Personal Vendetta Prototype Review
A highly stylized, polished take on single deck kitchen table card gaming.
Become a clone, fighting against their duplicates in this card dueler! Just be the last clone standing. With thematic terms for everything, clever shared deck recursion, and 6 sets to use together! For 2-4 players, with the focused mode of 2 players running about 30-45 minutes.
Video published , 2024
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Be the last clone standing, with 2 types of health dials!
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All unique cards full of distinct art, abilities, and flavor text!
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Attacks/Reactions can manipulate just about anything in the game!
This is a sponsored post. Prototype featured.
The Story
This is a prototype, but is 95% of the real thing! So don’t worry too much about the slightly lowered image quality and sleeves in this review.
Our Plays
2 Player: 4 Plays
3 Players: 3 Plays
Every set has been tried (6 sets)
Need to learn how to play? Or want more reasoning for our points? Our review video’s got you!
Component Pros
Rulebook is incredible
Designed to be initially skimmed, then you reference the “black boxes” later
Tons of clear and detailed diagrams
Online version helps you jump to things easily
Works great on mobile
Easy to setup
Just combine 2 sets together, get health dials
Art is very consistent/detailed
ALL unique art, no copies of cards
16 cards per each of 6 sets, so about 100 pieces of art
Clear iconography
Easy to see upside/downside of abilities on cards
Amazing flavor text on every card (writer knows his sci-fi!)
e.g. Self Loathing” No amount of makeup will quiet the voices in her head.”
e.g. Corpus Collector: “The body both serves the mind and enslaves the mind.”
e.g. Flesh Sculptor: “There can never be enough time to satisfy the curse of ideas.”
Theme meets Gameplay Pros — Amazing naming system that makes sense
Cards = “ideas”
Ideas become “thoughts” in your hand
“Headspace” comes from the “head”
Spend “memories” to push them back to the back of the “head”
“Repress” is pushing a card to the back of head from headspace
Gameplay Pros — Deck Manipulation of 1 Shared Deck
Go though deck fast:
Only 1 copy of each card, 32 card deck of 2 16 card halves
4 get flipped for initial headspace, when 1 card left in headspace, it clears and refreshes to 4
Never “deck out” because constantly spending cards from “memories” (player discards) to return to bottom of deck
Creating the deck in later stages of game based off of this!
Get to choose the order in which they go in!
Once know cards in sets, easy to predict what types of cards are left in mid-game
Gameplay Pros — RNG Mitigation for 1 deck genre
Only start with 1-2 cards in hand, everyone must take from middle (can see what they take)
No normal card draw to top deck things, people compete over middle grabs
Cannot lucksack way into a good hand, have to craft it
Can’t rely on drawing multiples of same card, because only 1 copy of each
Gameplay Pros — Card grabbing system
Clearing and refreshing when 1 card left logic’s out very well
Clearing at 1 card left lets you deny opponents without taking cards
Refreshing to 4 cards keeps pace of cards coming out at perpetual high
Discourages constantly taking as you might not take it it’ll refresh to give your opponent fresh pick
Say 2 cards in middle, then you take 1 for last action, then it refreshes
Picking nuance happens from get go because start with only 1-2 cards in hand
Plenty of card abilities let you manipulate headspace
e.g. Adding more cards to slow down refresh
e.g. Stacking cards on top of head to know what will come out later
e.g. Punish your opponent for refreshing headspace
Gameplay Pros — Response System with Reactions
Can react to ANYTHING on opponent’s turn, not just card drops
Constant engagement as long as have reaction (most reactions pay-able via health)
Usually know what people’s reactions are, because people are taking from headspace
More anticipation as hands get bigger and you remember
Can respond to yourself (just have to wait to see what opponent does first)
Is a rarity but is viable with right conditions
Gameplay Pro — Putting it all together
Card system ends up having big weight on every card drop
Memories (discard) are fuel to play cards, memories go back into deck
Thoughts often cost health to play, so can’t comfortably play cards without calculating
Rewards lots of concentration in memorizing exactly when cards come up, that you are helping sequence
State cards (passives) add progression for players
Help you, and often hurt you in some way!
May want to have a way to get rid of them
Some cards to play on turn don’t have time costs, allows for big combos
Can trigger states, react to yourself, and use certain cards without using time!
Gameplay Pro — Card & Set Design
Wackier/swingier abilities possible because game has little card draw and you always see cards available to grab
Decks easy to navigate because have a couple of swing cards, then others that tend to mirror each other in abilities
Mirrors e.g.: One state that will affect brain health, then another that affects physical health
Highlighting 4 sets (remember you combine 2 together):
1) Possibilities: all about choosing carefully from choices on cards, manipulating your opponent’s decisions
2) Agaku: Going big and hit big- so get a lot of cards!
e.g. do 7 damage but attacker loses all brain health except for 5
e.g. Set your healths both to 5, then add entire discard to hand
3. Ego: Headspace manipulation
e.g. Attacks to do damage based off of # of cards in headspace
e.g. States to continually increase or decrease headspace
4. Puppeteer: Controlling players (crazy!)
e.g. Take someone’s turn for them once
e.g. Swap seats with someone (yes you get to literally trade everything)
e.g. Can spawn a copy of yourself by siphoning off some of your health for an extra player on your team
Great replayability by mixing sets together, or combine all of them for “designer’s choice” for 1 huge deck
Gameplay Pros — 4 Asymmetrical Characters
Each has an upside AND downside to play around (downsides aren’t common in card duelers!)
e.g. Flesh Sculptor: Discards 4 cards from memory to gain 1 action (Easiest to play but you are reliant on filling up memory)
e.g. Corpus Collector: Allows you to discard states to draw 2 cards (one of few abilities to let you discard states)
e.g. Ad Atra Priestess: Spend an action and memory to draw a card off of the top of deck, to clear memory 1 at a time to play around certain states
Drawing off of top of deck lets you circumvent taking from headspace
e.g. Ex Alba Preceptor: Dig for cards faster in flipping out cards to headspace, then immediately putting one back
Gameplay Pro — Runs very true to time
30-45 minutes 2P, can run shorter if using simple sets
Cannot drag because lots of cards require health cost to play them
Almost no way to recover health
Multiplayer: players get “paranoia” state card after someone dies, which reduces everyone’s physical/mental health by 1 at the start of turns
Once people die, others die a couple turns after
Component Cons (Remember this is prototype)
Health trackers are SO recessed they’re hard to read
Player aids need to include info about reacting on them
Some rules questions not clarified:
“Choose” not explained very well, especially choosing a clone vs. choosing from a bullet point list
Matters a lot for states that trigger off of choose
Crazy cards probably need a FAQ (like one that that switches seats with opponent)
Can you “re-choose” someone’s inflict target in multiplayer if you have the correct reaction?
Card titles are a bit hard to read with blotches around them for flair
Every card is black with only blue/red accents, which makes them blend in headspace
Reaction/attack symbols on cards look too similar for having much different uses
POTENTIAL FIX TO CARDS: More of a colored border? Or putting color on at least 2 sides of card?
Admittedly inherently hard to go for edgy dark look and stand out well
Confusing term: “forget”
Means taking cards from thoughts to memory (that is discarding a card)
We had to keep looking this up because we thought forgetting something is removing it from the game
“Forget” has the weight of permanently forgetting in English
POTENTIAL FIX: “Dismiss” instead of “forget”
Gameplay Con — Deck running out too fast in multiplayer?
Whenever deck runs out, game immediately ends, which is a concern if only using 2 sets with multiplayer
Agaku promotes heavy memory stockpiling to spend them, which will deck you out FAST
Rulebook should give more pointers on how many sets to use for player count, or at least +1 set if using Agaku
Using 3 sets for 3P definitely changes deck composition as its bigger, does make game harder to track
But still works fine
Tentative Score: 9/10 Excellent
Personal Vendetta is an extremely well designed card dueler, that pretty much has an answer to all of the traditional kitchen table card game hiccups. There’s no deckbuilding or pay to win since it’s one deck. Poor RNG? Doesn’t really happen as much because you don’t really top deck much and you can see what your opponent takes. Ok so it’s really complex… right? But no, especially if you play the simple sets and it isn’t that hard to learn, 2P should definitely not take more than 30 minutes for your tutorial game. AND there’s tons of replayability in a single set so you don’t have to worry about getting bored of it quickly! Oh, AND it has a super strong theme that makes sense!
There’s so many permutations of how you should use reaction cards, or how to cycle cards back from your memories, or how to strategize around your persona’s ability.
Because every card does something different, and the sets all combine in their weird ways, you have to be on your feet with different headspace flips and reaction possibilities. Like, you can’t just settle with a strong boss card in MTG or Yugioh and just have it survive and do so much damage to win. Or it’s not like Star Wars Unlimited where you are consistently planning around leaders.
Personal Vendetta is slightly unintuitive to the CCG vets in just grabbing attacks, and when you first start out you’ll just have to take cards and see how the systems really work, cause you’re typically not re-making the draw pile with your opponent, eh? You’re not just “playing to your deck’s theme or persona’s strengths or engine” because how headspace cards act differently. It’s easy to learn, tricky to play, but hard to master and probably requires you memorizing each set inside and out to truly play efficiently.
It really got me curious on how hype a tournament for Personal Vendetta would be, since the skill ceiling seems quite high with people able to completely memorize the cards coming up in the deck, and find new ways to chain together the explosive attacks in the deeper sets. Multiplayer could also be really fascinating, although probably needs closer inspection on which sets exactly work best for this 3-4p.
Oh for fun, the designer’s silly choice in putting all the sets together for one deck… is hilariously like other card game’s single deck (e.g. Radlands, Star Wars deckbuilding) And remember Personal Vendetta CAN have a small deck because it’s doing memory recursion into head so much.
So, if you’re looking for a very polished 1v1 game that you can also kick around with 3 or 4P on the off chance, definitely try out Personal Vendetta. It doesn’t have the familiarity of tapping units to do damage, and requires you to plan around 2 set’s strong cards to win. If you’re playing with sensitive groups on the body horror, or just really want the feeling of dropping game-ending monsters to spam abilities, or keep attacking with them, perhaps stay away.
And can we give a shoutout to all of this being done by one guy, like that doesn’t affect scoring, but doing all the art AND game design, man that’s super impressive.
And, and, if you’re tight on money, there’s a free PNP demo available on the website right now, with the basic decks, so you don’t get the wacky stuff, but you can just look at all the card abilities in depth for other sets to see the craziness.
To go back to the top of this tentative score, this is SHELFSIDE certified! It’s really doing something within this space that feels new despite kind of feeling like a MTG + deck builder. It was in front of my eyes the whole time, the putting cards from your discard back into the deck, it just needed this really really amazing card design space and balance to make it work. I’m gonna be remembering Personal Vendetta when I evaluate other 1v1 duelers now, and maybe it could be a 10/10 recommender with more kinks ironed out.
