate your inactive minion on your turn during either the movement phase or the action phase. Do this at a cost of one dark blood if you are either on or moving through your minion at the time of activation, or do so at a cost of two dark blood at any distance. Reactivating your minion is optional.

After the movement phase is complete and the actions phase is complete, you will go to the minion phase. And here, in turn order, any players with an active minion may take a minion turn. Here, you may optionally move your minion at a cost of one dark blood per move, up to as many spaces as you want, and the minion may resolve the action in its location before becoming inactive again.

You don't have to move your active minion. You don't have to take an action with your active minion. Or you could move it without taking an action. And in these cases, it remains active until the next round. The only restrictions are that the same minion cannot take the same action multiple times without moving away to a different location and taking a different action in between.

And a minion cannot take the same action as its master on the same round. That is not allowed. Sharing the space without taking an action is okay. It's only taking the action which is not allowed. If the minion takes an action at a location with a shared space, then that's the action the minion takes.

If it has only a priority action, then it occupies and uses that priority action space, even if there are other vampires or minions present. In most cases, the minion's action is the same as a vampire action, with the following exceptions. At the black market, if there is one or more vampires present, then pay a flat entry fee of a coin before taking the action in full.

When hunting, only ever take one prey, never two. At Dr. Frank's laboratory, take a much weaker version of the action, limited to discarding at most two cards, one a used horror, and one a prey. And finally, the holy church is no place for a minion. Stop there by day or by night, and the minion is killed.

Remove that card from the game. Once you finished your minion action, as long as it wasn't killed, flip the token to inactive, and lie your minion down. Again, this occurs only if you took an action with the minion. Any other type of minion turn, and it remains active. Wherever vampires roam, the vampire hunter Van Helsing will be there to hunt them down.

Run, Terent. During the movement phase, Van Helsing interrupts players' movement. When he's on a day location, he blocks movement completely. Neither vampires nor minions during the minion phase may move into or through his location. When on a night space, a vampire may move through Van Helsing's location if they roll the fear die, or may stop in Van Helsing's location, again for a roll of the fear die plus a dark blood.

The fear die introduces the risk of gaining fear, and I'll explain that shortly. An active minion may move through Van Helsing's space at night for free. But if it chooses to stop in and use Van Helsing's space, it takes the action for free, but is then discarded. A vampire may ignore all negative effects that Van Helsing has on movement for a single turn by paying a Dracula's favor token.

These cannot be spent for minions. He has no negative effect on movement in or through the forest at night, but does have all of his normal blocking effects during the day. After each minion phase is the Van Helsing phase, and if there is a single player who has the most influence, then Van Helsing moves towards that player.

If there's a tie, he does not move. Van Helsing moves one step if his first step is onto night or two steps if his first step is onto day and moves in the shortest path towards the player with the most influence moving horizontally then vertically. So here if red were the target then he would move like so.

If yellow were the target he'd move horizontally first like so. If purple were the target he could move one two. Well here if blue were the target he would move only the one space into night sharing a space with purple despite targeting blue. If you're the one with the most influence you're going to get chased around the board but you also have the ability to influence which other players encounter Van Helsing.

During this phase Van Helsing strikes fear in the heart of any vampire he moves through and attacks any vampire he lands on. For those he moves through make a fear roll. Set this fear marker according to the total amount of fear collectively held by all players. Then roll the die and if it rolls up a value shown under that marker gain a fear.

The more fear is in the game the more likely even more fear will come. For those who are attacked roll attack dice according to whether the attack occurs at day or night. You'll roll the orange and yellow dice in day or the blue die at night. Either way consult the table and lose each resource that you rolled.

If you don't hold the resource then you lose nothing. In the case of losing prey lose it from your board prioritizing religious then noble then villagers. And for a roll of orange five lose a pupil and if none a minion. A pupil is moved to the cemetery a minion removed from the game. To finish each kind of attack perform a fear roll.

If Van Helsing moves through minions nothing happens but if he lands on minions then those minions are instantly killed with their cards removed from the game without a die roll. That means the loss of minion is the only consequence there will be no fear or other losses. Vampires can hide from Van Helsing in the forest during the Van Helsing phase meaning that when Van Helsing moves into or through the forest they will make no roll of dice.

However minions are not as good at hiding so if Van Helsing lands on the forest and a minion is present that minion is still killed. Once Van Helsing phase is complete it's dawn or dusk. From east to west flip over the next row of location cards. If you are on a card as it's being flipped gain or lose the dusk or dawn benefit on the current side of the card in the top right corner.

If there's a penalty and you're unable to pay then you suffer no consequence. Only vampires activate these icons never minions. After flipping occupy the same type of action space primary or shared if possible. If not default to the only one available. Well in the specific case of flipping to a side which has only a priority space and multiple vampires present whichever player acted earlier in the previous round takes the priority slot and the other player simply stays in the location but not on an action space.

If you've just flipped the most westward row then it will either be noon or midnight. Advance this marker and proceed to the corresponding intermediate scoring and reset. We're first going to talk about midnight. This smaller intermediate scoring phase occurs after rounds eight and 16. This has four steps tribute Dracula gain a horror card and discard pupil.

First tribute. Randomly draw one tribute card. It will show one of the game's resources. Each player secretly chooses an amount of that resource which can include zero in a closed fist before revealing simultaneously. Each player earns the card's cumulative benefits based on their bid. So this player would gain a horror and two dark blood.

This player a horror two dark blood and a ring and so on. Then if there is a single winner that player gains a Dracula's favor and a power point while if tied no one gains this bonus. All resources bid are discarded and then the tribute card is shuffled back into the deck. The same card may be drawn for the second tribute.

Next draw and resolve a single Dracula card. This could be a single once off effect or it could be an ongoing effect. Leave the card face up and it remains in play until the next Dracula step. Next all players draw one horror card to hand before the pupil in this slot is discarded to the cemetery and the board replenished.

But the main event and your major way of gaining points is at the high table. This tactical and interactive phase takes place after rounds four 12 and 20 and is its own mini game in which players will fight for points. High table plays in clockwise turns beginning with whoever has the most influence with ties broken by current turn order.

On a standard turn you'll move your vampire to an empty one among the seven outer chambers and pay the resources showing on that chamber to gain one power. If you follow this basic turn sequence then you must choose an empty chamber so blue could not for example move into here. And you must choose a different chamber.

Red could not for example pay perversion again they would have to move to a different chamber possibly coming back on a future turn to spend that remaining perversion. You do have a few other options. If you want to move into an outer chamber containing another player you can expel them. Pay that player two coins and pay a further coin to the supply.

The expelled player gets bumped back to the central space any number of meeples can go there. You move to that chamber and then make the exchange. Then whoever initiated the expulsion gains one perversion as reward for their evil deed. You may spend your entire turn paying one letter of permission to move back to the center.

This doesn't grant you any power but it means you'll now legally be able to move back to the same location to make that same exchange next turn. If you're unable to make one of these moves legally or if you choose not to then you must lie your meeple down in place making it inactive. While you remain inactive your turn is skipped each time around.

However you can still be expelled earning you two coins and the expeller a perversion. When this happens you return to the middle and become active again meaning your turn is no longer skipped. Meaning you can put those couple of dollars you just gained to further use at this high table. You will have to do this if you have no other action and you can choose to do this voluntarily if you're confident that someone else is going to later expel you since it's a handy way to gain a couple of dollars.

Just don't go inactive in the central space unless you have no other option. Players can only be expelled and reactivated from the outer chambers never from the middle. So if you lie down in the middle then your high table is definitely finished. As part of your turn you could play a high table horror card either an attack or an advance.

The location cost to play is always one dark blood. If targeted by one of these cards you can play a defensive card also at a one dark blood location cost. Whatever the case you cannot declare that you're going to enter a chamber unless you currently hold the resources necessary to make the exchange.

Keep taking turns clockwise until all players meeples are inactive. This high table is over and you can return the meeples to the center for the next one. Next reset the prey grid. Refill all empty spaces from the top of the deck and then as we saw in setup add dark blood according to all of these splotches and arrows.

At the end of this process any prey with four or more dark blood and that counts both dark blood tokens and printed dark blood is too tainted by the evil and is discarded from the game not to the cemetery. Note as well that can occur during initial setup for the game although it is rare. And once again discard one pupil to the cemetery and refill this time taking the one from this position.

After 20 rounds and three high tables the game is over. From the power they gained each player loses one power for each fear they hold. The player with the most power wins. If tied, this tie-breaking pupil breaks the tie. And if still tied, draw a single tribute card and whoever is holding most of the required resource breaks the tie.

If still tied, victory is shared. Thanks for watching. We are using prototype version of the game, so things are not final. And if you like this video, maybe you'd like to watch this next one. Have a great day. Bye.