1st Play Through of Fury of Dracula

A few month ago I posted a list of games I wanted to get next.  On that I said that one I was really looking forward to was Fury of Dracula 3rd Edition.  I haven't bought it, but a friend of mine did and we tried it for the first time Saturday Night.  I'm not going to do a review, I know we made a few mistakes and we didn't use all the advanced rules, I'd rather wait for play a few more games before writing a proper review.  Instead I'm going to write up our first play.

The BBG play record is here.  It does contain spoilers for this write up about where Dracula started.
So we set the game up and started with the Hunters in the recommended starting spots on the board.  We had decided not to use the advanced rules but we were using the Rumours.  I was playing two of the Hunters, Dr. John Seward & Mina Hawker, Martin was the other Hunters and Chris took the role of Dracula.

Since we used the basic set up we decided to keep Van Helsing with Mina so she could use her special ability to force Dracula to tell us which region he was in while Lord Godalming and Dr. Seward moved around the board trying to pick up Dracula's trail.  We thought that this would be best for covering as much ground as possible until we had some idea where Dracula was.

Early on we were moving Hunters around the East and Italy while Mina and Van Helsing had checked Germany and France.  We had excluded some areas, we knew he wasn't in Italy because we had checked enough that we would of picked up his trail if he had been, We had checked France with Mina, then moved to Germany and back to France in case Dracula had moved back in there.  This left the UK, Spain or parts of the East left.

Mina and Van Helsing were close to the UK so we decided to move them there to exclude that before moving Mina down to Spain.  Lord Godalming was moving up towards Germany covering as much area as he could to try and find any part of the trail around there.  Dr. Seward was heading back out of Italy and planning to go around Germany to pick up the trail.  Dracula had a Rumour that was close to maturing so we were worried about that sliding off the trail before we could find it, We had revealed the Encounter card on it using an Event so knew Dracula would gain 7 of the 13 influence he needed to win the game just by getting that to maturity.

After finding out Dracula wasn't in the UK Dracula played an Event that caused storms in the sea which he used to block them in the UK for a few turns because they had to leave via a different sea route.  We tried to leave via the Irish Sea instead of the North Sea or English Channel which were the easiest for us to reach but blocked.  An Event card drawn by the Hunters at night allowed Dracula to view all the cards of a weakened hunter and discard one before moving them back to an adjacent city.  Mina was the only weakened hunter so she was moved back into the UK, this added to the delay getting her back to mainland Europe.

Dracula's Rumour matured and this gave us our first break in finding him.  When the card was slid off the trail Dracula had to reveal the location of the Vampire that had matured.  This was revealed to be in the South of Spain.  Dr. Seward and Godalming were able to get to the south of France fast and there were only three cities Dracula could have gone through if he wanted to get out of Spain.  The Event card that pushed Mina back into the UK had come up two more times (once drawn again and then another card had the discarded Dracula Events shuffed back into the deck and it was drawn again).  Her delay meant Van Helsing had abandoned her and he headed to the West coast of France.  Him, Seward and Godalming covered the possible exits from Spain and picked up the next part of Dracula's trail.

The game finally turned to the Hunters favour, we were still a few steps behind Dracula but with three hunters were were able narrow down where he could have gone from each location we found and move forward catching up with him bit by bit covering all possible locations he could have moved to.  Dracula was running East through Munich and Austria towards Eastern Europe.

We finally had him nailed in the East.  He could only be in a few locations and we could catch up with him in our next few turns.  Mina had taken to the sea in Marseilles and was moving through the Jonian Sea to catch up and cover one of the possible ports in Greece that he could be in.

Dracula had stayed hidden long enough that it was late in the game and Rumours were close to sliding of the end of the track that would win him the game.  We got him blocked in by the Black sea we had a Hunter in Budacreast and Sofia and we knew he had headed that way.  Mina was the first to bump into him.  They fought and she ended up getting defeated, and moved to a hospital.  With all his routes back in land blocked Dracula moved into the Black Sea and round.  Mina, Seward and Godalming moved back to try and cover where he might go back to land, Van Helsing started to investigate the rumours that Dracula had left in Eastern Europe to stop them Maturing and losing us the game.

We had only two or three turns before we would lose.  After a few turns Dracula came back to land.  We assumed it was Venice or Genoa because of where we had Hunters.  We rushed Hunters to the spots and nothing.  Dracula's next turn he was suddenly back in the sea and we realised he had tricked us.  He had docked up in Cagliari and re-entered the Mediterranean from there.  We had only two turns to catch him and could not reach all his possible landing points in the Mediterranean let alone cover them to force him into combat.

Turns out that didn't matter anyway as Van Helsing failed to deal with a Rumour that slide off the end of the track and the Influence track reached 13.  Dracula won and escaped somewhere in Spain or the South of France.

It was a great game and really close at one point.  We know we made some mistakes as Hunters letting Dracula slip past us at the Black Sea was one and not cornering him and attacking together was another.  Dracula played it well holding Mina up and avoiding detection for a long time running down the clock early on.

I really enjoyed the game and I'm glad I got to play it.  I loved the hidden movement and it was fun watching Dracula get nervous as we were pointing out the two or three places he could be once we found his trail.  The game was long, almost 4 hours (but we were trying to learn at the same time I'm sure that will be cut down with experience).  Hidden Movement is definitely a mechanic I like and might look at getting some lighter games with that mechanic, like Letters From Whitechapel that we can play when we don't have such a long time to play one game.

I'm sure a full review will be coming after we play through a few more games.