Amani75

Certain Items in the game give you a one time bonus to Palisade or Weapon Level and certain conditions in the game can lower your Palisade and Weapon Level. Since the bonus you gained from the Items are one time only, now you must raise your Palisade or Weapon Level by building other Items, or directly building the Level up again through the expenditure of resources, Pawns, and/or possibly rolling dice. This variant rule would allow you to “repair” the Items you already built but whose bonus was deleted by game effects.

Say you have a Palisade of 3 gained by building up the Palisade Level twice and by Building the Fire Item card (+1 Palisade bonus). Because of a game effect you are forced to roll the Hungry Animals die the result of which causes you to lower your Palisade by 1. According to this variant rule when you lower your Palisade level also tilt the Fire Item card. Now during the next Action Phase you may devote a single Pawn to the tilted Fire Item card rekindling the fire and raising the Palisade by one once more. This has the benefit of only using one Pawn, requiring no roll of dice, and using only the resources required (if any) according to the Item card being repaired.

When I first started to play this game with my son I left out the cards and rules dealing with Envoys and Rumors. This left the game easier to digest for a young mind who simply wanted to play as a ninja infiltrating/attacking a house for loot. At the end of the game we would count our individual treasure tokens to determine the winner. For gold Treasure Tokens we ruled that they simply mimic the highest treasure value in your pile. You always have the option of adding Envoy and Rumor rules later if you want to add more complexity to future games.

For those looking to protect your cards Fantasy Flight’s Mini European Board Game (red labeled) sleeves fit the Initiative and Ability cards while the Standard Card Game (silver labeled) sleeves fit the Search and Encounter cards. You will need 2 silver labeled packs and 1 red.

We use the lid of the game box as Dracula’s screen to keep his area secret.

We use different colored tokens to represent the hunters and Dracula on Dracula’s map so that Dracula can make movement choices without consulting the game board, thus keeping his movements even more secret.

In my previous tips I talked about raising the difficulty of the game when using more mice than what the chapter normally calls for. But, I feel I should also mention that the game can be rather difficult and I have noticed that adding more mice does not necessarily ensure victory. So perhaps if you are just looking to make the game less difficult, perhaps for younger kids or just to increase the fun or get through a particularly troublesome chapter, adding mice without increasing the difficulty can help.

Rather than adding more minions of the same type when playing with extra mice, you could try adding 1 minion of lesser difficulty for each extra mouse player. Example: playing with 6 mice (although the chapter only calls for 4) and the encounter card says to add 3 rat warriors add the rats and 2 roaches (one roach for each extra mouse).

Another option for playing with more than four players on a chapter that only calls for four would be to use the Difficult Encounter cards rather than the normal ones. This comes from the designer himself if I remember right. Of course if the chapter already calls for the Difficult cards then raising the number of minions might be the way to go, as per my previous tip.

For games with more than four players we simply add one minion of the same kind for each additional player above four. So if the encounter card says to add 3 rat warriors and we are playing with six players we add 5 rat warriors instead.