Review: Eat the Reich
Review might be stretching it. Pointer, maybe. An urgent reminder.
In Eat the Reich, you play a crack commando of vampires, air dropped into 1943 Paris to kill Hitler and end the war. Along the way, you explode, incinerate, mangle, fry, shred and most importantly exsanguinate more nazis than you thought would fit into a couple hours of dice rolling.
Mechanically, EtR is quite straightforward. You piece together dice pools from your abilities, skills, and pieces of equipment, allocating successes to furthering the objective, eliminating threats, bolstering your blood reserves to fuel your abilities or, if all else fails, defending yourself against the threats. Equipment comes with special conditions, which grant bonus dice if fulfilled, e.g. a sawn-off used at point-blank or explosive runes placed in a concealed fashion.
I strongly advise to ignore any but the most basic logic because EtR excels if the players push things to the insane. Rigging the Eiffel tower's elevators with rockets to launch themselves right into the Führer's zeppelin. Riding a tombstone through a bunch of infantry (that counts as charge for my cavalry sabre, right?). In fact, fighting your way towards Hitler can actually become a slog if the players are hamstrung by having to defend themselves all the time, as opposed to actually getting to work on the objective(s)—just roll with it!
All that ingenuity stems from the players. The referee only sets a vague scene, i.e. a shopping mall or a church, throws in a couple nazis and then lets the players think up details to work with as they go. This can be a challenge for new or shy players and system mastery will take a few scenes to achieve.
I found three hours of gameplay (four, maybe five scenes) to be the right amount of EtR and I honestly don't think it can support much more than that. There are only so many things the characters can do, and this is not a slight against the system—EtR blew my concerns away with how it supports—no, leans into absurd, over-the-top action.
Before running the games, I had some mild concerns about the whole nazi thing but honestly there's no political ambiguity in the setting. The game's text also takes time to assuage such concerns, offers up safety tools and all that, which I found a pleasant surprise. One thing I did is to essentially remove any mention of civilians. The only moving things were either vampires or nazis, leaving no room for moral quandaries whatsoever.
If you need an R-rated one shot, go give Eat the Reich a try!