I sat down and played a match with a friend tonight, playing as factions from an ongoing Vampire: The Masquerade game we're participating in. The first list, the Vampires, is my squad, composed of characters inspired by my character's Anarch Gang. The second is my opponent's, playing as the Hunter antagonists from the chronicle. I made my units from scratch, my opponent used examples from the book. (Although, Sionnach wound up being identical to the listed 'Asshole Elder' stat line. Also pictured above is the board state when the game finished. For transparency's sake, we played the game with a gridless one-cell-to-one-inch 25x25 board on Roll20, which caused a little bit of weirdness around height but it didn't come up too much. The TL;DR is that I had a great time, but my opponent found it pretty 'swingy', in her words.
The game started out with a few judgment calls -- we only placed two Nodes in addition to the central one because we weren't sure how many we ought to be placing. In retrospect, it would have been a better game if we'd put a couple more down -- would have made the battlefield a bit more dynamic. Our terrain situation also wasn't great, but that's not the fault of the game at all. We began, and out the gate the Hunters seemed to have a bit more of the advantage. Their Boss charged out to the center and the rest advanced cautiously, one staying back to sieze control of the upper-right Node. The vampires, meanwhile, were a bit cautious, shifting slowly into position to pounce. Persephone hung back at one of the points, taking potshots at the hunters from cover, while Alex and the bosses moved in. Vampire Troy had trouble getting much done; he was pretty damn unruly, as a few hunters on the other side wound up consistently being through the whole game. Hunter Troy wound up being a sort of 'sniper' for the opposing side, doing much the same as Persephone.
The game wound up proceeding at kind of a trudge. Once Sionnach and Tiffany got up into melee range near the clustered Hunters, the game started to turn around. I stacked them up toward attack and defense. Todd's Exorcist ability wound up not having much of an effect, while Sionnach's Horrifying was a monster for the opponent's turn economy. In the end, the vampires locked down two points for three rounds pretty handily because the hunters couldn't get a wound in edgewise against my forward troops, and never had the actions to advance on the top point.
The biggest criticism I'd have of the game at this point is that the action economy being at the mercy of the dice makes the game feel... Difficult to plan for and around. It leads to rounds where not much happens and rounds where one side steamrolls the other in terms of action while the other just sort of sits there impotently and that doesn't feel great. In addition, no units wound up getting eliminated at all in this game, which felt strange. All in all, a very promising experience with plenty of holes to be patched, but that's to be expected this early in development. I'm ultimately glad I checked it out and am very excited to see how it develops.