Vampyres

Release Date: August 1999
Set Size: 6 Buttons; 6 cards (Print and Play Free Edition); 6 cards (Button Men Originals)
Publisher: Cheapass Games
Designer: James Ernest
Artist: Brian Snoddy
New Rules: Shadow Dice
Details

Vampyres was released for the Gen Con Game fair in August, 1999. During this period in the development of Button Men, Cheapass Games was trying to denote all of its strange dice with typographical oddities like strikethroughs and overlines. This convention was soon abolished, so Vampyres is the only expansion in which Shadow Dice are denoted by an overline. In subsequent expansions, Shadow Dice are marked with a small “S” on the die frame.

Design Notes[edit | edit source]

Shadow Dice want through many design permutations before finally coming to have the function they do. Originally, they were called “Negative” dice and were treated as negative numbers in all regards. They were incapable of making Power Attacks, summed as negative numbers in Skill Attacks, and were worth negative points. Later they were granted the inverted Power Attack, called a “Shadow Attack,” which was to be their final function. James Ernest eventually separated two of the aspects of Negative Dice into two separate die types, Shadow and Poison Dice (Poison Dice appeared first in the BROM expansion, November 1999). The third aspect, in which the dice sum as negative in Skill Attacks, was discarded because it was essentially useless.^[1]