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  The End of Infiltrations

  Jun 2, 2025

  Yesterday I was working on the script for the "how to play" video. As I did so, I tripped up on the word "infiltration". This is a word used to describe a major component of the game, but it doesn't really seem to fit in Victorian London. Indeed, it is one of the last remaining bits from the original iteration of the game.

  You see, it wasn't always a Dracula theme. When the game was first conceived it had a spy theme. The players were agents trying to uncover a conspiracy. In that context, infiltrating locations made sense. And for some reason, I just never changed the word. Until now. I think it makes a lot more sense to refer to it as "investigating" a location.

  Making the changes in the player aid was relatively simply. I think the word appeared 16 times in there. But I also needed to change it on the game board. That required a boost in my Photoshop skills, but after a couple of hours I got there!

  On the one hand, it is a little sad to see the word go. It makes me think back to the start and how far this game has come (I believe we started "infiltrating" back in 2012!) But on the other hand it also makes me excited to think of how far it has come and how close it is now to the end.

  I've also been thinking of another tweak to the Influenced player. Previously I let them draw two Dracula cards when playing Dracula's turn and choose which one to play. But after the last playtest I realized, they might very well only play Dracula once or twice in the game, so that doesn't give them much "influence" on the course of the game to meet their goal. So instead I'm going to have them look at the top card of the Dracula deck every time, and then they can secretly choose to put it on the top or the bottom. There's a possibility that may help the heroes too much, but we will see.

  I also updated the Attack cards from the Dracula deck so that now they call for a specific number of dread tokens if the heroes fail to fend off the attack.

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