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.

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.