•  

  Dracula's Last Resting Place - Post 8/18 Playtest Update

  Aug 19, 2015

  Thanks to my friend Darin, I finally got in a playtest with more than 4 people.  There were actually 6 of us, and as has generally been the case in the past, the game played pretty much the way it was meant to play.  The initial minion, being a new player, made one mistake whereby he gave himself away pretty early.  The Protagonist played the "Clarity" card on him and he chose to play out the game as a Minion.  Of the remaining four players, two had a resolve that causd them to switch over pretty early and the other two would always be on the Hero side.

  So what we ended up with was a good battle between the two sides.  The known Minion was going around causing what havoc he could and putting pressure on the heroes to hurry.  The two Influenced charatcers both played it pretty cool and relied on outright deceit.  In the end the Minions won as a result of that deceit.  Where I think the Heros went wrong was in being too trusting.  Only one player looked at all three of the hidden Insight cards and lied about two of them.  Also, the only two players to infiltrate suspected locations were the Influenced ones and they both planted decoys.  No one even got accused of being Influenced.  I don't consider this a design flaw.  I consider it an experience thing and hopefully one of those things that makes a player want to play again, but play smarter next time.

  I think moving the unused Insight cards to the Library worked well.  They were still accessible, but took work to get to.  Reducing the Library's ability to remove boxes from the Crypt also seems to have worked out.  It still got down to just 4 boxes due to 5 "The Fear Grows" cards, and someone must have used Resolve tokens to move one more though I don't specifically recall that happening.  I liked that even though the difficulty had dropped substantially, they weren't able to knock out the rest in just a few turns.

  I think the jury is still somewhat out on the addition of Dracula.  Though we forgot to move him a few times, it generally wasn't that hard to keep track of.  It did seem to add some interesting elements.  I didn't notice any down side to it, but I want to see it more than just one playtest before calling it a permanent addition.

  All in all I was pretty happy with this session and didn't see anything I wanted to change other than a couple of errors in the prototype construction I'll have to fix. Although there are still a few things to ponder.  The question of what order to do things in on your turn came up again and I'm still a bit undecided.  I think it is important that the player must move (or choose to stay put) before anything else.  I also think infiltrating should be the last thing in a turn.  but I'm ok with laying a card before or after using a location's power.  I just need to figure out how to state that in a precise way on the character sheet.

  I also think the end of the game can be abrupt.  I'll have to see if I can think of something to make it feel a little more climatic and not like the end of a Coen brothers movie.

Comments

• (no comments)