Fury of Dracula - Tips & Strategies

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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