Game Review: Nightfall

By Jeremy Anderson

Type/Time/Players: Nightfall is a card game that lasts about forty-five minutes. It supports 2-5 players, but the numbers in the game are designed for four and I really don't recommend it for just two. With four or five players, you can also expect a slightly longer play-time, but you probably won't go over an hour unless you have new players and five players.

The Skinny: You are a clan of vampires and werewolves, attempting to beat down other clans. Perhaps the player technically represents the dark lord of the clan, but there's no card or special powers representing that so it doesn't much matter. The key mechanic in Nightfall is called the chain, which is essentially a combo mechanic but permits other players to use your combo to their own advantage. If I play a red card with a pair of little symbols, one green and one yellow, I can follow it up with a green card or a yellow card. Say I play a yellow card with a purple and white pair of symbols and finish there. The player to my left can then play a purple card or a white card, and chain his own combo from the cards he plays. Thus, while the game does include a mechanic to handle card values (which tend to range from 2-4), I'm not sure it needs to. A card you can chain from your other cards is usually far more valuable than a card that is just a bit more powerful.

The Good: There's a lot of interaction in this game. On that rubric it's miles ahead of Dominion, Thunderstone, and even the Resident Evil deck construction card game. Players actually do things to attack one another and it is in players' best interest to pay attention to how well other players are doing and to what other players are buying. Additionally, players are able to play cards on one another's turns, which in theory means that every turn is of interest to every player.
Another interesting feature is that the starting minions actually remove themselves from your deck as you play, which means the deck's overall effectiveness (and chainability, which is totally a word now) increase pretty dramatically as turns go by.

Players also get to "draft" for the cards in the starting deck, picking two cards that only their own clan gets, one card for the central buying archive, and one they don't want to appear this game. Thus, there's a lot of diversity in how games can run (like most deckbuilding games) but in this one that randomness is tempered by player preference.

The Bad: Players don't tend to keep track of how many wounds their opponents have taken. Unless all of the players do keep track, there's no sense of who's winning and players only have a vague idea of who to attack. This leads to a final score that feels almost entirely random. A player with an excellent buying strategy and who performed excellent combos can frighten the others into attacking and irreparably wounding him, while a player who is too confused by the chain mechanic to do anything of value may be considered a 'non-threat' and take no attacks. This would be a fine balancing mechanism, except that the number of hits you take is how the winner is determined; the 'non-threat' player wins the game.

The other drawback to the increased interactivity is a simple matter of vision: To understand their best move, players must be able to see all the cards their opponents are playing and buying, and frequently they just can't.

One other concern with the game is actually its length; Its turns are complex but few, which means fewer buys, which means less deckbuilding happens in the deckbuilding card game.

Conclusions: I'd be interested to see a variant of the game where players just keep score, either aloud or on paper near the middle of the table. Then attacks near the end of the game wouldn't be totally misdirected, and playing well (at least defensively) would have some form of payoff over playing badly but quietly. More strategic players should also lay out the randomized cards for the central archive before the draft, so that players can make drafting decisions based on some information.

It's possible that the game is more fun with more focused players, and with players who are, on the whole, better at the game. For instance, players who know the cards don't have as much trouble with not being able to see the text on other cards; they can recall the entire effect when they recognize the card art (players of Magic: The Gathering know this phenomenon well).