Stormy Night Games

Games With Atmosphere

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    Dracula's Last Resting Place -2/11/16 Test Play

    My Halloween fundraiser followed by the holidays and the Winter Carnival caused the game to move to a back burner.  But I did have someone from my Mason Lodge request to play the game so I brought it to our Fellowship meeting last night as no other program was scheduled.  We ended up getting a group of four, including two who had never played before and one who had not played in a very long time.  This version of the game eliminated the Fear Track.  Instead the difficulty for all Infiltrations was the number of crates remaining in the crypt.  Unfortunately, not having played the game in a while, I forgot two rules that swayed the game heavily in favor of the minions.  One was that whenever a Fear Grows card appeared, we forgot to move a crate from the crypt to the location mentioned on the card.  Consequently the infiltration difficulty never dropped below 10.  Also, I forgot that players were supposed to get resolve tokens for each successful Infiltration.  Consequently there were not as many in play as I had planned on.  But even thougn the game was pretty unbalanced, it was still fun.

    One player started out Influenced.  They also got dealt the Clarity of Purpose card right away, but opted never to play it.  Another player had a Resolve of 1 so it was basically a game of 2 on 2.  I had a Resolve of 6 but played a straight hero even though 5 The Fear Grows cards came out and I held three others in my hand.  It's hard to properly assess how that worked though since the Heroes were playing without some needed advantages due to my neglect of the two rules above.

    I played Jonathan Harker to test out his power.  Being able to trade a Location card on the board with one in my hand was a useful ability, though there ended up being some fuzziness involved.  As stated, the power did not limit itself to face up cards, so I decided to test it by trading face down cards as well.  I somewhat arbitrarily decided that face up cards would be replaced with face up cards and face down cards would be replaced with face down cards.  Also, if taking a face down card, it would have to be taken at random.  And then can he pick up a "The Fear Grows" card?  I decided he could, but it wouldn't go into his hand.  I think this all played out ok, but I don't like all the detail tied to this power. Perhaps there should be a rule that when you lay a face down card on a spot that already has 1 or more face down cards, you have to shuffle them right away.  Then Jonathan Harker's power could be to simply replace any Location card with a card from his hand, played face down, and the old card is moved to the discard pile instead of his hand.  One way I used his power in this game was to drop a Fear card on an irrelevant location and trade it for a nice Courage card on that location.  That action felt like it nade the ability a little too powerful.   Also, I can imagine that if Jonathan Harker was influenced, and he had "The Fear Grows" in his hand, he could immediately lay it face up by switching it with another card. So all the more reason for him to play his cards face down all the time.

    This weekend is the board game marathon.  Now that I have an updated prototype again, hop[efully I can get some more playtests in and play with the correct rules.

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