Vampire: the Masquerade, the Board Game

By the way, did you know that there is currently a Vampire Board game. Not that it is necessarily better than yours, but just to make sure that you do not clone this game without knowing it.

I did not know how much the system were different. Apparently vampires are less likely to travel between cities. Personally, I am a fan of mage the ascension, I heard a bit how the new mage system worked. But considering that I stoped playing RPG before they switched the system, I never had a chance to learn the new system.

By the way, I do not know if it's me but the link seems to be broken.

Read the .pdf, here are my thoughts.

The existing Vampire game also has a board of hexes, and even has some of the same locations you described. I'd take care to avoid similarities.

Your game, despite using a scaled-down system of the RPG, still has a wide variety of statistics, more statistics than most board games would have a player keep track of. That begs the question: who is this game for? If one wants to play something that is very deep and allows them to have a customizable character and is set in the V:tM universe... why wouldn't they just play Vampire itself? I don't think you've scaled it down enough to attract new people, or enough to be SHORTER than a simple one-shot style RPG adventure...

Compare to the D&D boardgames, which have a significantly smaller amount of stuff to keep track of per character, and don't really do anything along the same lines with character customization/creation. Those provide a very scaled back experience.

Additionally, I think that from reading this PDF I only have an idea of the statistics and a number of roles, but I do not have an idea of how the game works or how resources are really gathered, how domains are defined, how retainers are placed/moved... I think that to get more feedback that should be fleshed out more than the stats/resources each character can have.

No matter what the game is, if I were dealt a card that said "my actions were determined randomly" I would quit the game. Then I would find the designer's house and burn it. Even in the RPG Malkavians aren't RANDOM, they're chaotic... why would you restrict one player to essentially playing Goth Candyland from the start of the game, such that nothing is really under their control and they cannot plan? Does that sound fun? Maybe thematic, but to me it sounds very unpleasant. Perhaps it is just me.

A final caveat: You don't work for White Wolf, so designing a game that is married to that theme is basically dooming yourself to never being able to publish that game outside of certain circumstances which I hope you don't mind me saying are extremely unlilkely (especially since Prince of the City didn't do that well, I believe) so I'd take care with using large amounts of naming/thematic elements from that system if you plan to put a lot of effort into the game and try to publish it... which will just make it more difficult to retheme later.

For Malkavians, their weakness could be something like, they can't take the same action twice in a row? So they're "unpredictable" in that sense? Having them be truly random seems... really really unfair to their player.

I understand that the difference does come down to wanting to roleplay or not. I think that to make a good boardgame you may still want to streamline further, but that may just be my preference.

Another thing I think you may want to look out for in this style of game is snowball effect; If increasing rank grants access to better areas to increase ranks faster, then a small lead could quickly turn into a larger one. One easy way of fixing that is to introduce some benefit which consistently goes to the player with the least ranks; games as diverse as power grid and munchkin have a mechanic like this, because both games would otherwise share that snowballing problem.

Considering the setting, I think finding ways to include negotiation/intrigue and uneasy truces among the game mechanics would serve nicely.

I think it'd be more interesting to see the ideas you have about retainers and such than to see the intricacies of the stat system! If you just started posting brainstorms in here you'd probably get a lot of feedback on them that way!

Sorry to sound harsh; I tend to focus on negatives in critique posts because, well, they're the things that will be changed... I think there's certainly a place for this type of game.

This day/night idea sounds interesting because you can strike a neat balance:
During the day, players who invested more effort in building up allies and retainers and such would have the advantage, getting to do more things
During the night, players who instead built THEMSELVES up to be more powerful would have the edge, able to bully weaker vampires around through force
And of course, each could interestingly affect the others.

You're right about negotiation being there, with the player determining turn order... what resources are there that can be traded/offered in exchange for favor during this phase? If players also receive benefits based on their turn order, there might be more incentive to wheel and deal for these turn order spots. Perhaps one player is always left out of the action, (though he gets something else as consolation) so players who want to perform the action must have something to offer to make sure they aren't left out?