Mobile card game Vampire: The Masquerade Clans of London understands the value of a funny character name.
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Rather than illustrations or CGI art, the Clans of London developers opted to use photographs of real-life actors in makeup and costumes to represent the vampires on cards, too. The shots are all heavily Photoshopped, with wildly varying levels of believability, but demonstrate a level of care that you’re hard-pressed to find elsewhere in the mobile space. It’s hard to imagine other developers would take the time to organize real-life shoots, especially given the proliferation of sloppy AI assets on the platform.
There’s just something so gloriously amusing about whipping out a card of some dude named Robert Cavendish and throwing it down like he’s some sort of established superhero, especially when it’s adorned with an image of someone who looks like an office worker you’d pass on the street.
Bloody battle
Two players go head-to-head on either end of a board with 15 card slots that are split down the middle by a shared central row of three. The first row is for your pawns: ideally, low-level cards with simple effects you place early to support your hand later on. You might start by slapping down Abir, for example, a low-level vampire perfumer who automatically buffs the strength of the next card you deploy.
Above it are the rook slots, a good place to put some more powerful characters to defend against your foe if they start trying to set down cards in your territory. Allied cards can generally receive reinforcements from those adjacent to them in combat, adding their power levels together. As the highest number wins a fight, filling out these slots wisely can pay dividends later on when you contest the valuable middle row, which is home to two knight slots and one prince.
Naturally, placing cards requires a resource, blood, so you can’t just put down your entire hand right away. It’s in short supply in the first few rounds, forcing you to think carefully about how to use it.
As any unused blood is discarded at the end of each round, you can’t just sit back and steadily accumulate it to spam powerful cards in the final rounds either. There are only seven rounds in a match, so things move very quickly, and you risk being left behind if you sit around twiddling your thumbs.
Build your coterie
Fans will recognize the prince title as the one given to a powerful vampire controlling a specific domain. The game is set in modern-day London, a city that, in-universe, is still recovering from a massive vampire purge, so having different figures fighting over positions like this makes a lot of sense.
Many of the different vampire factions and types are represented too, often with appropriate special card effects to differentiate them from other cards in your deck. I’ve been focusing predominantly on Ventrue — a powerful clan embedded in the upper echelons of society — cards whose status effects center on buffing other Ventrue characters, leading to a highly satisfying domino effect of boosts and bonuses that makes it easy to steamroll later rounds.
More cards are unlocked for free as you win online matches, and I would recommend frequently trying out new combinations, as a lot of them come together in really interesting ways. There’s a cool ‘make me a deck’ button that automatically creates a fairly decent setup out of any card you fancy, taking the stress out of having to think too much about the way everything interacts.
It almost goes without saying that there’s a battle pass with both free and premium tiers to work through as well, plus daily and weekly challenges, so there’s something to chase every time you log on, even if you don’t want to part with any cash.
The whole formula is an awful lot of fun, and I expect that I will be playing for months to come. If you’re interested in giving it a go, you can download Vampire: The Masquerade Clans of London for free via the App Store or Google Play Store.
Before joining the team, he was Contributing Writer at PLAY (formerly Official PlayStation Magazine UK) and has written articles for many of the UK's other biggest gaming magazines including the likes of Edge, PC Gamer, and SFX.
Now, when he's not getting his greasy little mitts on the newest hardware or gaming gadget, he can be found listening to J-pop or feverishly devouring the latest Nintendo Switch otome.