The Hunger: the base box leaves you hungry, the expansion feeds you

Some games show their hand the moment you lift the lid: drink blood, devour humans and get home before dawn. The Hunger is one of them, and with a name like that, you do not get to miss.

I brought it out one evening with four players, sold on the pitch: a deck-builder designed by Richard Garfield (yes, the mind behind Magic and King of Tokyo, no less). First game, gorgeous board, biting theme, and yet, halfway through, a lull. You draw, you move, you pray hard not to pull three useless movement cards. The hunger was real, just the wrong kind.

Playtime: 30-60 min · Age: 12+ · Players: 2 to 6 · Publisher: Renegade Game Studios · Designer: Richard Garfield · Art: Marta Ivanova, Jocelyn "Joc" Millet

A hunting night that whets the appetite

The setting does the heavy lifting. You are a vampire loosed for one night, every human card carries its own illustration, and the modular board reshuffles itself from game to game. It looks great, honestly (a little too great, even: the glossy finish catches the light and bounces your own lamp back at you). The gothic mood is there, the box promises a well-paced, bloody outing. The only question is whether the mechanics deliver what the theme keeps whispering.

On your turn, you hunt against the clock

Here is the core: you have fifteen turns to fill up on blood and get back to the castle before sunrise. Come home too late and you fry in the first ray; come home too early and you leave points on the table. That clock tension is the best thing about the game, and it strongly recalls Clank! (Dale Yu, over at Opinionated Gamers, even says he would reach for this before Clank!, which is no small thing).

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Each turn you draw three cards that set your speed, which means both turn order and how far you move. You travel, you hunt humans (each one costs you one to three speed points depending on where it sits), and you chase your goals: missions, treasures, mazes, several roads lead to victory.

The clever twist is a deck-builder in reverse. Devouring a human earns you blood, but it also adds that human's card to your deck, and those cards weigh your draws down instead of powering them up. The whole flavor of the game lives in this paradox: you have to eat to score, while keeping your prey out of your hand. A deck-builder that punishes you for eating too well, someone had to dare.

What stalls in the base box

On paper, it is all there. In practice, the base game alone runs out of gas fast. The empty turns are frustrating, especially at four or five players, when you watch the night tick by without sinking your teeth into anything worthwhile. Interaction is almost nonexistent: everyone runs their own race in their corner, and you cross paths without ever really getting in each other's way. Add iconography for "draw" and "discard" that invites confusion and rules that are hard to digest on a first game, and you get a title that seduces but does not keep you coming back.

Do we want to play it again? Yes. But not without backup.

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High Stakes, the vampire's Red Bull

This is where the werewolves and the hunters show up. The High Stakes expansion (Au Clair de la Lune in French) does not just spice the game up, it repairs it, quite literally.

It adds events every turn from the second round on, and suddenly the rhythm falls into place: you know where you stand, every turn has its little twist. It brings in threats, werewolves and vampire hunters, which finally deliver tension and a reason to step on each other. It slips an attack value onto your starting cards, enough to take down a threat, boost a hunt or, let us be honest, go bite your neighbor. So long, solo race.

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Best of all, it hands you eight wound cards right from the start. Wounds mean a deck that churns, and a churning deck means, at last, combos. It sounds backwards, but those junk cards improve the experience: they force you to clean up your hand and optimize it. You can breathe. Meeple Mountain puts it plainly: if you own The Hunger, you need this expansion.

Verdict

The Hunger is a fine promise that only fully lands once High Stakes is on the table. The base box, on its own, is too restrained: pretty, promising, but it stalls, and you leave the table with a small, unsatisfied hunger. Keep it for the curious who want to see Garfield's design, or for collectors.

With the expansion, though, now we are talking: variety, some (soft) brawling, a real sense of progression across the game. Who is it for? Intermediate players who love a strong theme and the tension of a countdown. Purists of pure combo deck-building may still be left hungry. My advice fits in one line: do not buy it without High Stakes, or jump straight to the full menu.