Vampire Survivors: Faking a Swarm in Cardboard

GrantOkay, so get this. We have talked cardboard for like 10 episodes straight.

MilesConventions, awards, more conventions.

GrantThis is The Design Deck. I'm Grant, that's Miles, and we promised you board, card, and video game coverage.

MilesWe did promise that.

GrantWe did not deliver that.

MilesUntil today.

GrantUntil today, because there's a video game that just went tabletop, and the puzzle underneath it is honestly kind of nuts.

MilesHere's the thing that got me. In the video game, the computer just spawns enemies, hundreds of them, constantly in real time.

GrantNo calculating, no dice. It just knows where you are and throws a wall of monsters at you.

MilesRight. So imagine trying to do that with cards and a table. No processor, no clock ticking 60 times a second, just cardboard and however many hands you've got.

GrantSo how do you fake a swarm with no computer? Oh, we are absolutely getting into that.

MilesBut first, you gotta hear how this thing actually got announced.

GrantAnd how the internet reacted because it was a lot. Okay, so get this. Grey Fox Games is actually publishing this thing.

MilesYeah, and the designer's Emerson Matsuuchi, who built it as a cooperative deckbuilder version of the video game.

GrantDeckbuilder, not an app. Actual cards, actual box.

MilesRight. And BoardGameGeek's listing backs that up. Cooperative deck and bag building, video game theme credited to Matsuuchi and Grey Fox.

GrantSo it's real. It's not vaporware.

MilesIt's real. Grey Fox's own announcement lays out the pitch. Up to four heroes fighting endless waves of enemies trying to outlast Death itself.

GrantOutlast Death itself. I love that they just went there.

MilesThey did.

GrantOkay, but here's what actually blew my mind. Zatu Games reported this thing hit its $15,000 funding goal in seven minutes.

MilesSeven minutes?

GrantSeven minutes. That's less than time it takes me to pick a lunch order.

MilesSure, but the video game's already got a massive built-in audience. People were sitting there with a mouse hovering over the pledge button.

GrantFair, but wait, there's more because seven minutes was just the opening shot.

MilesOh, you're gonna love this. The crowdfunding tracker on BackerTracker has the final number at $591,655.

GrantAgainst $15,000 ask.

MilesAgainst 15,000. That's something like 40 times the goal. Almost 4,000% funded.

GrantNearly 4,000%?

MilesNearly 4,000%. 9,272 backers total.

GrantAnd what were people actually paying on average?

MilesAround Sixty-four a head. Not wild for a board game campaign. But multiply that by 9,000 people and you see where the total comes from.

GrantSixty-four bucks is basically one nice tier plus shipping. That's not whale money. That's regular fans who wanted the box.

MilesWhich is exactly the profile you'd want if you're trying to prove this isn't just hardcore collectors throwing cash at a name.

GrantThis ran from late October into late November, right?

MilesOctober 28th to November 21st.

GrantThat's basically a full month of people still throwing money at it after the initial spike was locked in.

MilesRight. It's not just a Seven-minute flash in the pan. The campaign kept adding Backers for weeks after the headline number was already locked in.

GrantSo what does that actually tell us? Because I keep going back and forth. Is this proof video game fans will buy anything with the name on it, or proof the idea itself is good?

MilesHonestly, both. Grey Fox even built in a dollar refundable pledge with a treasure chest deck box just to catch people who weren't sure yet.

GrantWhich is smart. It lowers the bar to just try it and see.

MilesExactly. But numbers like this also happen with games that never get played. Backers fund the dream, and the box sits on a shelf.

GrantSure, but 9,000 backers averaging 64 bucks each is a very different signal than one whale backer covering half the goal. That spread tells you it's broad interest, not a single mega fan.

MilesGood point. It's not one person underwriting a passion project. It's thousands of smaller bets all landing the same week.

GrantSo the money proves people want it. It doesn't prove the thing actually works at the table.

MilesNo, it doesn't, which is the real question now. What did Matsuuchi have to solve to take something built around a computer doing math in real time and make it playable with cards on a table?

GrantOkay, so we left off on the money question. Now here's the actual puzzle underneath it.

MilesRight. What does a computer normally do that a box of cardboard just can't?

GrantA ton, actually. Every second a video game like this is tracking where you are, where every enemy is, spawning new ones off screen and running the pathing so they all funnel towards you.

MilesAnd it's doing that continuously. No turns, no pauses. That's the entire feeling of the genre. You're always moving, always being closed in on.

GrantSo take the computer away

Speaker 3No real-time position tracking, no invisible math deciding when a bat spawns behind you.

MilesYou've got a board, some cards, and people who take turns instead of existing in a live simulation.

Speaker 3Which is why I actually feel for whoever got handed this brief.

MilesThat's Emerson Matsuuchi, and he's not new to this problem. GoNintendo's announcement coverage points out he already designed the Metal Gear Solid tabletop game.

Speaker 3Oh, that's a smart hire then. Stealth and swarm combat are basically opposite genres.

MilesTotally different problems, but the same starting question: how do you take something built for a screen and make it work with your hands?

Speaker 3Does the write-up say what he pulled from that project?

MilesNot directly, no. It just confirms the resume. He's done this translation once before, video game to table, and lived to tell it about it.

Speaker 3Fair enough. So he's not walking cold.

MilesNo. And apparently this particular translation is getting noticed for more than just existing.

Speaker 3How so?

MilesDualShockers ran a piece around Gen Con framing the whole adaptation as outsmarting problems that trip up veteran tabletop designers.

Speaker 3Wait, outsmarting the veterans? That's a real claim to make about a first-time video to board conversion.

MilesIt's their framing, not mine, but it tells you the difficulty here isn't hypothetical. People who do this for a living look at bullet heaven games and go, "Yeah, good luck."

Speaker 3Because the thing that makes the genre fun is exactly the thing a board can't fake, the swarm building in real time.

MilesRight. And Wargamer actually built a whole piece around that exact question. Their headline is basically, "How do you even do this?"

Speaker 3They talked to the devs?

MilesYeah, interviews with the team, and the framing is blunt. A bullet hell video game converting to tabletop isn't obvious. It's a genuine open question, even to the people who just funded it.

Speaker 3So we've got two outlets independently landing on the same worry. Is this even going to work?

MilesYou good?

Speaker 3Sorry, yeah. Point is, that's not marketing spin. That's the actual design question sitting on the table before a single card gets printed.

MilesEnemies from everywhere, no engine to track them, no clock running in the background.

Speaker 3So somebody had to invent a way to fake a wall of monsters closing in without any of the software doing the closing.

MilesAnd that's not a small ask. The game has to know how close is too close for every enemy without a processor doing the math.

Speaker 3Right, because on a table, there's no hidden state. Everything has to be visible or trackable with a token, or it doesn't exist.

MilesWhich is why I think the real trick isn't just solving it, it's solving it so four people can read the danger at a glance mid-game.

Speaker 3That's a genuinely different problem than what Matsuuchi hit with Metal Gear Solid too. Stealth is about hiding information. This is about broadcasting danger as loudly and clearly as possible.

MilesTotal opposite instinct, and apparently they landed on something.

Speaker 3So that's the problem laid bare. What's the actual trick?

MilesSo the designer here isn't some random hire, Grant. It's the same Matsuuchi we mentioned, the one with the Metal Gear Solid credit.

Speaker 3Right, the stealth guy. Okay, give me the mechanic. What's actually happening on the board when the swarm hits?

MilesThe announcement lays it out pretty plainly. Players face, quote, "Waves of enemies closing in from all directions."

Speaker 3From all directions. Okay, so it's not one horde coming from stage left.

MilesFour sides, North, South, East, West, all pushing inward on your character standing at the same time.

Speaker 3Oh, that's diabolical. That's basically surrounding the table version of the on-screen swarm.

MilesRight, because in the video game, the enemies don't care about your hit box. They just close in from every angle the screen can render.

Speaker 3So the board is standing in for the screen's edges.

MilesExactly. And each side gets its own stack, its own pressure. You can't just turtle in a corner because there is no corner that's safe.

Speaker 3Wait, wait. Walk me through the actual pieces on the table. What am I holding when this happens?

MilesTwelve character standees for the survivors, a hundred and forty punch board tokens for tracking health, upgrades, enemy counts.

Speaker 3A hundred and forty is a LOT of little cardboard bits.

MilesAnd two hundred cards running the whole engine underneath it.

Speaker 3Okay, two hundred cards. That's a real deck. That's Not a starter set deck.

MilesYeah. And once the swarm stacks three or four deep on one side, you're grateful for every one of those tokens. That's literally the counter for how loud that side's about to get.

Speaker 3So the tokens aren't just bookkeeping, they're the tension gauge.

MilesNo, and that's the point. The tokens are doing the job the game's processor used to do: counting, spawning, tracking state.

Speaker 3So instead of the computer going spawn enemy, spawn enemy, spawn enemy sixty times a second...

MilesYou've got a stack of tokens on four sides that gets fed by a deck.

Speaker 3That's clever, genuinely, but I wanna poke at it a little.

MilesGo for it.

Speaker 3In the actual game, the chaos is omnidirectional and kind of unpredictable. Stuff spawns off-screen, wraps around, swarms unevenly. Four fixed sides feels almost too tidy for that.

MilesYou think it's a downgrade?

Speaker 3Nah, I think it might be a simplification dressed up as elegance. Like, real Vampire Survivors doesn't care about compass directions.

MilesSure, but you're not running a GPU here, you're running a Table. Four sides means Four players can each own a side. That's not a compromise, that's the whole reason it works as a co-op Game.

Speaker 3Huh, okay. I didn't think about it that way. You're saying the Four sides aren't a limitation, they're basically built-in player roles.

MilesExactly. Each side becomes someone's zone to defend, and that's a job the Video Game never needed to hand out because you were the only one dodging.

Speaker 3So the fixed geometry isn't compensating for what the Computer could do, it's compensating for what Four humans can't do at once, which is track every angle by themselves.

MilesRight. And that's why the Slower pace works in its favor. If this ran in Real-Time, Four people all watching Four sides at once would just be noise, not tension.

Speaker 3Okay, I'm coming around on it. It's not a downgrade, it's a redesign for a different number of hands. And honestly, it changes how I picture the table. It's not four solo games happening near each other, it's an actual defensive line.

MilesWhich is maybe the smartest inversion in the whole design. The video game punishes you for being surrounded, and the board game asks four people to choose to be surrounded on purpose.

GrantSo the video game is one person, one screen, dodging everything at once. This thing is four people around a table.

MilesRight. And Grey Fox Games actually frames it as a straight co-op fight. Up to four heroes trying to outlast death itself while the waves just keep coming.

GrantOutlast death itself. Bold pitch.

MilesIt's their line, not mine.

GrantOkay, but here's what I actually want to know. How do you turn one guy's leveling up screen into something four people share?

MilesDeckbuilding. Everybody's got their own growing stack of cards standing in for weapons and upgrades.

GrantSo instead of watching numbers tick up on screen, I'm literally shuffling a deck that gets scarier?

MilesThat's the idea. You start weak, you draw garbage, and by round whatever, your deck's doing real damage.

GrantDoes that actually feel like the game, though? Because in Vampire Survivors, half the joy is watching your character turn into a walking laser show in real time. A deck doesn't glow.

MilesNo, but think about Aeons End for a second. That's a cooperative deckbuilder we've talked about before, and nobody complains that the deck isn't visually flashy. The tension is in what you draw when you need it.

GrantSure, but Aeons End is slow and tactical. Vampire Survivors is chaos. It's a flood.

MilesWhich is exactly the trade they're making. You give up the moment-to-moment dopamine hit for a resource curve you can actually hold in your hand across four players.

GrantI'll give them that. A real-time auto-battler literally cannot be four-player without something turn-based underneath it. You can't have four people all mashing at once.

MilesRight. Somebody's gotta go first.

GrantActually, that reframes the whole debate. Does the deck feel as good as the screen debate for me, too? It's less is a card as flashy as a laser and more can four people actually act each turn without stepping on each other?

MilesRight. And that's a solved problem in cooperative deckbuilding generally. You just stagger it. Everybody gets their turn. The game doesn't need everyone acting at once to feel tense.

GrantSo deckbuilding isn't really replacing the video game mechanic. It's replacing the entire concept of simultaneous action.

MilesAnd BoardGameGeeks listing backs that read. It's categorized straight up as Cooperative/Deckbuilding/Pool-Building with a Video Game theme tag stapled on.

GrantVideo Game theme. As opposed to what, the mechanics being video gamey?

MilesExactly the split. The theme travels, the systems get rebuilt from scratch.

GrantThat distinction actually maps onto every adaptation we've covered on this show, doesn't it? The skin changes, the guts get rebuilt.

MilesPretty much every time. The name on the box is doing marketing work. The actual rule set is doing design work, and they don't have to agree with each other.

GrantThat's honestly the tell for whether any of these adaptations work. Not whether it looks like the source, whether the new system produces the same feeling through different math.

MilesAnd whether four people drawing cards at their own pace can recreate the panic of a screen filling up with bats.

GrantWhich we don't actually know yet.

MilesWe don't.

GrantAlright. Design choices are one thing. Let's look at what people actually put money down for and whether it lines up with what they were promised.

MilesBecause a pitch is easy. A shipped box is the real test.

GrantOkay, so pledge money. What did people actually get for their Fifty-nine, Sixty-something bucks?

MilesThere's really one core tier, the Deluxe Edition, and that lands at Fifty-nine dollars.

GrantFifty-nine. That's a legit game store price, not a help fund my dream price.

MilesRight. And if you wanted somewhere to actually store your cards and Tokens once you owned the thing, there's a Ten dollar Deck box add-on sitting next to it.

GrantTen bucks for a box. That's a little funny to me.

MilesLaugh if you want, but deck builders live or die by how fast you can sort and reshuffle between rounds. That's not a joke tier. That's a real accessory.

GrantFine, fine. Now what's this partnership thing I keep seeing mentioned around the campaign?

MilesSo separate from the actual pledge levels, Grey Fox's own announcement for the game describes a one dollar buy-in, fully refundable, that gets you into some kind of partnership program.

GrantA dollar? That's basically raise your hand if you're serious about this.

MilesPretty much. And the reward attached to it is a deck box shaped like a treasure chest.

GrantWait, an actual chest?

MilesThat's how their own copy describes it, yeah.

GrantOkay, that's kinda great actually. A dollar for a novelty box is such a low risk way to see how deep the fandom really runs.

MilesAnd it says something bigger too. It's not just back the game, it's go a little further and we'll treat you like a stakeholder.

GrantFor a mobile game that started as basically one guy's side project, that's a strange place to end up.

MilesIt is, but step back from the dollar figures for a second.

GrantGo on.

MilesStep back from the dollar figures for a second.

GrantGo on.

MilesEvery single choice we've walked through today, the Spawn coming from Four sides, the Deckbuilding standing in for a live weapon build, even the box you put your own cards in, it's the same question over and over.

GrantWhich is what exactly?

MilesWhat job was the computer quietly doing for you, and who's doing that job now that the computer's gone?

GrantThe screen scored kills. The screen Spawned every enemy in Real-Time. The screen shuffled your build behind the scenes without you noticing.

MilesAnd on the Table, that workload gets split up. A Deck handles the shuffling, a Spawn mechanic handles the Swarm, and four players handle paying attention to their own corner.

GrantSo the money's almost beside the point.

MilesIt's proof of appetite, not proof the design works. Those are different things.

GrantAnd from everything we've dug through, the design actually holds up.

MilesEnough of it holds up that I'd call this a real translation, not just a licensed cash-in with the name slapped on the box.

GrantCardboard went up against the computer and it's still standing.

MilesThat's the read I'm walking away with.

GrantLet's close the books on this one. So if you're building the game from scratch, the question that matters is just what did the computer used to do for you?

MilesRight. It kept score. It decided when the Swarm hits. It evolved your weapons behind the scenes.

GrantAnd Grey Fox had to hand every one of those jobs to a physical object.

MilesTokens instead of hit detection. A card instead of a random number generator.

GrantThat's the whole exercise, honestly. Figure out the invisible machinery, then build something you can hold that does the same job.

MilesSlower, sure, but you can see it happening now.

GrantWhich is more than the actual game ever let you do.

MilesAll right, so if you've got a game you want us to take apart like this next, video or otherwise, tell us.

GrantHit us up at thedesigndeck.com or find us on social. We want the weird ones.

MilesNew episodes land every Thursday.

GrantAnd we've got more of these translations to chase down.

MilesThere's no shortage of screens turning into cardboard these days.

GrantTrue. My shelf's already regretting it.

MilesMine regretted it years ago.