Masters of the Night Coming to Retail

Solo and cooperative vampire boardgame from Ares Games.

The fate of your family will be decided in a few days. Will you turn this city into your domain—or lose it to lesser mortals?

Play as members of a vampire clan slowly regaining their former power. With the help of your minions, you will fight against the agents of the Inquisition, cast fear into the hearts of the people with your hunts, and shape dread sigils in different city districts, all in preparation for the grand Blood Moon ritual that will confirm your grasp on the city and its fate. But beware, the longer you prepare for the ritual, the harder it will be to complete it. Your enemies are searching for you constantly and when they find you, even vampire magic may not stop them. 

In Masters of the Night you will find:

•  Solo and Cooperative gameplay: True to the theme, all players win or lose together. And you can play solo as well!
•  Interesting decisions: Find a compromise between using powerful blood-magic and keeping the Veil of Secrecy which protects you. Decide how to best use the dice in your pool - you only get new dice if you use them all!
•  Area control mechanics:  To get control of key city locations with unique powers, you need to recruit minions, and at the same do your best to stop the actions of dangerous Inquisitors.  
•  Strong thematic elements: Vampiric blood and abilities, powerful ancient Relics, the Veil of secrecy, the rising power of your enemies.  All thematic elements are interconnected and need to be considered  to win.
•  High replayability:  6 Vampires with unique abilities to choose from, 9 city districts (and countless city configurations), 13 relics and 54 different event cards,  variable difficulty levels - each game will be different.
•  Challenging: There are multiple paths to defeat, and only one to victory. Time plays against you. Your days are counted. Agents are infesting the city. Will you be able to establish your dominion in time? 

The Design Team:

• The designer of the game is Nikolay Aslamov,PhD, a Russian professor of History. Masters of the Night is his first design published internationally. Historian, PhD. He is an expert of folklore and mythology about "evil spirits": werewolves, witchcraft, vampires. He lectures on mythology, literature, historical evidence and biological explanations  of such phenomena. For the characters and backstory of Masters of the Night, Nikolay took inspiration from Eastern  European lore - Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian - the  regions most of the stories about vampires come from. "The idea of  ​​the game came, oddly enough, in a train," Nikolay wrote. " I had a few hours of  free time and a notebook, and I began to write down everything that  came to my mind on the topic “board game about vampires”: day and night,  the cathedral, minions, rivers of blood, mountains of corpses ... So the  main game concept was born."
• The graphic design of the game has been developed by a New Zealand studio - Peter Gifford's Universal Head. The graphic design, from the typeface chosen to the colors, is full of visual references to create the dark setting of a city in mid-century America. From the typeface, to the fake newspaper clips, to the color tones, all was carefully built for a visual journey into the past.
• Last, miniatures were designed by Italian studio Ludus Magnus, creators of many beautiful games such as "Black Rose Wars" and "Dungeonoloy", and again on Kickstarter this month with their "D.E.I.- Divide et Impera" game.