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  Play-through Video Practice

  Jun 11, 2025

  We're getting ready to make a play through video. In preparation for that, we had a "practice" game last night. The goal is for everyone to be familiar with the game so that when we record a play through, people won't be stumbling over the rules or what they should be doing on their turn.

  I would say the game went pretty well. We had 6 players, 3 of whom had never played before and another who hadn't played in so long, it was as if they were brand new to it. A failed investigation at Castle Dracula ended up leading to three Despair cards getting revealed in one turn. We already had one, so just like that Renfield was dead before we could find out what he knew. Things were looking grim as the dread tokens were spreading across the board with no good place to put them.

  We did eventually finish investigating Transylvania so we had the Hidden Crypt narrowed down to two locations, one of which was blocked by two dread tokens. However we had 6 Despair cards come out which moved 6 of the boxes out of the Hidden Crypt. An investigation at the Library, and two Privilege cards that moved boxes managed to clear out the rest, so in the end, we never had to find the Hidden Crypt anyway! That's been a pretty rare occurrence.

  Our Corrupted player folded at the first hint of accusation which helped a bit. The Influenced player was trying to get 5 of the same Dracula card out. That was very much thwarted by the fact that we only played 6 rounds and called the game before Dracula's 6th turn. Plus Privilege cards prevented a Dracula card from being drawn on two of them, meaning there were only three the whole game!

  This led me to rethink the Influenced player a bit. The main purpose of that particular goal was to encourage the Influenced player to drag things out longer. But I see now that in a game with 6 or 7 players, there just aren't going to be that many Dracula cards drawn in the game. Consequently, this goal is going to have to be dependent on the number of players. Also I decided to just require a total number of Dracula cards drawn rather than forcing them to try and make them match. A typical game has been running about 35-40 player turns, so I decided that a "stretch goal" would be closer to 50. But then I was also going to give them credit for two Privilege cards preventing a draw which I think has been roughly average. Consequently a 7 player game will require 5 Dracula cards, a 6 player game will be 6 cards, 5 players need 8 cards, 4 players need 10, and 3 players need 14. And there is no Influenced player in the 2 player version.

  This was also the first game where I had the Influenced player peek at the card on top of the Dracula deck and then put it on the top or bottom. But I didn't really like how that worked. I've been using the Dracula deck as the first player marker, so it gets passed around. But we had to keep handing it back to the Influenced player. So instead I got the idea that the Influenced player, when at a location, could choose to use either the Hero or Minion power. That gives them more flexibility to meet their goal and I think also feels more thematic. The only problem was I had to exclude the Minion power at Renfield as that was too powerful for someone not fully invested in Dracula winning. So we will see how that goes next time.

  Luckily there was a mistake in the art file I sent to the company that is printing the cards for the prototype. That allowed me to sneak these changes in as I sent them the updated file this morning.

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