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  Dracula's Last Resting Place - 9/19 Test Play

  Sep 24, 2015

  I was at the Minneapolis Board Game Marathon this last weekend when one of my gamer friends, Joe, asked if I thought my game would ever be avilable on Gamecrafter because he was interested in getting a copy.  I was certainbly happy to hear that someone was that excited about the game, and since I had the prototype with me we decided to play.  By that time it was after 10:30pm though so we were only able to get 4 players together.  However I would say it ended up being one of the best 4 player games I have played.  The downside was I had not yet updated the prototype with all of the most recent changes but I was able to work some of them in.

  We played with a Protagonist, one person starting out Influenced, and the other two players with a Resolve between 1 and 6.  In this case I had a Resolve of 1 and played Mina.  I initially played it as an all out hero even though I knew a change was likely, but I figured it was good to build up some trust.  Mina's abillity to look at the face down cards on locations soon revealed however that there was a "The Fear Grows" card on four different locations, plus I acquired two more which I laid on the board.  At one point we had it narrowed down to two locations, and though I had not yet officially switched sides, I knew there was a "The Fear Grows" card on both of them which meant one was certain to come up as we'd have to inflitrate one of them eventually.  My descent to the dark side was now assured.  Given that I started using my turns to flip over cards and of course every card I turned over happened to be "The Fear Grows".  Thus we went from having none exposed to having 5 exposed pretty quickly, and all three non-protagonists were now on the dark side (I could have flipped a 6th one, but it was clear enough there was no one left to turn).  There was some discussion afterwards about whether Mina's power was perhaps too powerful.  I don't like to make such judgments based upon just one play.  In this case it was a matter of luck that Mina was easily turned and that there were so many of "The Fear Grows" on the board initially.  This hasn't come up in other plays, so I don't think it is consistently overpowered, and I like that a character's power can occasionally be supercharged in the right circumstances.

  The player who played the initial Minion made the familiar complaint that he felt like there wasn't enough for him to do.  My usual response is that this is by design as Influenced characters need to win by using guile and deciet more than by using direct action.  However I've heard this complaint often enough now that I think I need to pay attention to it.  Upon reflection I realize it creates a secondary problem.  If the Influenced characters don't have any decent direct actions to take, then it becomes really difficult to discover who they are.  Consequently maybe there should be a direct action to tempt them with that might have some real benefit but might also raise their risk of discovery.  My thought then is to change the penalty for a failed infiltration.  In addition to making future infiltrations harder, there will be an additional penalty of taking the top 5 cards off the deck, checking them for "The Fear Grows", and then remove them from the game.  This will give both Influenced players and Minions something they can do to hurt the good guys and also makes it a little more costly to purposely fail one just to get rid of bad cards.  I'm not sure if that will be enough as it can be hard to play a bad card without being discovered, but there are very few actions in the game one can genuinely do secretly.

  We did manage to play with the revised Fear Track meaning the difficulty for infiltrating normal locations was 1,4,7, or 10 rather than 1-6.  I think that did work better though I still have to add some iconography to the board to make it clearer which number each location uses as the difficulty for infiltrating.  I'm also thinking of maybe just making it a standard number and the only way to make it easier to infiltrate is to use Resolve tokens.  In that case, you would also get a resolve token every time you sucessfully infiltrate a location (and lose them all if you fail).

  In the end, the original Minion got the Clarity of Purpose card but decided to just discard it.  Consequently it became a three on one and the minions were able to easily overwhelm the lone remaining hero by running out the deck.  It was interesting because for a long time it looked like the Heroes were going to easily win, but once Mina started flipping cards the tide turned extremely quickly.  But that was Mina's plan all along, so it wasn't an unexpected fluke.  Consequently I was pretty happy with it.

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