Vampire: Prince of the city - how is it?

As the title says, I have recently seen this game at my FLGS and because I really love V:tES, I am very interested in byuing it. Anyone here have some experience with it? It really looks cool and it's supposed to be negatiation-heavy game (like Dune) so I presume it would be a great hit with my group but wanted to ask here first.

It could have been a great game. I was quite disapointed, since I like V:TES a lot and had high hopes for this one. It is still a nice game if you bear the following in mind.

• You must dig systems that has you roll 23D10+23 rolls. I hate it.

• The old clans are gone. No Toreador, instead we have Daeva or whatever.

• The cards look horribly cheap. They make you realize how spoilt you are by the freakish V:TES artwork.

• I would have loved a real setting. Either Chicago or Anarch LA.

Ye, I hate the Requiem, I have all the books from The Masquerade and then they come with this crap. Daeva - Toreadors + Brujah, Mekhet - Malkavian, Ventrue - they haven't even bothered to change the name. I tried to read the new rulebook but the overall dissapointment with the setting got me out. But fuck it, I don't have the time for RPG even.

Someone want to give me a basic rundown on requiem?

No Camarilla, no Sabbat, just 4 new "movements". Basically it's the old stuff rearranged as a new stuff but you have to pay for it once more. I can see that it may be good for newcomers but I hate it because I see the old Maquerade behind it. One of the things I don't like is the absence of a metaplot in the new setting. I can't help myself to think of Requiem other than as a excuse to drain more money from ppl. But as i said, maybe i am biased because I liked the old setting and see the new one only as a poor rearrangement of events.
And worst of all: there are no Tzimisce!

Well, they said that the world world would eventually blow up. And it did. Can't blame them for being true to the storyline, can you?

I think the rulebook stated that they will never make a sourcebook describing Gehenna. When they did, it was apparent that they are about to hose the players in some way...

I have a personal history with Prince of the City, so I'll try not to ramble here. Let's just say that I worked hard on a different version that will never be published. Let's just say that it would be easy for me to dislike (resent) this game, but I actually do like it.

Vampire: Prince of the City is a boardgame about the nightly battle between vampires for influence in mortal institutions of the city they dwell in. The game does a decent job of bringing the theme to life, with a dark and pretty board and some moderately thematic rules. With the right kind of players, this is a heavy negotiation game with co-op elements but also plenty of direct conflict. With the wrong players, it's a lifeless hybrid of Euro and AT elements focused on area control and victory points.

Prince of the City is set in the new World of Darkness, which makes sense from a pure business standpoint, but was probably a major missed opportunity to cash in again on the larger fanbase of the old World of Darkness. I have very reluctantly come to appreciate the new WoD, for the streamlined and playable combat system, for the coherent cosmology, and for the absence of the most twinked-out powergamer bullshit of the old setting, like the Thaumaturgy, Vicissitude, and Obtenebration. The quality of many of the new books is high, especially the core books, the excellent Chicago hardcover, and the experimental Damnation City. But your mileage may vary. Most of my friends refuse to play anything set in the new World of Darkness.

Back to Prince of the City... I like it. My friends who turn up their nose at the new WoD didn't enjoy it as much, because they needed to constantly make snide remarks about the setting. But other friends who just love Jyhad really enjoyed this game. It had a comparable mixture of strategy, manipulation and luck that offered some of the same fun as the card game. At first, they were cautiously focusing on the co-op element of dealing with external threats, probably because we had just played two games of Arkham Horror. But by the third turn, the gloves were off and people were getting into hardball negotiations, trash talk and yes, torpor.

It's easy to complain that Prince of the City suffers from leader-bashing and king-making, because it's quite true. And that's okay, because those are perfectly legitimate activities for machiavellian vampires. A more restricted degree of interaction would have missed the entire point of the setting. It's also true that there is a lot of dice-rolling, but anybody reading posts at Fortress: AmeriTrash should be comfortable at calculating odds and managing risk.

I guess that the die-rolling in the end was what kept me from giving the game an higher mark, Daevas in Nonesuch City or not. It drove me crazy. Personal taste of course.