Step into the shoes of a hero that has been bashed and tortured by one or more of the four gangs in the game. You win by building up your hero, scouting gang dens to find the baddies who wronged you, then taking bloody revenge through action-packed fight sequences made up of dice based puzzles.
Vengeance alternates between montage turns and fight turns. In montage turns, players heal and upgrade their heroes through new abilities and items. They also go out scouting gang dens to find the bosses who wronged them and take revenge on them in the fight turn.
The fight turn is the heart of the game. Players pick one of the scouted gang dens containing a boss who has wronged them and burst into the gang den to exact bloody revenge. Players gain VPs for killing the boss, clearing the den from all the minions or, for maximum points, both. Players have three turns to do this and get out of the den in one piece.
Fights are basically dice-based puzzles. In each round of the fight, players roll a set of dice and decide the order in which they play the rolled results. Upgrade skills and items allow players to swap die-results for others or string together a number of results to perform enemy-slapping combos. Upgrades thus work towards mitigating the luck of the die-roll, giving players more control over their Fight actions.
Players score points by killing bosses who wronged them, i.e., matching the figure on their vengeance card with one of the face down Boss cards attached to each den and/or by clearing all minions of a gang which matches the color of a vengeance card they have in play.
At the end of the game players also score bonus victory points through three mission cards in play.