Fury of Dracula

The second game we'll be looking at is Fury of Dracula, which Ah Ping and I played with Key-jie-jie's Rifle friends last weekend...



Fury of Dracula is actually Fantasy Flight's rework of the original game by Games Workshop. The plot behind the game is that several years after the events of the Dracula novel, Dracula is setting plans for world domination, and is traveling around Europe planting minions and seeding vampires. The vampire hunters (4 characters from the novel) suspect that something is up after they hear of a rash of mysterious deaths. and set out to hunt Dracula down.




The game mechanics carry this story very well! In the game, Dracula moves around from city to city in secret. This is accomplished by using location cards placed face-down on Dracula's Trail, which means that players will not know where he is unless they cross his trail or find other means of revealing the cards. However, once they do reveal some of the cards, they can attempt to deduce Dracula's path and track him down.

The players' primary means of finding Dracula is to walk around the cities trying to find evidence of his trail. As both Dracula and the players are constrained by road and rail movement (they can't teleport!), the players have to decide how best to search the continent, and how to rush down on Dracula once they find out where he is. Dracula's part on the other hand, is to be as devious as possible in making the players mis-guess his location.




Down here, for instance, we managed to track Dracula (played by Raymond-kor-kor) down into Eastern Europe, and were closing the net around him, which is why we're all in that corner of the map. However, we made a mistake and he was able to flee through the northern part of Eastern Europe - at this point in the game we'd just realised he had done that, and were about to play a "Consecrated Ground" to keep him from running away. It didn't work out, but I'll get Zim-kor-kor to explain some of the tactics and logic behind the game.

(Zim-kor-kor: I'll find a chance to insert some posts about the tactical considerations for the hunters and Dracula)



Well, in the end, if we hunt Dracula down, we get to fight him! The fight system is kind of strange, and reflects that the game is not primarily a fight game but more one of deduction and hiding. Basically, each player selects what he's going to do in secret, and then reveals it before rolling a dice to see whose card takes effect. In this case, Ah Ping is using a pistol against Dracula's Mesmerize. It's a little bit like scissors-paper-stone....

Well I really like this game, because there's a lot of interaction between the players, plus it's mostly cooperative, except for one person who has to be the bad guy. Only bad thing about it is that it's so looooooong. We took five hours to play our game... Nevertheless, my rating for this game is 5 oinks!