Eat the Reich
The year is 1943. You are a team of crack vampire commandos with one mission: drink all of Hitler’s blood.
Eat the Reich is a tabletop roleplaying game in which you, a vampire commando, are coffin-dropped into occupied Paris and must cut a bloody swathe through nazi forces en route to your ultimate goal: drinking all of Adolf Hitler’s blood.
It’s written by Grant Howitt (Honey Heist, Spire, Heart) and illustrated by Will Kirkby (Critical Role, Image, Darkhorse, Boom).
This over-the-top, ultraviolent game is designed to be played from beginning to end in one to three sessions of carnage, blood magic, meaningful flashbacks and hundreds upon hundreds of extremely dead fascists. It tells one story, it tells it loud, and it tells it brilliantly. Think Wolfenstein crossed with Danger 5 and you’re not far off the mark.
WHAT’S IN THE BOOK?
Eat the Reich is a lavishly illustrated, beautifully written 72-page rulebook and it has everything you need to get started:
- A quick-to-learn D6 dice pool system – the Havoc Engine – that encourages creative violence
- Enemy reinforcement rules that keep the vampire invaders on their toes
- Pregenerated iconic characters (with room to level up)
- Gruesome augmented Übermenschen (drink their blood to level up)
- Non-accurate maps of Paris with lots of location details and ideas for fun things to destroy
Critical acclaim for Eat the Reich
Fully funded on Kickstarter in 31 minutes: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gshowitt/eat-the-reich
The Rules
EAT THE REICH uses a simple D6 dice pool system. Players declare their intent and work out the size of their dice pool – it averages out at about six – then roll them and discard any that show 3 or less. Any that show 4 or more are spent to achieve the current objective, destroy nazi defenders, defend against incoming damage or gulp down mouthfuls of fascist blood.
Nothing too complex, but we think it flows nicely – and it means the rules will never get in the way of your rampage.
Reviews
Alice (Final Girl) –
A wonderfully bound book: vibrant, textured, and layered. And inside is just as good, Eat the Reich delivers a wonderful system to spend an evening or two (or three) killing fascists with your friends without the need for lots of additional resources. Playing irl? The book and some six-sided die to share, along with some snacks and close friends. Digitally? Dice can be rolled on many things including discord, but instead you need mics and internet. Either way, very basic. As are the mechanics of…
A wonderfully bound book: vibrant, textured, and layered. And inside is just as good, Eat the Reich delivers a wonderful system to spend an evening or two (or three) killing fascists with your friends without the need for lots of additional resources. Playing irl? The book and some six-sided die to share, along with some snacks and close friends. Digitally? Dice can be rolled on many things including discord, but instead you need mics and internet. Either way, very basic. As are the mechanics of playing the game. Unlike something like D&D 5e where the DM describes your surroundings and what you can interact with, and the rules dictate your action for the most part, Eat the Reich is all about how much you can BS your way into the biggest dice pool possible and then use your rolls to narrate the wildest outcome you can think of. Got enough successes to take out a squad of Nazis in one go? Then of COURSE you can conjure the souls of the damned to drain their life force in one fell swoop. Or better yet, of COURSE there was a nearby tank with disabled treads but a working cannon this whole time. I cannot wait to run this game many times over, creating my own scenarios as I do. My only minor complaints are the lack of rules to support going beyond the book, there is a couple pages but they keep it vague, and how certain rules such as Specials, Advances, and etc. are all explained well after the character sheets are shown so seeing the sheets first can be a bit confusing to new DMs.
See you all in Paris and remember tea bagging fascists is a free action!
Bert Pigeon –
Lovely looking book but mistakes in the book point to incorrect pages (the map), and certain rules are mentioned but not explained. For example specials. It gets mentuoned several times but nothing on the character sheets says special. On the character sheets it says abilities and advance. Advance isn't explained in the rule book. So it feels incomplete. Feel like stuff is missing or nobody did a qr check to marry up wording used in one section or another. I'm guessing special are just the abili…
Lovely looking book but mistakes in the book point to incorrect pages (the map), and certain rules are mentioned but not explained. For example specials. It gets mentuoned several times but nothing on the character sheets says special. On the character sheets it says abilities and advance. Advance isn’t explained in the rule book. So it feels incomplete. Feel like stuff is missing or nobody did a qr check to marry up wording used in one section or another. I’m guessing special are just the abilities but as I’m a rules nerd unless they say the same thing I can’t assume they are.
On a more positive note the art and look of the book is good and from what I can make out of the rules seem like a ok game.
Overall I’d recommend it!
(If anyone could tell me where or what the specials are please do)
CJ –
Thank you so much for your honest and thorough feedback. Advances are explained on page 41 under Ubermenschen, but we agree that it could have been clearer. We’re happy to say that the page numbering issue is correct on the PDF, and should also be correct in new printings of Eat the Reich.
Ryan Brown –
Having run this now with at least 8 groups of strangers in lots of environments I can safely say this is the single best one or two shot story game made. Mechanics that reward and reinforce the genre, a setting easy to explain that everyone can get in to, and some wonderfully quick and easy safety tools to make the game pop from the first turn.
Oscar Moreno –
Hello, I thin the game is superb for a fun evening storming with superpowered creatures. It requires some lateral thiking from the traditional RPG games to make it work, as everything needs to flow according to the stat you used to advnce the plot, but with some creative players and DM it can be achieved. I only miss that there is no roll20 integration, as it is the preferred tabletop tool of my GM, so we were using alternate methods to play online. Great experience!
Kodi Gonzaga –
I just played this last night with some friends, and it absolutely RULED!!! It was our first time playing and it was a three hour one-shot, so we sort of blew past a lot of content, but the content we did experience? Epic. Incredible. The scene settings were so fun, the mini bosses were fantastic, the mechanics were SO fun and SO easy to manipulate into making us feel awesome, and yet we still felt threatened too! Highly recommend this game for anyone who wants to play a colorfully violent game …
I just played this last night with some friends, and it absolutely RULED!!! It was our first time playing and it was a three hour one-shot, so we sort of blew past a lot of content, but the content we did experience? Epic. Incredible. The scene settings were so fun, the mini bosses were fantastic, the mechanics were SO fun and SO easy to manipulate into making us feel awesome, and yet we still felt threatened too! Highly recommend this game for anyone who wants to play a colorfully violent game with a REALLY satisfying premise.
Alex V –
I have run this four or five times already, in at least two languages, as both home games and convention settings, and it never disappoints. Where else can you get choice quotes such as “I pee on the Nazi coffin currently on fire and it does nothing; but it makes me feel better”? 13/12, Fang-tastic game.