27th October 2020

8BIT MEEPLE GUEST BLOG

Hello hunters!

Matt from 8BitMeeple tells the story of how he discovered, and then rediscovered Fury of Dracula in this guest blog post!

Similar to Bram Stoker’s novel, the story of how I came to love Fury of Dracula is a tale of the naivety of youth facing a beast he is ill equipped to face. However I hope to tell it in less than the 160,000 words Bram Stoker took to tell his version! To fully understand the twists and turns of my time with Fury of Dracula, I have to take you back to the very beginning of this tale.

The year was 1897 in Transylvania… well actually it was 2007 in Sheffield, but that’s not quite as spooky right? I had just been given the Settlers of Catan (yes, it was still called that back then) for my birthday. Until that point I’d only ever played board games like Monopoly, Cluedo or Mousetrap. It didn’t take long before me and my friends were playing Catan weekly, addicted to this new hobby of board gaming. 

After a year or so of playing this one game every week (with the occasional guest appearance from a borrowed copy of Carcassonne) we decided it might be time to venture out and buy a new game together - seeing as we were now such experts at board gaming. With that we hit some online forums and stumbled across a reasonably new reissue of a game that was getting great reviews, Fury of Dracula. The theme was interesting and although we didn’t really know much about the game itself we thought we’d take the leap of faith and sink our teeth into this new board game. 

Sadly, upon buying Fury of Dracula we began to realise we had bitten off far more than we could chew. The game came with multiple rule books, it was partially co-operative but also partially competitive and some players' moves were hidden on the map. Not only that, but there were decks of cards with unique events and triggers that we had to keep track of too. Coming to this game straight from the island of Catan with its 5 resources and small deck of development cards, Fury of Dracula was an overwhelming game that we didn’t have the confidence or competence to play - let alone put 3 to 4 hours into each time. 

Each mechanism was new to us and confusing, requiring us to reference the rules at each turn. We’d never seen hidden movement in a board game before and as such our first few games saw Dracula, or more accurately, didn’t see Dracula, evading detection for so long that by the time we caught up to him it was far too late. Combat was a mess of cards and events that left us sure we were missing something; even the act of co-operation felt unnatural and counterintuitive to us coming from a world of competitive board games. After 5 playthroughs and over 20 hours sunk into Fury of Dracula, we sold our copy and went back to the drawing board to look for a game a bit easier for us to sink our teeth into.

As the next few years went by as my board game group and I expanded our game collection, making sure we took baby steps into the hobby and began honing our skills and increasing our experience with all types of games. Each game we played added to our understanding of board game mechanics and how they worked together; Pandemic and Forbidden Island taught us to work co-operatively, El Grande taught us how to utilise card events to gain victory and Stratego taught us how hidden movement can work in a game. Our knowledge and stamina for board game increased with each passing year, our skills sharpened like a stake, until one final night we sat down to put these skills to the test, to play a 4 against 1 hidden movement game, hunting down a famous blood thirsty killer. You guessed it, we sat down to play Letters from Whitechapel.

For those of you who haven’t played Letters from Whitechapel, it’s a great hidden movement game where you take on the roles of Jack the Ripper and the police attempting to track him down. You rush around the board as either Jack himself, trying to evade capture and make his way from the murder scene to his secret hideout, or the police, attempting to pick up the trail of Jack and close in for an arrest. It’s a lot of fun and something that my group really enjoyed, however after having played it a few times we were struck by how powerless the person playing as Jack the Ripper really was. More often than not he was left cornered on the map with no way to escape and not even the option to put up a fight when he got caught. 

We talked how we often would, about ways to improve the game, ‘they should have given Jack a way to fight when he’s caught’, ‘there needs to be more events that change the game other than the 4 options Jack starts with’, ‘we should be able to see how long ago Jack was in a certain location, it’s more realistic that way’ and so on. It wasn’t long until we realised that actually what we were doing was not improving Letters from Whitechapel, but in fact describing a game we had tried to play around 7 years earlier but didn’t have the experience to really understand.

With our new-found confidence in board games and our expanded library of game mechanics we rebought a newly released edition of Fury of Dracula, determined to see once and for all whether we had been right to jettison this game all those years ago or whether we’d made a mistake. What we found was a game that at first glance seemed complicated but in reality was relatively simple. The hunters and Dracula played differently and had varied objectives however they made both mechanical and thematic sense within the game. Events were not only easy to understand but devilishly fun to play and each encounter with Dracula felt tense and exciting rather than confusing and messy. 

What we discovered was that Fury of Dracula was a game that lent itself to late nights and low lights and rewarded multiple playthroughs as we developed strategies for hunting Dracula and he discovered ways to evade capture. It’s a game we still play to this day and although it doesn’t get to the table as much as it should these days it will always stay in our collection and have the honour of being the first game we bought as a board game group as well as being the first game we rebought. Though we lost the Dracula’s trail for a few years, as with all great monsters, he reared his ugly head years later only to finally be vanquished.

If you want to read more words by 8BitMeeple, you can check out their official website!

Or go follow them on Twitter, where they talk about how wonderful digital board games are, and post pictures of the countryside that make us very jealous!

You can also follow us on social media to keep up to date with the latest news about not only Fury of Dracula, but all our other games! Join us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to hear announcements as they happen. Or if you’d like to join the ranks of hunters on our Discord, you can join it here - you can even chat directly with the dev team there!