I was able to get the game out at April's Board Game Marathon on Sunday morning.  I was expecting one person who wanted to play and had talked my friend Jason and his friend John into trying it.  I had the game set up and started explaining it, even though the 4th person hadn't arrived.  Having gotten that far, we decided to see just how a 3 player game would actually go since it turned out the 4th person couldn't make it.  I had always assumed 3 wouldn't work well and thus had never tried it, but this seemed like the perfect chance to giver it a go, so we did.

I decided we wouldn't have someone start out as automatically influenced, but I did include it in the mix so it was at least a possibility.  I also decided to remove the Clarity of Purpose card as having two of three players be unimpeachably good and third player also possibly on the good side, there would be no hope of game balance.  

We played the game and the mechanics all seemed to work well.  I gave out one token for successful infiltrations and if someone burned a green card on one of the red Dracula spaces, I gave them tokens equal to the value of the card.  I was a little worried this might result in too many tokens being in the game, but that didn't happen this time.  However, no one worked the Library aggressively either.  However, we did do the math and realized it would take 75 tokens to use the Library to remove all of the crates from the Crypt.  If they can successfully acquire and use that many tokens, then they deserve to win.  So I think that mechanic will prove ok.

I played Jonathan Harker.  With the Kingstead Churchyard space now allowing players to remove a card from the board, I found I never used his power at all.  It seemed better for me to get rid of a Fear card in my hand to remove a Fear card from the board than it did to take another Fear card into my hand and leave a Courage card behind.  There was also a lot of fuzziness about how it worked with face up cards vs. face down cards.  I think I will scrap this power and search for another.

In the end, the good guys won.  Not a single "The Fear Grows" card was revealed.  Jason was the Protagonist and held 4 in his hand.  I buried one on a space that we knew to be irrelevant.  I felt the game played fine and I thought the mechanics all worked well enough, but overall the game was very much not compelling.  Basically it reinforced my belief that there absolutely has to be at least one traitor in the game.  In a three player game, I'm not sure how that would work.   It seems like it would be fairly easy to decide between the two non-protagonists which one was being suspicious.  Then again, all of the other mechanics seemed to work just fine with only three people, so maybe it's worth trying to figure out some alternate traitor mechanic that can work for three people.

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.

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.

My friend Darin helped arrange another playtest date and this time we had five players and played twice.  Darin ended up being the Protagonist again for both games and had definitely learned to be more suspicious of those "helping" him.  Yet we didn't end up with an exposed Minion in either game.  In fact, I don't think we had more than one of the cards that pushed people to the dark side come out in either game.

In the first game I tried out a new rule saying that if a player infiltrates a site, they can llook at the face down cards played by people who had previously infiltrated the site.  That was a big mistake and we immediately dropped that rule for the next game.  It gave away far too much information.  I immediately know the person who played the first card down was influenced and we also knew without a doubt when we had placed enough cards under that site.  So it is now the official ruling that when infiltrating a site, you can not look at what was previously played.  There was also some question about whether there was a way to remove a previously played card.  But I think just playing an additional card will have mostly the same effect as removing a bad card.  Plus when you're talking about smashing crates, what is done is done.  So once is card is placed under a site, it is there until the end of the game.

We took a close look at the special powers.  Lucy's power seems pretty strong because as written, she is always drawing extra cards, even if she is on a space meant to simply replace a card.  But since she must give the extra cards away, it doesn't make her that powerful.  I think it was ok though with some spaces we had to think about exactly how the power worked.  "Discard 1 card to draw 1 card.  If you wish, discard that card and draw one more" turned into "Discard 1 card and draw 2.  Give one away.  If you wish, discard the other and draw 2 more and give one of those away."

We decided Quincey's power oif having an infiltrate difficult of 1 instead of 3 was farily inconsequential most of the time.  Next time we're going to try letting him ignore the power of Dracula which is to say he can use a space even when Dracula is there.  Mina's power seems fine.  Dr. Seward's ability to draw off the discard pile seemed ok, though it neans being careful with the discards.  The plaer putting the discards in the pile gets to choose their order.  The jury is still out on Van Helsings double resolve token power.  Arthur's ability to place cards anywhere seems like a good one.  That just leaves Jonathan Harker.  Starting in Transylvania and with 5 cards is mildly useful at the start and completely useless afterwards (though so was Mr. Harker in the book as I recall). Now I'm thinking maybe he can trade a Fear card on the space he is on with a Courage card in his hand.

It was pointed out that the stark red and green colors on the cards are easy to accidentally see.  We'll have to keep that in mind when doing the final graphic design.  

In the second game, there were two Influenced characters early on and just three good ones.  Yet the heroes had a remarkly quick, relatively uncontested win.  This brings two things into question.  Perhaps having the leftover Insight cards at the Library isn't a good idea.  First Van Helsing had access to them and then the Library.  In both cases it made it relatively easy to guess the definitive location earlierr than I think it should have.  I think next time I will put just two cards in the Library and leave the 9th card out of the game entirely and thus it will always be a mystery.

Also, I think Influenced players are better off staying Influenced rather than being revealed and becoming Minions (because once they are Minions, they can no longer infiltrate)..  Consequently I did not allow them to become Minions unless accused first.  But after this second game, I think one or both of the Influenced players might have actually been better off becoming Minions and using those uinique powers.  So while they may generally be better off not being exposed, there may be times when being exposed is in fact the better choice and they should have that option.  So going forward an Influenced player can declare themselves to be a Minion at any time.

So those are the observations from this week.  I hope to have some weekly playtests in September.

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.