Fury of Dracula PBF - Game 1

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I sort of feel I should apologise for the disasterous way the encounter with that Vampire turned out… And sort of feel I shouldn’t. We were already very close to the ‘last chance saloon’ and while we had an idea of where the Count had got to we had nobody near enough to him to attack.

Losing the four points when the vampire matured was going to screw us either way so I went for broke. I have a tendency to do that. I think perhaps, while attacking and then going away wounded wouldn’t have helped much, that waiting till the next morning so I could attack the critter in the daylight might have made enough difference. We’ll never know.

Our primary problem was that the Count wasn’t found early enough. We had no trace of him until after the first despair was placed (I think: could be wrong) and that was far too late. Perhaps our initial dispersal of the hunters was unwise and we should have kept Mina in company with someone who could trigger her special ability.

One point of disagreement: I don’t recall Mina and Van Helsing being in the same place at the start. If we had been I wouldn’t have left Madrid without using her ability.

EDITED TO ADD: And what I should have said at the start was my thanks to all of you for a great game, especially my thanks to the GM for making it possible. And I’d like to do that again sometime. Playing someone different this time…

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664

Oh, yeah. That was a clerical error, where I had messed up the starting positions. The spreadsheet record is wrong on that point, I manually changed it in the actual game tab.

And a word of advice for any Van Helsing player. Never just Rest at night unless you need to heal. Instead, use your Leadership ability to privately converse with one of your fellow hunters, learn what they have in hand and see if another hunter could use anything.

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Answering the above and more…

Starting location.
Weirdly I’d picked Athens before anyone had decided starting locations. This decisions was based on rubbish railway links and Blake 7. My tactic was to always pick locations that were tactically poor, gambling that people would assume I would keep my options as open as possible, Initial route was to skirt the edge of the map heading north east.

Lots of sites suggests keeping wolf move for when I was attacked, but I reasoned the earliest I could break up my trail, the better. I dropped my reckless vampire first, knowing it was the one location most likely to mature before I was discovered, especially as it would wipe out the trail for locations 4-6 as well. I got loads of vampires and played them all as soon as possible.

On Wednesday, you’d twigged where I was, and if it wasn’t for a double night time move you could have double teamed my vampire. As luck would have it Mina didn’t have the cards to stop me.

The next issue was I’d used all my vampire cards, so as I backtracked and tried to confuse my trail, I only had cards that could delay you, so the next tactic was to tie people up in one area and then flee as far as possilbe.

The water move was a big risk, but the net was closing, and I wanted to draw hunters into my double fog trap.

Saying all this, I was absolutely livid when you played consecrated ground as I was convinced you’d play it exactly where I was, and by this point I’d spent a whole week not laying vampires. I needed that second vampire to mature. If not Dracula would just have to keep on damaging himself to escape, and one single combat would have been fatal.

I got so lucky drawing strength twice against van helsing, and I’m very surprised I won.

My next move would have been back into the Mediterranean to really mess with you.

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That was probably our major and biggest mistake: we never communicated at the start or came up with a plan until three or four days into the hunt. That almost gave him a head start. Unless you get lucky and draw some event cards to reveal his locations early, we really should have spent time agreeing our approach and starting positions before play began, making use of player abilities, such as keeping Mina central so any of us could meet her, allowing Godalming to be an outlier if his ticket supply ability gave him further train travel range, and yes Van Helsing’s Leadership ability too.

Fights are what they are: win some, lose some, depending on the cards drawn by Dracula and the items that hunter has collected. However if there is chance another hunter can get there before an encounter matures, the first hunter can always consider an escape in the first three rounds while always being vigilant to avoid being mesmerised and bitten.

My main mistake was coming up with a pretty good plan - but then second guessing it with regards to where Dracula was. Hindsight is great I know but Mina’s defeat by the vampire at Valona when I was planning to meet her there put us in a big hole at the end of the first week. I became convinced Dracula may have snuck back past us and headed towards Germany and France - probably because that’s what I would have done - and didn’t think Godalming or Van Helsing could block him off. Had I continued with the plan, I would have got to Valona first with my stake and a knife plus maybe also my pistol (I think I had it around then) and tackled the vampire much better equipped. Godalming’s chartered carriage from Paris to Berlin might have been enough to cover any anticipated Count’s advance, but of course collectively we didn’t know he had that. Then Mina and I could have checked the two most easterly regions for his presence. May not have changed the outcome at the end, but would have given us more scope for taking risks in week 2, especially if he was starting to be penned in around Szeged.

And in retrospect, maybe we should have taken a punt and sent Consecrated Ground to Cagliari. As I think I said at the time when he made his first sea move it was strange as we weren’t sure where he was and Dracula only goes to sea for three reasons: if cornered or boxed in, if heading to/from the British Isles and Ireland, or if going to put an encounter at Cagliari - and usually a nasty one. With typical irony I think I drew a Heavenly host card the round after we played that card, and if one of us had one at the time, Cagliari was the ideal place to put it just in case.

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Adding to the above, I tried to remove all evidence I wasn’t slipping north past hunters in order to feed this misconception.

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Those two Unnatural Fog encounters were perfectly placed. If I remember you learnt after ambushing with the first one that waiting until the hunters search for it would delay them for an extra day.

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One general initial point I got from this first game though is that there seems quite a short time limit for the hunters to complete their hunt. The maturing of encounters and lack of ways for hunters to move back the shadow track seems to make it more difficult than 1st edition, even with the extra hunter, and the double whammy of losing a fight to a vampire about to mature is brutal. Worth some replays though and see how other events and cards affect the hunt.

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There is a Vampire Lair event card, which allows a hunter armed with a Stake to become delayed to remove 2 influence from the track, but I think that is the only way the hunters can do so, and there is only one in the deck.

You guys had the misfortune of Mina being the hunter in the first combat, as one bite defeats her due to her permanent bite mark. Any other hunter would have lost the fight, but not been defeated from a single bite, preventing some of that influence from accruing.

The combats are a mix of pure luck, but also reading your opponent and guessing how they are going to proceed in their efforts to win. Admittedly, I think some of this is lost in a virtual play like this, compared to looking your opponent in the eye and maybe even trash talking a little as you play.

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I’m more than happy to try it again, with whoever and as whoever - even as the Count, although I’m torn as to which of two avatars I’d use if playing him.

And my offer for running A Touch Of Evil still stands for you all.

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I would love to have you run that @gmwhite999

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Oh it will happen as soon as I sort out the graphics - hopefully by or over the weekend. Roger is keen too so that makes at least 2.

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