Tips & Strategies (12)

Add your own Tips, Strategies, & House Rules! Vote for tips that you think are useful.

Tips & Strategies (12)

Filter by: Order by:
Gamer Avatar
11
Miniature Painter
Expert Advisor
Inventor
Advanced Reviewer
75 of 78 gamers found this helpful
“Ranking Dracula's Allies”

Deciding which allies to keep or discard can make a difference in your overall results. The following ideas may help you choose.

Quincey P. Morris: He is better than no ally! Unfortunately, his one damage a turn never really adds up to anything significant. Many times it is completely nullified by the appropriate Item cards.

Dracula’s Brides: These ladies can be useful for locating New Vampires or other key encounters. Better than Quincey, trade up if the opportunity occurs.

Immanuel Hildesheim: Generally the best choice. The extra two Event cards that he enables you to hold will provide more flexibility and you won’t waste as many cards to discarding if the Hunters are providing you with more than you are currently using each turn. Choose him over the other two in most cases, the exception being if the Hunters seem to be using an event card denial strategy.

Gamer Avatar
6
Mage Wars fan
Novice Reviewer
I play yellow
34 of 35 gamers found this helpful
“Dracula's Evasion Card options”

If drawn from the Event Deck, this card lets Dracula move to any space on the board and the Hunters lose his trail completely, basically resetting the game for the Hunters.

When introducing Fury of Dracula to new players, I suggest removing the Evasion card from the game since it is extremely frustrating for the Hunters when it is played. Especially if it is drawn late in the game and they almost have Dracula cornered.

Alternatively, you can advise the players of the existence of the card before the game starts and warn them it may not be in their best interests to draw from the Event Deck if they are closing in on Dracula.

Gamer Avatar
5
Z-Man Games fan
I Walk the Talk!
Amateur Advisor
32 of 35 gamers found this helpful
“Tokens for Dracula's map”

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.

Gamer Avatar
3
I Am What I Am
32 of 35 gamers found this helpful
“The Fload”

This has been a topic of discussion in my circle of of gamers and I was just able to show how strong this strategy is for the hunters. I call it the flood, plain and simple is that the hunters draw as many event cards as they can. Yes that can give Dracula card but this is giving the hunters cards as well. The hunters have twelve to thirteen event cards they can stack up and pick thru compared to Dracula’s four. Not to mention once he has his four he has to start to discarding the fifth. you might think well then he just gets to cherry pick the best ones, well what do you think the hunters are doing at the same time and I like the odd of twelve good cards to four good cards any day.

Gamer Avatar
6
Tactician
Professional Advisor
Tinkerer
Senior
24 of 30 gamers found this helpful
“Dracula: Throw Bad Encounters into the Catacombs”

When a card falls off of Dracula’s trail, he has the option to add it to his catacombs. This keeps any encounter on that location in play, so that it can still harm a hunter who blunders into it later.

In my experience, things rarely work out that way. The encounter will often be gone by the time it falls off your track, and even if it isn’t the hunters likely know the card’s location, which means they won’t trip it accidentally–plus, a face-up location card in your catacombs means that the hunters can be sure you haven’t visited that location again. This may discourage you from moving cards into your catacombs.

However, there’s another important reason to use your catacombs, which is that you get to “fortify” the location with an extra encounter when you move it there. Even if the hunters are never going to trip that encounter, this can be used to cycle encounters out of your hand, giving you more chances to draw the ones you want. If you move most of your locations to the catacombs when they fall off your trail, you can draw new encounters at nearly twice the normal rate–and if you don’t want the card there, you can always remove it at the start of your next turn.

Gamer Avatar
6
Tactician
Professional Advisor
Tinkerer
Senior
25 of 32 gamers found this helpful
“Dracula: Avoid Combat”

It can be very tempting as Dracula to attack the hunters at night, especially when a single bite can take down Mina and earn you 2 victory points. However, no matter how great your tactic cards may be, you are still dependent on winning a die roll to gain any benefit, and if the hunters have the right items (which they usually will), it only takes a few unlucky rolls to lose the entire game, even at night.

Prioritize your own safety! Attacking the hunters can pay off, but it’s a gamble. If you can stay safe without fighting, just run down the clock and make the hunters do the work.

Gamer Avatar
6
Tactician
Professional Advisor
Tinkerer
Senior
24 of 31 gamers found this helpful
“Unearthly Swift Maturation”

The Unearthly Swiftness event card allows Dracula to move twice in a turn. One obvious use is to flee the hunters, but since it adds 2 cards to your trail, you can also use it to push a New Vampire encounter off your trail and mature it one turn early.

If that turn makes the difference between the hunters killing it or not, you just earned yourself 2 VPs!

Gamer Avatar
6
Tactician
Professional Advisor
Tinkerer
Senior
31 of 41 gamers found this helpful
“Combat Reference Table”

Each combat card in the game tells you what happens if you win, depending on what card your opponent played. However, it doesn’t list what happens when you lose, which makes it easy to overlook some important interactions, such as the fact that Dracula’s Strength power will protect him from a hunter’s Stake even if he loses the roll, or that Holy Water is the only hunter card that even has a chance to stop Dracula’s Escape as Mist.

I printed out two copies of these reference tables showing all the interactions:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/15835/fury-of-dracula-combat-chart-pdf
and it made combat much more interesting.

Gamer Avatar
6
Tactician
Professional Advisor
Tinkerer
Senior
22 of 29 gamers found this helpful
“New Vampires”

Maturing “new vampire” encounters is key to winning as Dracula. If you don’t have any in your hand or on your track, use Dark Call to try to get one as early as practical. Try to use your Hide power to protect new vampires with delaying encounters, such as Bats (blocks a hunter 2 turns) or Fog (blocks all hunters for 1 turn), and use your trips to sea to manipulate the time of day so that if a hunter finds one, it will be at night.

If you have 2 new vampires in hand, though, you shouldn’t necessarily use them both at once; when one matures, it removes everything else currently on your track, so you need to space them out if you want to mature both.

Hunters, try to visit every city on Dracula’s trail, even if you know where he is, so that you can kill new vampires before they mature. Leave extra time, if possible, to deal with defenses. Also, some events can reveal encounters–try to use these to identify locations that are safe to ignore.

Gamer Avatar
6
Tactician
Professional Advisor
Tinkerer
Senior
20 of 27 gamers found this helpful
“Atlantic +1”

The blue card backs reveal when Dracula goes to see–and if the hunters had even the vaguest notion of where you were before that, they probably know which sea you’re in (or can narrow it down very quickly). And the sea zones are mostly linear, which means in many cases they’ll know where you are every turn you’re at sea.

You can sow a lot more uncertainty if you visit the Atlantic Ocean, and then go exactly one more sea move before landfall. The Atlantic is connected to four different ocean spaces, so even if they know where you came from, that still leaves three sea zones you could be in–a much larger area to search to pick up your trail (and inconveniently spread-out). You need to land immediately after that, though, or you eliminate a lot of options again.

Gamer Avatar
5
Z-Man Games fan
I Walk the Talk!
Amateur Advisor
31 of 50 gamers found this helpful
“Dracula's Screen”

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

Gamer Avatar
2
I'm a Real Person
“Pirate Dracula”

Don’t be affraid of going to the sea. It’s the best way of escaping when you are cornered. Then you can feed to recover damage, no big deal.

Add your own Tip, Strategy, or House Rule

You must be to add a comment.

× Visit Your Profile