Vagrantsong Review

Year: 2022 | Players: 2-4 | Minutes: 45+ | Ages: 14+

This Vagrantsong review was made after playing through the campaign once. All scenarios were played by either two or three players.

What is Vagrantsong?

Vagrantsong is a cooperative storytelling horror game in which you attempt to help some ghosts gain back some of their humanity and stop haunting a train.

Vagrantsong was designed by Matt Carter, Justin Gibbs, and Kyle Rowan, and it’s published by Wyrd Games.

Rules Overview

During the Vagrantsong campaign, you and your fellow Vagrants will face off against different Haints (ghosts), hoping to give them back as much humanity as it takes to get them to stop haunting the train and free their spirits. When you “hit” a Haint, they gain humanity, getting you closer to victory. When a Haint hits you, you lose humanity and get closer to defeat.

There are base rules that you follow throughout the campaign, but the scenarios and Haints have their own unique sets of rules. During a round, each player will take a turn and the Haint will take a turn between each player’s turn.

You’ll have three coins to use on actions each turn. You have General actions on your Vagrant’s card and actions on your Skill cards; you start with your character’s unique Skill cards and gain more as the campaign progresses. Each action shows you how many dice you’ll roll and the Success number you’ll need to meet or exceed. Stacking multiple coins on a single action can usually make it more powerful. Vagrants can also have Junk cards, which usually give passive effects that can be used throughout the game.

General actions are: Move, Investigate, Rummage, Patch Up, and Bust. You can use the Investigate action when you’re in a space with an Event token, reading that entry in the book. The Rummage action allows you to pull Rummage tokens from the bag; these tokens can help you fight the Haint and heal. Patch Up is a healing action and Bust is a basic attack action.

Each scenario has multiple Rituals that the Vagrants can perform by completing the objectives shown on the cards. You don’t have to complete those objectives, but the rewards usually make the scenarios much easier to beat.

On the Haint’s turn, you pull a Rummage token from the bag and do the action shown in the book. In most cases, the Haint will move and then attack Vagrants. Different effects can make the Haint switch between its two moods, changing its unique rules and the actions it takes. They also usually have a powerful Cycle Effect, which is an action they take when a certain number of Rummage tokens have been discarded.

You’ll beat a scenario by satisfying the victory condition(s), which is usually when the Haint gains back all of its lost humanity. You’ll lose if all of the Vagrants are Westbound, which occurs when a Vagrant has had all of its Skill and Junk cards flipped over due to losing Humanity (health) during a scenario. Regardless of whether you win or lose, you always move forward in the campaign.

During the post-game Camp Phase, you’ll optionally use your coins to buy new Skill and Junk cards, perform a seance (this gives you a unique ability for the next scenario), and heal wounds, among other things. You’ll then read the next Witness the In-Between card, which will give everyone choices to make before moving on to the next scenario.

That’s just a very basic rules overview for Vagrantsong. For more info on how the game plays, take a look at the rulebook.

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Pros and Cons

Pros

Vagrantsong is a great-looking game. The rubber hose art style is fantastic and I prefer these acrylic standees to most of the miniatures out there.
Every scenario in Vagrantsong feels at least a little bit different than the rest, keeping the game feeling fresh throughout the campaign. All of the Haints have unique rules, the map layouts change how you can move around, and the rituals usually make you play slightly differently.
I like the challenge of this game, especially once you get past the first couple of scenarios. It can be very tough since the Haints like to focus on the most vulnerable Vagrants, but it’s also very rewarding. Multiple times we went into scenarios with beaten-down Vagrants, but we were still able to pull off the wins.
I really like how the Camp Phase works. You have a bunch of options for spending your coins, and those can be some tough/interesting choices. We always wanted to spend the coins on new Skill cards and the seance, but in a lot of cases healing was the best option. The Camp Phase also does the job of making you want to jump right back into the game.
You get enough information to understand who the Vagrants and Haints are, so it’s easy to get into the story and role-play it a bit.
I love when games have the “exploding dice” mechanic. It’s a pretty huge deal in Vagrantsong, too, since getting multiple successes with some Skills can be the difference between winning and losing.
It’s surprisingly easy to set up each scenario. You just copy the map layout in the book and then there’s a list of any unique setup instructions to follow. Setup only took us a couple of minutes each time.
It’s very easy to add or remove players from the campaign. You just have to adjust the Haint’s Humanity threshold. We switched from two to three players multiple times without issue.

Cons

The rules for the Haints’ movement could be clearer. There were some situations when we really didn’t know how the Haint was supposed to move, even after reading through those sections of the rulebook multiple times.
It can be very frustrating when you can’t get anything done on your turn because of bad dice rolls. This can happen multiple times per scenario since there aren’t a lot of ways to mitigate bad rolls. I think having the option to use any of the Rummage tokens to reroll would’ve fixed this issue.
One one-off scenario would’ve been awesome. You do get enough content in the box since the 20-scenario campaign is quite long, but having a way to randomize a single scenario would’ve made it even better.
I wish they had included some extra coins for each character since there are multiple ways to gain more coins than you start with. They give extras of other components, so it’s odd they didn’t include extra coins.

Final Thoughts

Vagrantsong is a fantastic horror game and one of the better storytelling games that I’ve played. It’s well-written, it looks great on the table, each Haint is a unique challenge, and it requires plenty of cooperation to beat.

There are some things about Vagrantsong that I would tweak to make it work a little better for my group (see the Cons section above), but I was as excited to play the final 10 scenarios as I was the first 10. That’s not typical for me when it comes to long campaign games.

If you’re looking for a great horror/Halloween board game to play and you like campaign games, I definitely recommend checking out Vagrantsong. If you’re a fan of co-op storytelling games and/or boss battlers, chances are you’ll be a fan of this one.

I’m very much looking forward to checking out the Vagrantsong expansions.

Update: Vagrantsong has already been added to our Top 40 Cooperative Board Games list!
Update 2: It’s also included on the Best Horror Board Games page!
Update 3: It’s now also on the Top Storytelling Games list!
Update 4: Another list! It’s now one of our Best RPG Board Games!

Vagrantsong Links

BGG | Amazon | Game Nerdz

Thanks for taking the time to read our Vagrantsong review!

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