One of the things I like about Renegade Games and what they are trying to do with Vampire the Masquerade: Rivals is establish a community for the game.

Vampire Wednesdays is their attempt at creating their version of Friday Night Magic. To support this they have been running a weekly live stream on twitch on Wednesdays. With the video being shared on YouTube days later.

Ideally because I don’t do twitch I’d love them to push the live stream to YouTube at the same time, or at least put the video up on YouTube within 24 hours. But I can only dream.

At the moment the only other player I know who likes the game is Diego. Luckily the day he is free to play is a Wednesday. Sadly due to timezones and availability we are playing many hours before the Vampire Wednesday live stream. So any fun formats, rule changes introduced for those joining in are missed. I suppose we could use them the following time we play.

This morning Diego and I met up to play a two player game of Rivals.

I played Toreador, whilst Diego played Malkavian. Once again these were the pre-built decks straight out of the core box with no modification.

We were still having to refer to the rulebook to look things up. Like conspiracies, we hadn’t played them before. But for our second game we were getting better!

I have to say I enjoyed playing Toreador.

My experience with the deck was far far different from Gavin last week. The cards were much much more kind to me. I had Search Engine and Influencer in my opening hand. Both Unhosted Actions. So they were both played for my first turn. A great set up turn. Influencer was great as it set up playing a scheme turn two to take a prestige from Diego.

Whilst Search Engine gave me the Rivals version of the scry mechanic in MtG. I love this card. Being able to basically control the top card of your deck with this deck is important. Several of the cards in the deck have you revealing the top card to get some kind of benefit, like extra attack or influence.

It’s also important with the Toreador deck to get a retainer early on to start buffing your vampires and gaining agenda points. Which I was able to do on my second turn. Getting a vagrant also allowed me to mitigate the S.A.D. damage at the end of my turn until a second one appeared in the street. So I was happy leaving it there to chip away at Diego’s Coterie.

Diego had a nice card that exhausted all my vampires so I couldn’t attack his vampire he was going to claim the Prince of the City with. Unlucky for Diego he never got to benefit from it as I claimed it off his vampire on my turn.

In the end I won by TKO or more correctly sending all his vampires to Torpor.

I enjoyed Rivals as a two player game. It was different to last weeks three player game. I like both player counts. But I can see how a deck needs to be built for either a two player or multiplayer game. Multiplayer your deck can be a bit slower to kick in, but in two player you need to be out of the starting block as quick as possible.

There wasn’t enough time to have a three player game with a friend of Diego’s that turned up mid game. So we had a couple of games of Perudo before I had to head back home.

I’m looking forward to our next Vampire Wednesday Morning.