Review: Eat the Reich - A Fangtastic Experience!

Eat the Reich is a capsule game about vampires who kill nazis, and it’s very good at it. I’ve been a devout follower of the church of Grant Howitt since Everyone is Seagulls Goblin Quest, and so when I heard that Rowan, Rook, & Decard were making a splatterpunk, ultraviolent, vampires-in-WWII game, I was hooked immediately (Not to mention seeing Will Kirkby’s fantastic art, including this insane Drop Coffin design).

Just look at this shit, isn't that fantastic?

A shorter version of this review was first published in July 2024 as part of Questing Quill Zine #1 - check out the whole zine here!

The book sets out its pitch much more effectively than I could:

“The Year is 1943. Europe is in flames. You are a unit of crack vampire commandos with a single objective: Drink all of Adolf Hitler’s blood and fatally destabilise the nazi war machine.”

Short, sweet, and totally accurate. It sure does do exactly what it says on the tin.

At its core, Eat the Reich is a really, really tightly designed game. The core gameplay is broken down into Locations, each of which has a Threat meter that acts like the location’s ‘health bar’, and some side objectives and enemies that mostly act as a distraction to stop your vampires from rushing through the location too fast; similar to RRD’s earlier game Heart and its Delves . Occasionally there are ‘miniboss’ fights against Hitler’s twisted Übermenschen, whose death empowers the vampires and unlocks more of their abilities. At the end of it all, you kill Hitler (who is way too pathetic to even give stats to), and the game is done. There’s no scope for shopping trips, or sidequests, or cute bits of dialogue - you walk into a room, kill any nazis you see, and walk out.

That’s the loop - enter a location, hold off the enemies in it long enough to drop the objective meter to zero, repeat. Simple, easy to GM, and extremely satisfying. In my experience, it doesn’t outstay its welcome, it doesn’t get boring, and yet it doesn’t feel too short or unfinished either - it just works. We took three sessions, about six-to-eight hours to complete it, running into a single Ubermensch and maybe eight locations along the way - a fairly minimal experience, but one that didn’t feel as if we missed out on anything along the way. In fact, I think it shows just how much stuff there is here - I’m planning on running it again soon, and I’m very sure that we’ll have a totally different journey through occupied Paris. I’d estimate that there’s at least three or four ‘playthroughs’ (to borrow from video games) worth of unique stuff to experience here.

That’s not to say its a chilled out experience - my sessions were about three hours long, and we were all exhausted by the end of them - the game says it runs hot, and it does - this is a fast paced game that keeps your brain firing on all cylinders. This comes down to the core system - the Havoc engine. It is a d6 dice pool system, where the player rolls some dice, usually 3-5, which succeed on a 3+. Simultaneously, the GM rolls some dice as well, usually 1-4, to represent the threat that the players face. The player then assigns their successes to various tasks - completing the objective, negating the GM’s threat, drinking blood etc. Any successes that the GM has left over injure the PC, so negating threat is usually a major focus - but not always! The player then narrates the fiction, weaving in their assigned successes as they go - and importantly, adding in more details. These details key off abilities on the character sheet, allowing you to roll yet more dice. In the end, the player rolls 4-8 dice, each of which is clear and present in the fiction.

This ludonarrative confluence means that you’re incredibly involved in the fiction - you’re describing it, you’re working with it, you’re a fundamental part of it - and you need to pay attention to the fiction as it develops because then you can jump off of it even more. It marries fiction and mechanics almost flawlessly. And the game does this in a very purposeful manner - it’s not trying to mimic reality in its fiction, it’s got a very specific vision it’s working towards, and the mechanics are used to guide this. A great example is that the game wants you to use your items, not hoard them - so it gives a bonus dice when using their last charge, and makes it trivial to find new cool things to use. By the end of my game, I had used up half of my original items, and instead had a vampire’s arm (courtesy of one of the other players), Napoleon’s horse, and a gigantic stone crucifix (which was used to brutally one-shot an Ubermensch in our explosive finale).

It definitely takes a little while to get used to; my group found it simultaneously a hard RP task, and one prone to weaselling behaviour (where the player tries to shoehorn in as many abilities as possible, however much they fit (or don’t fit) the fiction in the moment). When you get into it, however, these drop away. The text gives you a lot of ideas of how to structure your narrative, and who cares if you’re weaselling your way through if doing so means that you have to narrate an extremely cool, varied scene?

I’ve only got a couple of minor criticisms of the system:

1. Stats aren’t made equal. We barely used Con, Sneak, or Search, and Fix was very situational - in our game, the actions they lent themselves to felt too ‘slow’ compared to the pace we were going at, and so they never really fit the fiction to us. To repeat myself though, it never felt like a problem to just use the more offensive skills over and over - you’re never saying ‘I roll my Brawl’ - you’re describing it in quite a lot of detail, and so it always feels unique.
2. Rolling poorly feels bad. If the player rolls fewer successes than the GM, or only as many, the turn can feel dead, especially if the PC has already taken enough damage to not want to take more. It’s also harder to narrate a turn where little happens - if the player attempts to beat up a motorbiking squad of nazis, but doesn’t deal or take damage, or do anything else of note, what’s there to tell? Thankfully, the nature of success being 50/50, and rolling so many dice, means that this is rare - the one time I rolled twelve dice, including a flashback, and ended up getting two successes total notwithstanding.

One of the real superpowers of the engine is that the players have practically total control over the pacing of the game. If they’re having fun? Put points into defeating the enemies, clear the side objectives, drink a little blood here and there. If they’re getting bored? Ignore the enemies, eat a few points of damage, and focus on clearing the objective - pretty much all of them have a low enough threat that a party of four will clear them in a single round of actions if that’s what they concentrate on.

The other standout part of the text is the guidance. Any alt-history game, especially an alt history game about WWII, is going to butt up against tough subjects, and it does an excellent job at flagging potential pinch points and offering guidance as to what to do, what not to do, and what to suggest - without being overly didactic or definitive. I especially liked the inclusion of a discussion about blood libel with respect to Jews and similar conspiracies to Muslims. Elsewhere, the advice on running the game is good and clear and takes up a minimal amount of brainspace at the table - exactly what you need as a GM for a game that’s mostly player focused. In our game, there weren’t any standout NPCs or GM-led narratives, because the only people our characters interacted with were Nazis, and we didn’t leave them alive long enough to have a chat with. And yet our GM said that they had a whale of a time reacting to us instead of proactively putting out a scenario as they normally would.

Lastly, I want to talk a bit about the book as an object. I don’t want to mince my words - it is the prettiest, most striking gamebook I own - hell, it’s one of the prettiest books I own. The cover, with its textured blood spatters and cutouts, the page edges in vibrant hot pink, the phenomenal artwork by Will Kirkby - it all just works together to produce a fantastic object. And this continues inside. Each page is laid out like its a collection of notes, tied together with string, overlaid with props and notes and stamps and blood and coffee stains - there’s an enormous amount of stuff on each page - and yet the text is totally readable and unhindered. Even if you’ve not got any intention of playing Eat the Reich, I’d still recommend getting the book - it is a masterclass in maximal, yet clear, layout.

Eat the Reich is exactly what it says on the tin, nothing more, nothing less. Spend a few evenings killing nazis, kill Hitler, and go home. You won’t be disappointed. It’s a rip-roaring, ultraviolent, mile-a-minute, cathartic experience that never outstays its welcome, and never gets boring. In short, it rules, and I can’t wait to play more.