Fury of Dracula PBF - Game 1

[COMaestro]

Lord Godalming supplies and draws 2 items and a Dracula event. Please discard 2 items.

Dr. Seward is at sea and must pass.

Van Helsing (@MichaelCule), you are up.

[MichaelCule]

Supply, since we’re at the Hail Mary stage.

[COMaestro]

Van Helsing supplies, drawing an item and a Hunter event.

Mina (@RogerBW), your turn.

[RogerBW]

Supply…

[COMaestro]

Mina supplies, drawing an item and a Hunter event. She must discard one item and one event.

Dracula’s (@RossM) turn, which should end the game at the maturation of the Reckless Vampire.

[RogerBW]

Mina discards the new things:

FAST HORSES
LUCY’S REVENGE

[Whistle_Pig]

Discard Holy bullets and crucifix

[COMaestro]

@RossM, I assume you intend to mature the vampire?

If so, that’s the game, and I would like to hear the post-game from everyone.

[Chewy77]

As a mere spectator, that was great. Well done @RossM sneaking about and everybody for the humour and good spirits, I enjoyed that!

I think it would be great to see when the hunters were discussing where Dracula could have been, where was he actually in the map at the time.

[COMaestro]

I will post a Dracula move chart later, which can be compared to the pictures of the board to see how close (or not) the hunters were to Dracula.

[gmwhite999]

On the assumption that Dracula will mature that vampire - and even if not he can definitely evade us for long enough for the Despair Track to take effect - I’d like to start with a few thank yous, and give my thoughts on the game later today.

Firstly, thank you @COMaestro for running this game. I’m sure it can’t be easy keeping track of everyone’s moves and inventory when a lot of that is done through private messages, but it seemed to run very smoothly. You were always there with advice and clarification when I wasn’t sure what cards did, and I’m looking forward to discussing the changes from 1st edition later on too.

Secondly, thank you and congratulations to the Count: @RossM. A most fiendish chase and excellently played, plus some great moments of humour too. How I managed to type your title correctly without dropping the “o” throughout the game was a miracle. I can’t wait to see your moves and read your thoughts on them and your strategy and choices at those key stages of the game. I’m also hoping to even the score in our current Star Trek PBF game here, although with a third of that game left to go anything can still happen - especially if you keep on blowing up the Federation ships.

Thirdly, a thank you and commiserations to my fellow hunters @Whistle_Pig, @MichaelCule and @RogerBW. Sadly our hunt wasn’t successful but we gave it a great shot and might have ended up closer had a few key decisions or encounters gone our way, including one or two specific choices I made that would have changed the game much earlier. I’d also like to apologise as at times I felt like I was quarterbacking you all in our hunt too much, and tried to back off that too; I hope that didn’t affect your enjoyment of the game. More on all of that in the longer roundup discussion.

Finally though, a collectively thank you to all of you for being part of this game. It was my first PBF game and I thoroughly loved the experience so am looking forward to playing more. In fact, after thoughts and a brief discussion with Roger, I am hoping to run my own PBF game here in the next week or so, playing through a similar although fully cooperative hunt for a supernatural villain in a small 1800s village in A Touch Of Evil. I was intending to run it for 4 people, but if all 5 of you are keen to play I can accommodate you all. I posted a review of my thoughts of the game here and you can find playthroughs and reviews on YouTube or by following the link in my review to the BGG website, but it plays a lot like Arkham/Eldritch Horror or other Flying Frog titles Fortune and Glory and Invasion From Outer Space (slightly more complex than Last Night On Earth) if you are familiar with those games. Please let me know publicly or privately if you wish to take part.

Thanks again - more to follow later on!

[RogerBW]

A hidden movement game should, I think, produce in the hunters a mix of frustration and cunning; that’s certainly the way I feel about Whitehall Mystery. This was a little on the frustration side for me, but I think I should probably have supplied more and travelled less (at least judging by my combat outcomes). And I think we only used Mina’s power once… that’s a thing that varies a lot between games. In Aeon’s End you really want to work up to the point where you can spam your individual player power as often as possible; in this the setup meant it usually wasn’t worth the effort.

Thank you to all!

[COMaestro]

In my opinion, you made a tactical error in your first combat with the Reckless Vampire. It has 4 HP. By the way Hunters have to alternate their attack cards, and combats going a maximum of 6 rounds, you could not defeat the vampire in one combat, so you probably should have tried to escape early, especially as I think it matured that night (I would have to go back and check). That defeat gave Dracula 3 extra influence.

But you did have such horrible supplies, never really getting a weapon until near the end of the game, I believe, which are the things that really do damage.

For my part, this is my first time running a PbF, and it was a lot of fun being behind the scenes and getting to see how everything was unfolding. A person on BGG, DaveD, made a wonderful spreadsheet with macros that manages a lot of the game for the moderator, as well as files for the board images and was kind enough to share them all with me. It is not perfect (the combat section does not appear to work at all), so I might try to tweak it if I can find the free time to do so to patch the holes. Got frustrating trying to get someone to move by rail when I could clearly see their ticket allowed them to move that far, but the spreadsheet said it was out of range. Turned out one of the cities was not listed as being adjacent to the middle city by rail, which caused the issue and I was able to fix that. There are probably a few most missed connections like that, but with SO MANY adjacencies to deal with, it is no surprise some may have been missed.

I had fun trying to predict what Ross would do on his turms, which ended up being very different than what my choices would have been most of the time, but obviously worked out very well for him.

I would be happy to run this again, to give other players a shot if interested, or run the same crew through for a shot at vengeance against the Count if all were interested.

Thanks for playing, everyone.

[gmwhite999]

@COMaestro

In my opinion, you made a tactical error in your first combat with the Reckless Vampire.

That tactical error was mine, which I’ll get to later.

[RossM]

Ah. It’s better to get back to my true form.

Despite my constant moaning about event cards, I actually got incredibly lucky once in combat, drawing exactly the cards needed.

Also, my one drawn event card was exactly the one needed.

Thanks to all, I’ll talk about decisions once the move map is posted.

Well played everyone. I was super stressed throughout.

[gmwhite999]

@RossM

I was super stressed throughout.

More stressful playing Dracula in 1st edition, when a stake (and if I remember a knife too) can instantly kill the Count if he loses initiative to a hunter in combat. I think the extra blood points and combat system here might give Dracula license to scrap more if he (or she) so chooses.

[COMaestro]

Here is a move chart, for everybody:

	Week	Day	Day/Night	Godalming	Seward	VanHelsing	Mina	Dracula
1	Start
2	1	Mon	Day	Leipzig	Milan	Madrid	Madrid	Athens
3	1	Mon	Night	Leipzig	Milan	Madrid	Madrid	Valona
4	1	Tue	Day	Brussels	Prague	Santander	Florence	Valona
5	1	Tue	Night	Brussels	Prague	Santander	Florence	Varna
6	1	Wed	Day	Bordeaux	Vienna	Saragossa	Rome	Varna
7	1	Wed	Night	Bordeaux	Vienna	Saragossa	Rome	Constanta
8	1	Thu	Day	Nantes	Zagreb	Toulouse	Bari	Constanta
9	1	Thu	Night	Nantes	Zagreb	Toulouse	Bari	Bucharest
10	1	Fri	Day	Nantes	Zagreb	Toulouse	Bari	Bucharest
11	1	Fri	Night	Nantes	Zagreb	Toulouse	Bari	Klausenberg
12	1	Sat	Day	Paris	Vienna	Marseilles	Adriatic Sea	Klausenberg
13	1	Sat	Night	Paris	Vienna	Marseilles	Adriatic Sea	Szeged
14	1	Sun	Day	Berlin	Budapest	Genoa	Valona	Szeged
15	1	Sun	Night	Berlin	Budapest	Genoa	Budapest Hospital	Belgrade
16	2	Mon	Day	Prague	Constanta	Vienna	Budapest Hospital	Belgrade
17	2	Mon	Night	Prague	Constanta	Vienna	Budapest Hospital	Valona
18	2	Tue	Day	Budapest	Bucharest	Vienna	Budapest	Valona
19	2	Tue	Night	Budapest	Bucharest	Vienna	Budapest	Athens
20	2	Wed	Day	Zagreb	Belgrade	Munich	Szeged	Athens
21	2	Wed	Night	Zagreb	Belgrade	Munich	Szeged	Ionian Sea
22	2	Thu	Day	Sarajevo	Klausenberg	Milan	Szeged	Ionian Sea
23	2	Thu	Night	Sarajevo	Klausenberg	Milan	Szeged	Tyrrhenian Sea
24	2	Fri	Day	Valona	Klausenberg	Genoa	Constanta	Tyrrhenian Sea
25	2	Fri	Night	Valona	Klausenberg	Genoa	Constanta	Cagliari
26	2	Sat	Day	Valona	Belgrade	Rome	Varna	Cagliari
27	2	Sat	Night	Valona	Belgrade	Rome	Varna	Cagliari
28	2	Sun	Day	Adriatic Sea	Salonica	Naples	Sofia	Cagliari
29	2	Sun	Night	Adriatic Sea	Salonica	Naples	Sofia	Cagliari
30	3	Mon	Day	Bari	Athens	Tyrrhenian Sea	Szeged	Cagliari
31	3	Mon	Night	Bari	Athens	Tyrrhenian Sea	Szeged	Mediterranean Sea
32	3	Tue	Day	Rome	Athens	Cagliari	Vienna	Mediterranean Sea
33	3	Tue	Night	Rome	Athens	Cagliari	Vienna	Granada
34	3	Wed	Day	Genoa	Athens	Rome	Munich	Granada
35	3	Wed	Night	Genoa	Athens	Rome	Munich	Alicante
36	3	Thu	Day	Marseilles	Tyrrhenian Sea	Rome	Munich	Alicante

[gmwhite999]

Hmm I thought Dracula might have made it home to drop a vampire there between Valona and Klausenberg but maybe didn’t quite have the time for it.

[RossM]

Random map of movement.

Starting at Athens in red.

[gmwhite999]

@gmwhite999

Here’s my thinking aloud. I am on the border of Eastern Europe, which no one has explored yet and has few cities or railway connections. That’s a lot of ground for the Count to skulk around in: indeed, if I were playing Dracula given the hunters’ starting positions, I would have started in the northern east of the map, travel south and maybe a touch west but keeping close to the shore to be able to escape by boat if necessary. Alternatively, with the right cards or feeling lucky, head more west than south and hope to find a gap between the hunters to slip through any advances east that they make.

My inventory is one event card, two items and two train tickets, and my possible actions tonight are either to supply and grab another item (I can have up to four) with the risk of drawing a Dracula event card, or prepare to travel and take another train ticket which may or may not be a better replacement to one of the ones I already have.

I think where I am, drawing another ticket might be a waste - unless of course, the Count is somewhere like Britain or southern Spain - and although there is a chance of handing over a Dracula event card, there’s a reasonably better chance it will benefit me, as well as adding another item and allowing me to move fully in the day.

It’s a group game though, so I’m willing to be persuaded to play it safe.

@RossM Way back on the Wednesday evening of week 1, you said you would like to comment on those early plans we had. What did you want to say back then?