The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Another board game we tried out on New Years was Fury of Dracula, from the company that brought us Arkham Horror. I thought the all vs one mechanic combined with what looked to be a hopefully shorter game would make this one a winner, so I went about making sure I got it for Chrissymas.
Before I talk about my impressions, though, I have to put a huge disclaimer on here. There are a ton of rules to this game, and learning any game like this makes the first time you play draaaaaaaaaag and go sloooooooow and generally be much less fun than it should be because you don’t know what you’re doing. I especially, as Dracula, had a ton of rules to juggle and figure out. I remember Arkham Horror sucking the first time we played it too. It’s not surprising I didn’t have a great time this first go.

However, I feel like the game may have some problems. For the first… I dunno… hour of us playing the game, nothing really happened. Essner and Spaeth were annoyed because they were just wandering about with no guidance, and I was just playing cards without knowing exactly what I was doing because I wasn’t getting any feedback on them. This wild goose chase gameplay could be fun for Dracula, after I figure out exactly what I should be doing, but it’s certainly not too fun for the Vampire Hunters. It seems like there has to be a way to fix that, but I don’t know what it is quite yet.
The part that was the most fun was when the hunters had my location narrowed down to like… four locations, and had to strategize about where to wait for me. Then you were having those “detective deduction” moments constantly, and I was trying to throw them off the trail using my powers. However, to get to that point, basically my whole trail had to be revealed, which basically removed all traps I could spring on them to give me many options. All the locations of my catacombs were revealed, so I couldn’t spring any big traps on them. It was… less than optimal. It might just have been that I didn’t set things up the way I should because I was kind of clueless. Which I was. I don’t know. In the end, Spaeth had to leave, so I started making some suicidal moves to finish things up, and lost. (Note that I probably would have lost either way at that point, I was just speeding up the process.)

One interesting thing about Fury of Dracula is that it is a game that I don’t think gets better with more people. Three MAY be the optimal number. The hunters have another player to bounce ideas off of, but play moves quicker because you don’t have to wait for too many people to take their turns. Since every hunter is on the board no matter how many players are playing, it certainly doesn’t seem to give an advantage to having more people, even though you can play with five. Who knows, though.

Anyway, this is a game that needs at least a few more playthroughs before I can make a real judgment of value. It’s interesting, and all of the things that I expected to be in the game and that drew me to it are there… I just don’t know if it works well as a package overall. We’ll see, I’m sure.