Saturday Morning Gaming: The Fury of Dracula
Okay. Before I played Fury of Dracula on the computer, I felt like it was a really complicated game that has so much going on that it’d be difficult to describe in a post.
Now that I’ve played it a handful of times, I can say that it’s a simple game to explain that has a bunch of complicated rules in order to provide balance… but if I had to explain it in a sentence, it’d be easy. “Fury of Dracula is a game about hide & seek with a guy who can punch you if you find him.”
Here’s the map:
The four vampire hunters put their pieces down on the board. It is their job to find Dracula. Now, Dracula can’t put his piece on the board because then everybody would know where he is. Duh. So Dracula moves around the board by use of playing cards. He has a deck containing every location on the board and moves around the board by putting a card, face down, on his location tracker. Then he moves to the next city by placing the card for an adjacent city on the location tracker. What this means in practice is that Dracula can’t double back… he must always move forward.
Hunters can move around the board by taking boats, trains, and carriages, Dracula can only take carriages and boats (and he takes damage from being on the water). It’s the job for the hunters to move around and land on the same space as Dracula.
And that’s 90% of the game right there.
The first time I played, I played as a hunter with 3 AI hunters and we all searched for Dracula and *NEVER* encountered him even once. This made me think that this was the dumbest game I had ever played.
The second time I played, I played as Dracula going up against 4 AI hunters and while they never encountered me, it was *AMAZINGLY* fun. I had about three close calls where I had to thread the needle between two hunters who were closing in on me and one of the close calls had the hunter have to pick between two cities to go to and HE PICKED THE WRONG ONE! I laughed and got on a boat off of the coast of France and quickly sailed to Eastern Europe to win the game.
Subsequent playthroughs had me say that this game would be *AWESOME* in person with multiple players who were all bickering about where the hunters need to go next while Dracula sits on his side of the board laughing at them.
The computer version of the game is a fun tool to learn how to play the game with all of its intricate rules for moving around but, once you have that down, you’re stuck with how the AI is dumb. Sometimes the AI hunters would end up with two of them in the same city. This might be okay for it to happen once as they were moving around, but it happened multiple times. When I took control of all four hunters, it was a *LOT* less frustrating.
Oh, you just have to cordon Dracula off. Oh, the trains make it easier to coordinate. Oh, you sometimes have to send a hunter to the hospital in order to send Dracula to the morgue.
What makes the game so complicated is that it has to deal with the fact that the hunters don’t know where Dracula is and needs to keep that information asymmetrical. What’s amazing is that they figured out how to do it at all. And the bonus is that they figured out a way to do it that doesn’t allow Dracula to double back.
The combat between Vampire Hunters and Dracula is pretty good. Dracula has a leg up but, if the hunters play their cards right, Dracula will quickly be playing a “escape!” card rather than one that does damage. Once the Hunters get on Drac’s trail, Dracula will be trying to get out of there as fast as he can and, get this, there are cards that the hunters have that can potentially block an escape attempt.
Once they get onto Drac’s trail, Dracula is going to be bad off. He’ll win the first couple of interactions, no doubt… but he won’t survive once the hunters know where he is.
So the game is two things: Hide and Seek followed by Beat Dracula Up. You’ll always need to catch Dracula at least three times and probably four or five times… but I was surprised by how good the game was when I was finally able to wrap my head around it.
If you are thinking about getting the board game the next time it gets back in print, you should. And if you just want to play it to learn how to best play a hunter or how to best play Dracula? Get the Steam version and you’ll have the mechanics down pat.
So… what are you playing?
