I bought Vagrant Song at Gen Con in 2023. I was drawn to the game originally because of the art, which reminds me of the game Cuphead. I liked how this game is cooperative, and that there are several different scenarios to play. I get the most value out of board games that offer a ton of replayability. Vagrant Song is a game I occasionally bring to my family’s board game days. We succeeded in playing two different scenarios, “When You Dig My Grave” and “Suffocation Station”. Eventually, I’d love to say that I played every single scenario in the base game.

Vagrant Song is one of those games where you have to relearn how to play the game if it’s been a few years since you last played. When we last played, we took pictures of our characters to save our game and items. These pictures were dated from November 2023. It’s wild to me that it was almost three years ago. It makes sense since we rotate out the games we play. It took about an hour to re-read the rules and set up the scenario. In the first scenario, “When You Dig My Grave”, we had to put the haint, the terminology Vagrant Song uses to describe a ghost, to rest. Each scenario includes a series of rituals, and if you complete the ritual, you can unlock various power-ups after the scenario concludes. In one such ritual, we unlocked a vial of poison that my character has on their character card. It’s neat to be able to take items into future scenarios in the game. Once we finished the scenario, we realized we played the game wrong. We had all our characters take a turn, then the haint would take their turn. Instead, the haint should have had a turn after each of the characters. Oops. If I type this out in this blog post, maybe we will remember to play the game correctly in the future.

In the second scenario, “Suffocation Station,” the goal was not to free the haints, but to complete all the rituals or the events on the board. I liked this a lot. It made the game different since our strategy had to change. Most of the scenarios in the game include giving humanity to the haints, so they can be put to rest instead of wandering the train, which is why this scenario was unique. After completing this scenario, we packed up, took pictures of our characters, and saved the game.

Vagrant Song remains one of my favorite board games in my collection. I like how there is still so much of the game that we haven’t discovered yet. This has become one of our favorite games we play, and hopefully, we will get to the point where we have played every single scenario in the scenario book.