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  Dracula's Last Resting Place - Post 8/9 Playtest Update

  Aug 18, 2015

  Played two games, both with 4 players.  Both games played out pretty similarly (including all 4 players drawing nearly identical Resolve cards to start!)  In each game the Heroes pounded the Library.  Every time they succeeded in infiltrating it, they moved a box out which made it easier to infiltrate the next time.  Soon, the mionion really had no ability to stop them, just delay them, and finding the actual location of the crypt became irrelevant.

  I also realized that giving Van Helsing the ability to look at all three unused Insight cards right off the bat made it easier to guess the Crypt's location that I had realized.  Consequently I am going to change the Library so that infiltrating that lets you look at an unused Insight card instead.  I'll try having the first two publicly exposed while the third one is only peeked at so as to be consistent with the other Insight card locations.  Infiltrating the Library will no longer mean the heroes get to move a box out of the crypt automatically.  However they can trade three Resolve tokens to do so, instead of looking at an unused Insight card.  That way the ability can still be done in moderation (as was the original intention) but would require much greater effort to do repeatedly.

  Speaking of Resolve tokens, I decided to take the dice roll out of the acquisition process.  Instead a player will just discard one Courage (green) card to acquire one token.  The caveat is the card is removed from the game. As for Van Helsing, his new power will be that he collects two Resolve tokens instead of one each time he does this.  I also decided to change Lucy's power.  Instead of trading cards (which almost never happened in the playtest) she will get to draw an extra card every time she draws a card, but that extra card must be given to another player.  I think this is a good representation of Lucy's wealth and how everyone wants to be on her good side.

  Finally, it struck me that perhaps Dracula's presence in the game was too abstract.  It is his plot that underlies everything, but he only exists in the background when maybe it would be better to give him a more active presence so that he can menace the players a little more directly.  Consequently I am introducing a Dracula token.  He will start in the Crypt and then any time a Location card is turned over, he will move to that location. Players may not intereact with the location Dracula is on.  They may not move there, lay a card there, use that location's power, or infiltrate it.  That will make it a little hardr for the Heroes, but generally they will outnumber the minions anyway, and trying to get help from Dracula will give the minions another thing to do.

  I have another playtest for tonight so we will see how they play out.

  Tags: Dracula

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