We're getting ready to make a play through video. In preparation for that, we had a "practice" game last night. The goal is for everyone to be familiar with the game so that when we record a play through, people won't be stumbling over the rules or what they should be doing on their turn.

I would say the game went pretty well. We had 6 players, 3 of whom had never played before and another who hadn't played in so long, it was as if they were brand new to it. A failed investigation at Castle Dracula ended up leading to three Despair cards getting revealed in one turn. We already had one, so just like that Renfield was dead before we could find out what he knew. Things were looking grim as the dread tokens were spreading across the board with no good place to put them.

We did eventually finish investigating Transylvania so we had the Hidden Crypt narrowed down to two locations, one of which was blocked by two dread tokens. However we had 6 Despair cards come out which moved 6 of the boxes out of the Hidden Crypt. An investigation at the Library, and two Privilege cards that moved boxes managed to clear out the rest, so in the end, we never had to find the Hidden Crypt anyway! That's been a pretty rare occurrence.

Our Corrupted player folded at the first hint of accusation which helped a bit. The Influenced player was trying to get 5 of the same Dracula card out. That was very much thwarted by the fact that we only played 6 rounds and called the game before Dracula's 6th turn. Plus Privilege cards prevented a Dracula card from being drawn on two of them, meaning there were only three the whole game!

This led me to rethink the Influenced player a bit. The main purpose of that particular goal was to encourage the Influenced player to drag things out longer. But I see now that in a game with 6 or 7 players, there just aren't going to be that many Dracula cards drawn in the game. Consequently, this goal is going to have to be dependent on the number of players. Also I decided to just require a total number of Dracula cards drawn rather than forcing them to try and make them match. A typical game has been running about 35-40 player turns, so I decided that a "stretch goal" would be closer to 50. But then I was also going to give them credit for two Privilege cards preventing a draw which I think has been roughly average. Consequently a 7 player game will require 5 Dracula cards, a 6 player game will be 6 cards, 5 players need 8 cards, 4 players need 10, and 3 players need 14. And there is no Influenced player in the 2 player version.

This was also the first game where I had the Influenced player peek at the card on top of the Dracula deck and then put it on the top or bottom. But I didn't really like how that worked. I've been using the Dracula deck as the first player marker, so it gets passed around. But we had to keep handing it back to the Influenced player. So instead I got the idea that the Influenced player, when at a location, could choose to use either the Hero or Minion power. That gives them more flexibility to meet their goal and I think also feels more thematic. The only problem was I had to exclude the Minion power at Renfield as that was too powerful for someone not fully invested in Dracula winning. So we will see how that goes next time.

Luckily there was a mistake in the art file I sent to the company that is printing the cards for the prototype. That allowed me to sneak these changes in as I sent them the updated file this morning.

Yesterday I was working on the script for the "how to play" video. As I did so, I tripped up on the word "infiltration". This is a word used to describe a major component of the game, but it doesn't really seem to fit in Victorian London. Indeed, it is one of the last remaining bits from the original iteration of the game.

You see, it wasn't always a Dracula theme. When the game was first conceived it had a spy theme. The players were agents trying to uncover a conspiracy. In that context, infiltrating locations made sense. And for some reason, I just never changed the word. Until now. I think it makes a lot more sense to refer to it as "investigating" a location.

Making the changes in the player aid was relatively simply. I think the word appeared 16 times in there. But I also needed to change it on the game board. That required a boost in my Photoshop skills, but after a couple of hours I got there!

On the one hand, it is a little sad to see the word go. It makes me think back to the start and how far this game has come (I believe we started "infiltrating" back in 2012!) But on the other hand it also makes me excited to think of how far it has come and how close it is now to the end.

I've also been thinking of another tweak to the Influenced player. Previously I let them draw two Dracula cards when playing Dracula's turn and choose which one to play. But after the last playtest I realized, they might very well only play Dracula once or twice in the game, so that doesn't give them much "influence" on the course of the game to meet their goal. So instead I'm going to have them look at the top card of the Dracula deck every time, and then they can secretly choose to put it on the top or the bottom. There's a possibility that may help the heroes too much, but we will see.

I also updated the Attack cards from the Dracula deck so that now they call for a specific number of dread tokens if the heroes fail to fend off the attack.

We played a four player game Saturday. It ended up being a fairly straightforward game. We had a lot of Dread tokens on the board for much of the game, but not quite enough to be crippling. Many came from the Dracula deck as I think we only had one Plot Twist and two Attacks. Which was lucky given that the Conflict Track was pretty high for much of the game. Only two Despair cards came out, and the second one was pretty late, so infiltrating only involved one or two unknown cards. A well worn set of lockpicks also helped with that. Consequently the Heroes cruised to a relatively easy victory this time, including the Influenced player.

There was a suggestion to change the colors of the arrows in the center of the Rally and Thwart cards to more clearly distinguish which things they were good for and which things they were bad for. It was also suggested that losing an Attack should have a set penalty, rather than depend on how badly it was lost. After pondering that, my reaction is "Well, of course it should be like that!' It's already the case that Plot Twists invoke the full penalty even if the Heroes only fail by one point. And really, does it make sense to end the game just because of one Attack that was lost badly? A Corrupted player could potentially end the game relatively early if they had a hand full of Rally cards that they added to the pool. Yet I don't entirely like a single flat number of Dread tokens either. I'm thinking perhaps it will be the strength of the attacker plus three Dread tokens. I think it would also make sense to simply add that penalty to the card.

In other news we will be making some videos soon! We'll have a short promotional video that is just meant to introduce the game and make it look appealing. Then there will be a medium length video that explains how the game is played. And then finally a long video that actually depicts an entire play of the game. I look forward to posting those once we have them all ready.

It's been a while since I updated the website with what's going on. That doesn't mean nothing has been happening though. Quite the contrary! A lot of progress has been made on the game, especially in the last year. Usually in the spring, when I am the least busy, I would dig the game out, dust it off, and plan some test plays. I always thought I was done and just wanted to make sure there was nothing more that needed to be adjusted. And then every year I would actually find a lot of things that needed adjusting. Sometimes it was something I hadn't thought of before. Sometimes it was something that had always nagged at me, but I thought would be ok in the end, but finally realized it had to change. And then I would think about it some more until the next spring when I'd again try out the "final" changes.

About a year ago I thought I was close enough to the end to make a final push towards actually getting the game produced. I put out a call for an artist, a graphic designer, or someone who could do both. I ended up with four strong candidates. One was great, but her style didn't quite match up. Another had experience producing games, having actually worked at a game company. A third was a friend of mine who is amazing at everything she does. And the fourth was a kind of mysterious guy who wasn't actually an artist or a graphic designer, but worked with several around the world.

In the end, I wasn't sure my friend's art style was exactly right for the game either, so I decided to hire her to help me with the Kickstarter instead (which I think will work out great. I hired the person with game experience as a sort of project manager. And the mysterious guy, Trevor, convinced me he was a real person who could get me some quality artists, and so I decided to give him a shot. It might sound like I'm leading up to saying that was a bad decision, but it ended up being a pretty good one. My project manager had some things come up and kind of fell out of the project, so Trevor picked up that aspect too.

Trevor hooked me with his friend Dario who did the art for the backs of some of the cards. But he also hooked me up with Frost Llamzon, an artist in the Philippines. She ended up being amazing. I liked all the art she did, but she also did all of the graphic design on top of that. And she did it all really quickly. I would definitely recommend her to anyone looking for similar art services. Meanwhile, Trevor helped me not just coordinate with them, but he was a huge Dracula fan himself and helped me a lot in fine tuning the thematic elements and was a great person to bounce ideas off of. We exchanged many long emails debating various aspects of the story and how to adapt it to the game. 

After the art was done in October, I got busy working on the St. Paul Winter Carnival and didn't talk to Trevor for a while. When it was done in February I wrote to him to let him know it was time to get going again. I didn't hear back for a while. I thought perhaps he was bothered that I had been out of touch. But then I did finally get an email. He said he had been quite sick with pnuemonia, but he thought he was finally on the mend. Unfortunately I did not get another email from him, and was starting to worry. A couple of months later though I did get one from his sister who confirmed my fears. Trevor had died. I only met him in person so I couldn't say for certain how old he was, but he was relatively young, much too young to be gone already. So as we do make this final push towards getting this game out into the world, I will be dedicating it to Trevor who did so much to help get it to this point, but won't get to see the final version.

Let me preface this entry by saying I had done a lot of thinking after the previous week's test play.  Two nagging ideas had crystallized and reinforced each other.  One was that the game would have limited success if it could not be played with three players, or even two.  I had also heard on multiple occasions that there ought to be a "timer" in the game.  Something like the Doom Track in Arkham Horror or the Darkness Track in A Touch of Evil.  I had resisted the idea thinking that running out of cards was enough of a timer.  

After my three player test play the week before, I had been thinking all week about how to make the game work with a smaller group.  The traitor mechanic breaks down a bit with only three players and certainly with two.  It just didn't seem to make sense to start the game with a traitor in those cases, and from experience I know that without a traitor, the game is too easy to win.  So then my thought was, can I have people play the game without a traitor, and just make it harder to win?  It would be a different sort of game, almost entirely cooperative, though there would still be a chance that someone might become a traitor later in the game.  And here is where the timer came back to mind.  Maybe the game wouldn't be so easy if there was added urgency to the game.

I ended up making two changes to the rules.  The first was specifically for 2 and 3 player games.  Instead of one face down card to start on each location, there would be two.  Not only would this add more uncertainty to infiltrations and slow them down, it would also cause the deck to run out faster.  But that didn't seem like enough and I resolved to add a timer.  I didn't want something completely random, but I didn't want something the players could exercise complete control over either.  Finally I decided to use red tokens.  Red tokens would appear any time a card with a value of 5 was revealed (positive or negative).  The Protagonist would then have to place the red token on a Location.  The first token would do nothing but the second token would mean that Dracula's influence on that location had become so strong, players could no longer interact with it at all.  Over time, more and more locations (and their abilities) would get blocked off and the players would become increasingly squeezed as time went on.  So those were the new conditions we were testing.

My friends Scott and Renee came over Saturday afternoon specifically to test the game and we ended up playing 3 rounds of it.  Neither were familiar with the game so I had to explain the rules which wemt unusually smoothly.  Hopefully I can remember how I did it for future games.  Scott was the Protagonist and was playing Jonathan Harker.  I also gave Jonathan a new power.  He could reveal and discard red cards from his hand to gain a green token once per turn.  Since the Protagonist tends to end up with a lot of cards anyway (via Bermondsey)  he used this a lot and acquired a lot of tokens.  I'm not sure he made the best use of them, but both he and Renee were learning the game and made some mistakes.  In the end, we won and it felt like a good close game.  No one went to the dark side and maybe 1 of "the Fear Grows" cards made an appearance.  We had loyalties of 3 and 5 so that didn't really come close. 

I had decided before the game that for a 3 player game there would be one protagonist and the other two players would have a Resolve between 1 and 6 and I left out the "Clarity of Purpose" card.  I think now though that I would use the Protagonist, one card between 1 and 6, and one card that is always good.  In the three player version, you're really fighting the game more, and if there was a case where two people went dark and it was 2 on 1, the Protagonist would have no hope at all.  I think they could handle a 1 on 1 situation so for 2 players I would have a Protagonist and 1-6 Resolve card.

The second game I was the Protagonist and we absolutely breezed through it, winning in about 30 minutes with no opposition.  I believe this was mostly because Scott and Renee got the hang of the game and once everyone knew what to do, it was still too easy to do.  We decided the game need to be harder still.  We decided to ,ake it so that if a Location had 1 red token on it, you would have to spend a green token or a green card to interact with it.  We also decided that "The Fear Grows" card would result in two red tokens being played.  However we also decided to not impose red tokens for Green 5's as that just felt unnatural and annoying.

In the third game we ended up having the same characters from the first game, but this time Renee was the Protagonist.  I had a Resolve of 3 and actually ended up going dark.  In all 5 of "The Fear Grows" cards came out, but Scott had a Resolve of 6.  The game felt tighter and more intense with the initial red tokens having more meaning now.  In the end it was a close game as they managed to destroy all the boxes with 1 card left in the deck and my turn coming up next.  I didn't turn until pretty late in the game so I don't think it was my mischeif that made the game feel closer.  People don't typically have a lot of cards or get a lot of green tokens, so having to spend them to use a Location is kind of a big deal, or at least it feels like one.  Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing have a little better access to tokens, so it may be watered down with them in the game, but time will tell on that.

Afterwards we questioned whether there should be a way to get rid of red tokens.  If a spot becomes blocked off, it's possible the Heroes could lose if a box gets moved there later on.  Or perhaps they found out someone was lying to them about the location of the Hidden Crypt and it's actually in a location that has been blocked off.  There are a couple of locations whose abilities are very rarely used so we though maybe there could be a location that removes red tokens at some cost like 5 green tokens perhaps.

Going forward, I'm going to try and do some more 3 player testing and even some 2 player testing.  I may continue to look for some ways to make the game tougher to win in general, or at least for 2 or 3 players.