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!

Vampire hunters unite!

Hee... Zim kor kor is gonna play Fury of Dracula tomorrow with his friends! Two boxes at once! Gonna be fun... We'll be taking pictures, so keep a look out!

Arkham Horror

The first game we'll be looking at is Fantasy Flight Games' Arkham Horror. A lady at Paradigm Infinity recommended it to us quite some time back, and Key-jie-jie is a big fan of horror games. Zim-kor-kor was tracking the game and it just got reprinted, so he went ahead and bought the game. (Zim's note - SGD 85 at PI).

You can see from the picture, Ah Ping is pointing to some people driving an old car and shooting tommy guns at some monster, and that reflects the story. It is set in 1928 in the town of Arkham where an extra-dimensional being is about to enter Earth and destroy everyone and everything. It's a cooperative game with a gothic-ish horror theme that is shown in the mechanics. Your character can "die" from being injured physically (losing stamina), or going insane (losing sanity), and most monsters can damage your sanity even before you get to fight it... As for the cooperation part, all the human players are working together to save the world. The boardgame itself is the main opponent and each turn you draw a card to simulate the forces of the Mythos creeping ever closer to earth. This is kind of like another cooperative game, Shadows over Camelot.


The game itself has a lot of really nice parts, as you can see from this picture. A very nice, colorful board, and many many components. The lady at PI said that setting up was one of the things that detracted from the game, but so far it's been fine. Key-jie-jie is a bit worried that the cards will spoil easily since the material doesn't feel very long-lasting, so we're planning to laminate, maybe. Zim-kor-kor is worried that will make it difficult to combine with the other expansions...

In the game, we take on the role of investigators, trying to find out what is happening and then stop it. It's very cool, each of the 16 investigators has a little background story and many different ways to differentiate themselves. There are also stand-up chits for each investigator, quite cool! A bit less spectacular than the plastic figures from games like Fury of Dracula and Descent, though. What is very cool is that each character must trade off his stats between "Speed" and "Sneak", "Fight" and "Will", and "Lore" and "Luck", and can dynamically adjust this a little every turn to cater to changing situations. Makes for some very interesting decisions.

Here are some of the investigators exploring French Hill in the game. The green row of circles in the back represent other worlds - as the game goes on gates are opening to other dimensions in Arkham, spawning monsters and bringing the Ancient One (the big awful monster) closer to waking up and destroying the world. Investigators are supposed to explore the other worlds, and then close the gates to prevent the Ancient One from waking up. If you observe the little blue marker at the foot of the two explorers, that's a seal which one of the investigators has placed, preventing any gates from opening there.


Of course, everything would be much easier if not for the monsters which are running around trying to kill the characters. Some are fairly "usual" monsters like Zombies or Ghouls. Some, I've never heard of, but I guess they must be from this guy Lovecraft's books.

We can choose to hide from the monsters or fight them. Hiding is safe, but it's not good to let the monsters build up either. Eventually, even if the monsters don't get you, they'll slowly fill up Arkham and then all the normal civilians will get scared. This is shown in the "Terror Track" which steadily advances if too many monsters show up. Which is why eventually we'll try to kill them - at least the ones which are easier.. Closing gates and killing monsters gives you trophies anyway, which you can trade for goodies. In this case, Ah Ping traded some trophies to become the policeman in Arkham. You can see the three cards he's holding... Deputy of Arkham, Revolver, and Patrol Wagon, all very useful things.



These were my favorite items from the game -- You can see I had three gate trophies, and I had a magic sword and a shotgun, and many other things.

I think the game was quite fun. On the one hand, we can "level up" by picking up items, skills, and magic spells to help us fight the evil monsters. On the other hand, if we spend too much time "leveling" instead of actually fighting monsters and closing gates, then we can very quickly get into a position where we can't win, no matter what.

So there's a fair amount of tension, forcing us to move quickly to make sure we finish the game, rather than allowing us to take our time to make sure we're fully equipped.

Also, the encounters and events are very atmospheric and even a little creepy... I know I'm going to have trouble sleeping tonight. At least Key-jie-jie will hug me to sleep...

The rules are kind of complicated though. Zim-kor-kor spent a lot of time reading the rules and still got some wrong. But we'll get better as we get more experienced lah. Hopefully it won't get boring with familiarity. In the meantime, I'm giving it a rating of four oinks!