Five Hundred Year Old Vampire with expansion Beguiling Whispers by Central Michigan University Press

What is a Keepsake Game?

The term “keepsake game” was coined by game designer Shing Yin Khor to describe some of their games, such as A Mending, and those they co-created with Jeeyon Shim, like Field Guide to Memory. In a keepsake game, players create memorable artifacts, or keepsakes, that they wish to hold on to beyond the end of the game.

In Five Hundred Year Old Vampire, keepsakes take the form of artifacts players create and share with each other throughout the game, and which are collected and celebrated together at the conclusion of the game. In the game, players are encouraged to see the artifacts not as “great works of art” so much as unique tokens of an experience.

Player Count and Adaptability

Each cohort of Five Hundred Year Old Vampire is designed for 3-5 players. However, the game has also been designed with classrooms or larger convention play in mind and works well with short campaign and multi-cohort play. In addition, classroom use aligns with both the national common core writing standards and the national core art standards. The game will scale to fit most class sizes, with six cohorts being as easy to facilitate as one. The game is modifiable for many classrooms but is especially strong in visual arts and creative writing spaces.

• Five (5) decks of prompt cards (237 cards in total), representing the various ages of your Vampires’ existence.
• Slotted and recessed tray to help keep prompt cards organized for ease of use and for space to add in crafting and art supplies for creating your keepsake artifacts.
• Set of gorgeous dice for advancing your Vampires through the ages (d4, d6, and d8).
• Detailed rulebook containing all the rules you’ll need for multiplayer Cohort play.
• A tearaway pad containing six (6) sets of premade characters (5 characters plus a prime vampire per set), each representing a different area of the world, plus blank character sheets. 

• Basic prompt which provides the context for the rest of the card;
• Effects: how the card impacts the vampire and the rest of its cohort;
• Questions: Ideas the player may consider when writing of their experience in their character’s voice and crafting an artifact to represent their vampire’s experience; and
• Years Added: The number and type of die the player rolls to help calculate the number of years their card choice adds to the overall movement of time for the cohort as a whole.

There are many different outcomes for Effects though most relate to adding or removing skills, resources, or connections from their character.

Each session is considered a “Convocation,” where the vampires in a cohort meet to try to hold on to something of who they were. They begin by sharing the letters and artifacts created for their last set of last prompts, and then draw two cards from the deck for the “age” they are in. They select one to keep and one to pass to another player, as they attempt to influence each other’s unlives, and then look at the new times and places their characters find themselves in for historical events that would mean something to the vampires. They then retreat to craft a new letter and artifact to share at the next Convocation, and the process begins anew until at last their characters pass from this world.