Fury of Dracula
Summary
Fury of Dracula is a 4 vs. 1 game. Even if only two people are playing, 1-4 people will control the vampire hunters who moves across an undirected graph connecting cities in Europe (shown below) and one player controls Dracula. Dracula moves secretly through the map, laying down traps in the cities he visits or resting (aka draining the blood from local villagers) to regain health. Hunters move through the map and can choose to draw cards that provide them buffs for fighting Dracula in combat or that affect the game in various ways (which usually means that some of Dracula’s recent cities visited are revealed or Dracula’s movement is hindered in some way). Gameplay works with Dracula taking a turn then each of the four hunters.
Fury of Dracula Map
A round of everyone taking a turn means that time passes during the day. When it is night, Dracula gets added powerful attacks to use during combat, which generally mean the Dracula player will be more aggressive when the sun is down and hide when the sun is up. Every full day that passes increases Dracula’s “vampire counter” up one and the hunter’s “resolve” goes up one (which the hunters can spend to do special actions for transportation or Dracula path reveals).
Gameplay is essentially reduced to:
- hunters getting buffs and possibly avoiding Dracula during the night
- Dracula laying traps, some of which can “mature” if they stay on the board long enough and give him additional buffs or increase his Vampire Counter, and avoiding the hunters during the day / trying to obfuscate his path and possibly attacking at night
The last time we played, Dracula (me) matured a particular trap worth 2 Vampires, bit a hunter who already starts off with a bite, given him even more points (2 bites = a ‘dead’ Hunter who has to restart the game basically), and very quickly ran off the clock to get the additional three vampire points to win the game (7 points = a victory).
Why is this game interesting?
Getting buffs – not a big deal. The combat system – pretty basic, though how they abstract from die roll and weapon combinations to actual damage is a bit unique. What makes Dracula interesting is effectively two features:
- the 1 vs. everyone else nature
- the hidden location / path of Dracula and how it can be revealed over time
The first part is not particularly mind blowing – there are multiple games where it is one vs. many or all vs. the game system (e.g. Arkham Horror or BattleStar Galactica). It is still fairly unique in board games to have such a setup.
The second is what I think makes Fury particularly fun. As mentioned in an earlier post, my research in improvisation has led to a growing interest in what I call knowledge disparity games – games where certain players / actors have different kinds of knowledge from others. Fog of War, e.g., is a kind of knowledge disparity. In this case, the location of Dracula and the ability to, at times, uncover parts of the path leads to a fun game of sleuthing on the part of the hunters. Dracula is only ever visible (until you find him) indirectly through the traps you encounter or parts of his trail you uncover through playing cards / using resolve points.
How does this relate to digital games?
Invisibility / knowledge disparity is nothing new for digital games (such as the fog of war example from earlier). However, how knowledge is discovered is typically a direct process. Fog of war –> move and you see more. Invisibility in an FPS, like Halo –> wait and it will run out or observe the invisible character shooting / walking / barely visible / etc. There really isn’t any process of sleuthing in digital games, where you can gain buffs that add evidence to your knowledge base, but nothing definite. There are some simple examples, perhaps, like hearing a sniper rifle go off in an FPS in a general direction but not seeing the sniper yet. However, there is nothing active you can do to increase your knowledge other than try to directly observe / confirm where you think the sniper is. You could potentially add processes to games with knowledge disparity that decrease the knowledge, but not completely (when two entities are somewhat but not totally on the same page, e.g., it is called “partial cognitive consensus”).
So, for invisible characters in games, add a buff to highlight where they were 10 seconds ago or give players a UV ray as a weapon. With fog of war, add sensing that is faster, but less clear (i.e. it doesn’t reveal everything with a single sweep sweep over a terrain). You could even go to the extent of making radars in games that sense opposing forces be more precise / accurate or less, depending on the buffs you get.
This line of thinking simply points to a deeper conceptualization of knowledge disparity in games and how knowledge doesn’t have to be black and white, which I dig.