Vagrantsong Review – Saving Souls on the Spookiest Train in Gaming

Somewhere between life and death, you managed to stow away on an eastbound train. From there, things go from bad to worse, as you realise you’re not the only stowaway aboard. In Vagrantsong, every train car you move through is a house to a lost soul, and the only thing these lost souls share is their hatred for you.

Vagrantsong is a scenario-based campaign game, where every scenario is three rooms and a boss (called a Haint). These Haints are souls who’ve lingered too long in purgatory. So now it’s up to you to restore their humanity so they can go peacefully into the afterlife.

Restoring humanity requires you to complete different rituals like collecting a hat, reuniting a child and their bear, or returning from the dead. However, if that all sounds too complicated, you can also restore their humanity the old-fashioned way – by beating them senseless!

Each character has several skills, along with some general actions. Beyond these, you can always find items by rummaging inside the item bindle. These items provide temporary benefits such as distracting the Haint, healing wounds, protecting you from taking damage or restoring the Haint’s humanity.

After your turn, this very same bindle is then used to determine the Haint’s attack. When the items you draw are translated into the Haint’s attack.

This tit-for-tat between players and ghosts continues until they’ve left peacefully into the afterlife, or you have no humanity remaining.

Pure chaotic energy

Vagrantsong is a wild and chaotic game that runs on dice rolls. Almost all skills and actions require a lucky dice roll to work. Resulting in some painful turns where despite trying your best, nothing happens because you’re unlucky. On the other hand, you can also get lucky and roll a six, which counts as both a success and an extra dice roll.

Boom or bust right?

While this sums up players’ turns in Vagrantsong, the randomness doesn’t stop there. All of the Haint’s moves are based on a random draw of tokens from the bindle. Furthermore, their attacks, like your own, are devastating, doing large amounts of damage with each.

Therefore you’ll experience these wild swings where you go from feeling on top of the world to feeling like you’re almost dead (again?). Vagrantsong does nothing to stabilise this and rather leans into crazy, making each play of this board game a wild ride.

Thankfully, it’s not all about fighting. During each boss, there are several events and rituals scattered across the board. Any nearby player can investigate them, often finding items, clues about the Haint, or key parts to a ritual. Which can then be turned into significant damage.

This provides you with options and choices about what you should be doing. So you’re not always thinking about beating up a poor ghost. It also allows support characters to do something helpful, and not get relegated to heal bot duty.

A narrative from all sides

Imagine walking through a graveyard at night. Then hearing a groan, and seeing a silhouette of a decomposed hand reaching for the moon from a fresh grave. It’s too late, and before you know it, you’re surrounded by the undead!

Such is the theme within Vagrantsong, it’s everywhere within the game, from the boss mechanics to the narrative plot points, to the artwork. You can’t escape it, just like zombies.

This sublime integration of the theme and the stories Vagrantsong tells makes me so excited to play this board game. The writing within is sharp, evocative and ghastly. But when comparing it to Sleeping Gods, there’s not too much of it.

This is because it doesn’t try to tell a grand story, but instead, each boss is its small vignette about a lost soul who’s been stuck in purgatory. As you play and investigate events and complete rituals, you uncover little snippets about the Haint. Who they were, and why they became lost.

Yet even at the end of the scenario, you’re only left with vague ideas.

It’s up to you to fill in the blanks.

This adds to the mystery and hauntedness of Vagrantsong, and I love it. That, and each Haint being so unique in both rules and story drives your curiosity to see what’s next. It’s fascinating, creepy, and exciting, making it the perfect game for the lead-up to next Halloween.

It’s Cuphead, isn’t it?

The comparison is right there, isn’t it? In the 1920-30s art style, the overly animated boss battles, the macabre theming. However, that’s where the comparison stops and Vagrantsong becomes its own game.

Wyrd Games has done a wonderful job with the components, and we need to give a special shout-out to the acrylic standees. They both look fantastic, popping out from the table, and allow for what feels like a million different bosses without increasing cost or box size.

However, with all of these bosses, like the gameplay, your experience can be boom or bust. While some are excellent, others overstay their welcome, and others still just have too many rules going on.

Overall, I’m seven games deep into Vagrantsong’s campaign, and I look forward to every time it hits the table. Partly because I love the theme, and how it’s integrated into everything, but mostly to see who or what I’ll be saving next.