Fury of Dracula
or, the sloppy masterpiece
When people talk about boardgame design, a lot of emphasis gets rightly placed on the tightness of the gameplay, the flow of turns around the table, the tension bubbling between players. I love a magnificently designed game that feels both effortless and consistently tense, with every choice carrying so much weight. Concordia and Wingspan and Pandemic and Raiders of the North Sea come to mind as modern classics that are easy to learn, delightful to play, and brimming with the fizzy tension that make game nights worth having.
Along with these, I love the big sprawling games that fill up your night. A Feast for Odin or Spirit Island or Terra Mystica or Through the Ages or Mage Knight or Rising Sun or Great Western Trail are games I would happily play every day, but they’re big unwieldy tablefilling nightfillers to bring to the uninitiated. Sit down and let me talk rules at you for twenty to forty minutes before we settle down to spend the next three hours playing a game that you may only incompletely understand the first time we go at it. But once you have that first game under your belt, these are games that you’ll be thinking about long after you’ve gone home.
Then there’s Fury of Dracula, Third Edition.
A wild, brutal, impossibly tense three hours of hide and seek where the hider is able to absolutely decimate the seekers, should they be unfortunate enough to meet Dracula unprepared.
In a dozen ways, Fury of Dracula is an absurd mess. There are two instruction manuals, which isn’t necessarily so uncommon, but the organization of information and how they’re spread across these two booklets seems accidental (maybe this has been resolved in the Fourth Edition?). Rules that seem clear in one case seem contradicted in another place or in the other manual. Some rules are just completely unclear or seem to buckle under the variety of actions a player might dream up in her head while losing her mind in this mad quest for Dracula.
There’s a sloppiness to the presentation of the rules, which is reflected in the sloppiness of the design. In most cases, this makes for a failure of a game. Something both complex and opaque leading to a game that never manages to actually be fun.
But in Fury of Dracula, the sloppiness is part of what makes it a masterpiece.
Before we get there, let’s take a step back.
Overview of play
Fury of Dracula is a Hidden Movement Game, which, as far as I can tell, always falls into the 1-vs-Many style. In many ways, this makes the 1 who stands against the many into the Game Master.
In Fury of Dracula, one player takes the role of Dracula and one to five players take the role of the Hunters: Van Helsing, Mina Harker, Dr John Seward, and Lord Godalming (if you’re playing with 2-4 players, the hunter player(s) control multiple hunters). Each has different nontrivial strengths and weaknesses that impact gameplay. For example, Mina Harker begins the game bitten (a status effect) but also has a psychic connection to Dracula which allows her to locate him more easily.
When you begin the game, Dracula chooses a location on the map as their starting position and collects the cards that go into their hand. They then place that location card facedown on the six-space location track in front of them. Once that’s settled, the Hunter players pick their positions on the map.
You set the game timer to the first day of the first week and then the game begins.
There’s a Day/Night cycle to the game. During the Day phase, Hunters can move to new locations by road, train, or ship, acquire items, train tickets or event cards, or search for Dracula in their current location, or rest. Mina Harker has the additional ability to broadly sweep a section of the map, of which there are seven. She can only do this when she’s on the same space as another Hunter. If any two Hunters are on the same space, they can trade items privately. Van Helsing has the additional ability to exchange event cards with anyone on the map, regardless of location.
During the Night phase, the Hunters cannot move from their current location, leaving them to draw cards, train tickets, trade items, or rest. While you draw cards from the top of the deck during the Day phase, you draw from the bottom of the deck during Night.
This is significant because some of the event cards are for Dracula. When you draw a card, it will tell you whether its effects are immediate or can be played later. Event cards are almost always good for the Hunters.
Unless they belong to Dracula.
Then they are very, very bad.
Because you cannot know what’s on the bottom of the deck, there’s a large risk in drawing cards at Night. While you might get the perfect weapon for defeating Dracula, you may also give him an ability that is going to absolutely wreck your characters and their chances of finding the Count. For example, some of these event cards allow Dracula to have two turns in a row or make it so that there is no Day phase and so on.
After the Hunters complete their Night phase, it’s Dracula’s turn. These are all quite simple. Dracula picks a new location (which must be adjacent and connected to their current location, with various exceptions based on specific cards) and places an encounter card there. Additionally, if Dracula has event cards gained from the Hunters due to drawing them at night, he may play them.
After that, you move to the next day and begin the Day/Night cycle once more.
The encounter cards are where the tension begins. Dracula has a hand of cards, ranging from vampires to roadblocks. Essentially, Dracula moves around the map placing traps for the Hunters. When an encounter card makes it to the end of Dracula’s location track and is subsequently pushed off the edge, it may push Dracula’s influence forward one to four spaces. Once Dracula’s influence reaches 13, the game ends and Dracula reigns supreme over Europe.
The game ends when Dracula reaches an influence of 13 or the Hunters kill him.
It’s that simple.
And so the Hunters need to find Dracula’s trail to keep his influence in check to keep him from running away with the game. When the Hunters go to a space, Dracula has to tell them whether that location is on his six-space location tracker. If yes, the Hunters can search this location.
They’ll either face an encounter card or Dracula himself.
Sometimes the encounter card is a simple trap, waylaying the Hunter, but sometimes it causes the Hunter to fight a vampire or even Dracula himself.
And the combat is delicious.
Each Hunter has a basic hand of fight cards, which are augmented by the item cards they’ve acquired. These cards go head to head with Dracula’s cards in a Rock, Paper, Scissors style combat.
Both players choose a card and place it facedown. Once both are ready, they flip the cards.
So simple.
Then you resolve the cards, with various icons blocking one another, and then you add hit markers to anyone who’s taken damage.
Now, the tension here is that the Hunters have a fraction of the hit points Dracula has. On top of that, Dracula is strong as shit. If you face him when you’re ill-equipped, you’re going to have a bad time and might be sent to the hospital, which increases Dracula’s influence and sidelines your player for an entire Day/Night cycle.
But this is just an explanation of the gameplay. This tells you almost nothing about how this game feels to play.
To sweat for three hours while sitting in place
You’re Dracula, Lord of the Night, and you choose your initial location, opening the board to your friends who begin their hunt.
Conversation and strategizing begins immediately. You watch them already guessing where you might be on the board. They try to arrange themselves in such a way that they can get to the various disparate locations with relative ease, which often means they’re evenly spread out over Europe.
But they’re thinking five turns ahead and one of them points, seemingly at random, to the exact place you put Dracula. You know it’s not a serious guess, but your heartrate spikes. You focus on keeping your expression placid and you definitely don’t say a fucking word.
You thought you were so clever. Thought they’d take at least a handful of turns before they even came close to your trail. But there’s Mina Harker one space away from you. And now they’re talking about using her power to narrow down which of the seven sections of the board you might be on.
They’re going to find your section on turn one.
Goddammit.
You try to show nothing on your face but your hands are already sweating. You feel the heat rising in your neck, in your face.
And, yes, they found your section and they found you. You haven’t even had a turn yet! But they’ll regret finding you so soon. Oh yes, this was a mistake for them because they’re not equipped.
So you ambush them and prepare for the first fight. Your confidence grows because you know there’s little they can do to stop you. But then you draw two escape as mist cards and an escape as bat card, leaving you with only two attack cards. No matter, you’ll make them pay and you go in for a bite.
And they dodge.
You draw another card and prepare for the next round of the fight. You try not to smile and you choose your next card. But instead of walloping them, making them cower in fear, they block your attack and punch you.
They punched Dracula! And you place the damage markers on your card.
The third round, you successfully punish them and knock them to the hospital while you escape, wiping your location track clear. More importantly, you’ve taught them a lesson. Even though they’re not far from the trail, they know to give you some space. And space they give you while they equip yourself.
But they’re always right on your tail, clearing out your encounter cards before they can mature and become real trouble. Every trick you pull, they’re still not far off. They continue talking about where you must be, where you must be heading, how to circle round you, the noose—never far—tightens as the days drip by.
You’ve never stopped sweating. Your heart’s been galloping for over an hour. For nearly two hours. Your influence grows but so do their inventory of weapons.
They find you again and this time, though you’re still much stronger, they have a handful of weapons and crucifixes and strings of garlic. You slash out and rake them bloody, but they’ve splashed you with holy water, eating into your health. Worse, the second and third rounds have you completely nullified and at their mercy. The Hunter is anticipating your every move, correctly countering everything you throw their way, even blocking your escape to fill you with silver bullets.
Emergent Gameplay
This is really the magic of Fury of Dracula. No amount of rules can built this level of tension. The rules are all quite simple and even dry to hear. You sit there while it’s being taught and go, Okay, so we just move, draw cards, and make some educated guesses. And, yeah, that’s exactly what you do as the Hunters.
But as Dracula? Most of the game is you sitting quietly and listening to your friends discuss every permutation of every move you’ve made. I cannot even begin to describe the feeling of hearing someone on turn four suddenly point to the place you chose as your starting location and say, He started here. Then he moved here, then here, and now he’s either at location A or B, and know that they are 100% correct.
They found you, despite your best efforts.
On the Hunter’s side, this is exhilarating. Every clue you get, every space your strike out as a possibility, feels like you’re a detective putting together the events of an unexplained murder in the last five minutes of a hardboiled noir written by Graham Greene.
The story of the game is pretty straightforward. Dracula has returned after the events of the novel and the characters must, once again, stop him. But the real story of the game happens right here, with the Hunters discussing and analyzing their moves, the disposition of the gamemap, and with each silent move Dracula makes across Europe.
At it’s best, Fury of Dracula feels like a vampire movie. It’s full of tension and dread, of surprises and elation. I cannot tell you how amazing it feels to stumble into Dracula on your second turn as a Hunter, or how that wondrous feeling twists into agonizing horror as Dracula unleashes his full power on your poorly equipped ass.
The same is true when Dracula successfully misleads the Hunters. When you cast a red herring out there and watch your friends gobble it up, chase it down, and going in the complete wrong direction.
All of this is really only possible because of the looseness of the design. Fury of Dracula isn’t a tightly coordinated campaign, because it can’t be.
80% of the game happens in the head of the player. While a single move, in theory, should take a Hunter about three seconds, it sometimes takes as long as ten minutes as the Hunters discuss and analyze and coordinate their actions.
And you sit there, silent as death, as Dracula, your heart beating so fast you think you’re having a stroke.
the otherside of slop
The best way to think of the Dracula player is as the Game Master. This player sets the rhythm and tone of the game, for better and worse. And this is something never communicated within the rulebooks.
Boardgames are a social events. You always need to keep this in mind. If you’re sitting at a table with four of your friends and none of them are having fun but you’re having the time of your life, it’s worth asking why. Some games encourage this kind of gameplay.
Personally, I do not like these games. I don’t like playing a game where some people are noticeably frustrated or not having fun. There can be a lot of reasons why this happens, but often this speaks to a flaw in the design. Risk and Monopoly are good examples.
Depending on how the play in those games evolve, some players may lose all agency while others can basically do whatever they want.
Fury of Dracula can risk collapsing into this kind of game if you’re not careful.
It’s the tension that breathes magic into this game. And the Dracula player can have a heavy influence on that tension.
I’ve played games as Dracula where I was hounded the entire game, never getting a breather, but I’ve also played games where I successfully remained hidden the entire game, which takes about three hours.
One of these was incredibly fun for everyone involved and one was only fun for me, because it allowed me to feel exceptionally clever.
But if you’re the Dracula player and the Hunters cannot find you, you are actually playing very poorly.
And this is where Dracula becomes a Game Master more than just another player at the table. If you look around the table at the end of the first or second hour and see that the Hunters feel lost or deflated, it’s time to throw them a bone. Honestly, the best move is probably for you to run directly for the closest Hunter and fight them.
You’ll be surprised how quickly the energy around the table changes. And, you know, you can just keep that quiet. Don’t tell them that you chose to be found. Let them believe in the game.
Because now they’re back in. The fight, like any fight in Fury of Dracula, is full of drama and tension, even when you’re sitting on the sidelines. Even if you kill the Hunter mercilessly without even taking a hit, they’ll still feel back in the game.
They found Dracula.
This isn’t hopeless.
One of the worst strategies has the nickname of Pirate Dracula. It involves Dracula escaping to the sea and spending turn after turn out there. While at sea, Dracula cannot be found.
There are times when Dracula needs to escape to sea. It should only be done out of desperation and you should return to land as quickly as possible. But you can spend an entire week at sea, which leaves the Hunters listless, their actions near meaningless, until you return to land.
There is nothing worse than making perfunctory moves that you know don’t matter. Subjecting your friends to that for three hours just so you can say that you won is tantamount to torture.
Conclusion
Remember the title of the game. This is about Dracula’s Fury, not his cleverness. So while you might feel like the smartest lad in school by evading your friends for three straight hours while they amble uselessly from Sarajevo to Lisbon, you are fundamentally misunderstanding what this game is.
Yes, it’s a Hidden Movement Game, but it’s really a game of chess1. Chess is a lot of fun when the person you’re playing with is similarly skilled, but breathtakingly dull when one of you overpowers the other in overwhelming displays of skill.
This game can be a disastrous slog in the wrong hands. But when it shines, it really is my absolute favorite game.
And if you’re one of those kind souls looking to get into my fiction, here are the novels I’ve released recently:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl. Out now!
Some free books for your trouble:
I don’t play chess much these days, but I like to say that I’m very good for someone who is bad at chess. Like, if you’ve ever even thought about reading a chess book, you’re going to demolish me. But if you used to play a lot casually but haven’t played in ten years, we’ll probably have a fun time.