First Impressions of Fury of Dracula

I got to play Fury of Dracula last week and oh my God was I totally blown away by this! There you go. Job done.

You want more? Well, I could give you a brief overview of the mechanics of this game and what I thought of them but honestly? Since this isn’t a review, I think the best first impression I can give you is just to tell you what happened in our game!

I was Mina Harker, already bitten by Dracula so while I was weakened, I had a psychic connection to Dracula that let me determine if he was in the same region as me, so long as I had a chaperone to keep me safe during my trances. The role of my protector (and maybe more… *flutters eyelashes*) fell to Van Helsing who accompanied me on a delightful tour of Western Europe in the early game checking for Drac, but to no avail…

Time was ticking on when a message arrived from our ally Jonathan Harker! Wait. That makes him my brother… how have I only just realised this!? He’d spotted Dracula in Manchester! The swine had been hiding in Britain, and were it not for Jonathan we’d have been horribly screwed. Now though, Dracula was forced to take to the sea and we rushed to the coast to try and catch him as he made landfall. However, he hit the sand in his wolf form, leaping two cities into Europe and massively increasing the number of places he might be! Dr John Steward, who was rushing across from Eastern Europe decides to slow down, stopping in Berlin to be sure Dracula wasn’t making a dash East when BOOM! There he was!

Suddenly the game changes! Van Helsing rushes from my side to join the battle with a big train ticket that gets him all the way into Berlin, me waving my handkerchief at the train station as he vanished into the morning fog. In Berlin a brutal flurry of cards are played, shots ringing out through the dusk only for Dracula to vanish into the mists, but not before he took massive damage. So close to death, we probably only needed to pin him down one more time, but to do that we’d need to figure out where he’d gone!

So began the most amazing process of deduction I’ve ever had the pleasure of being involved with. Through some manner of card play shenanigans Dracula had managed to wolf move 2 spaces to give himself some breathing room and we steadily eliminated his options when I (with the help of Van Helsing who had rushed back to my waiting arms – wait, nevermind) used my psychic link to discover Dracula had reached France! He had been trying to slip through our net and reach Spain hoping we’d think he’d go East. But by remembering the cities we’d checked and knowing how many cards he’d played we could figure out exactly which French city he was hiding in: Marseilles! This was just the most amazing feeling in the world!

Of course, knowing where he is and catching him are two different things and a tight chase through Northern Italy resulted in a brief skirmish in Munich but to no avail, he escaped East towards the waiting Castle Dracula (Lightening flash! Peel of thunder!)… This is where things started to go wrong for the hunters. Eastern Europe is a big place, and travel is slow. We were terrified of him reaching… Castle Dracula! (Lightening flash! Peel of thunder!)… and being able to heal himself, undoing all our hard work. So we surrounded it, allowing him to escape south and into the Ionian Sea. A disaster!

We raced West towards Italy as he was forced to make landfall (staying at sea wounds him, Dracula suffers from awful seasickness you see). But as Van Helsing and Dr Steward searched the mainland I realised that, with time almost up, Dracula could have landed in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia. Immediately I chartered a boat, with no time to wait for support I landed on Sardinia to find Dracula waiting for me! In the very last turn of the game, we fought, my one shot attack card doing a tremendous 4 damage to him, but with so few cards available to me, I was unable to deal with his repeated healing abilities and I was forced to flee… The battle in Sardinia raised his reputation sufficiently that Dracula had won the game. We had tried, but we had failed.

And like that 3 hours had flown by! The hunters (myself included) were all Fury of Dracula newbies, Dracula had at least played the 2nd Edition, so mistakes were made. And yet! We came so close! My God, tracking him down through western Europe was quite possibly one of the most fantastic experiences I’ve ever had in a board game! And talk about a cinematic ending! As I said at the start, I was blown away by this game, and I can’t wait to play it again.