Fangs vs wooden stakes
There were 2 new releases at Spiel'23 from Mandoo Games that we found really attractive. One of them is Jekyll & Hyde vs Scotland Yard, which we have already covered, the second is 🩸Dracula vs Van Helsing. It is another small box duel game, with a very interesting twist on the trick-taking mechanism. 🤩
The little game board shows a town with 5 districts. Each district has 4 villagers in it.
One of the players will be Dracula - their job is to either turn all 4 villagers of any one district into vampires, or to survive the 5th round of the game.
The other play is Van Helsing - they have to reduce Dracula’s life from 12 to 0 before the 5th round is over.
The game uses a deck of cards with cards in 4 colors going from 1 to 8. Each round you will both draw 5 cards and put them into your card holders. These cards are actually allocated to the district they are in line with. You will play turns until either the deck runs out, or someone skips their turn to announce the end of the round. Turns simply consist of drawing a card, and deciding to either discard it for its ability, or swap with a card in the holder and discarding that one for its ability.
When the round is over, you will compare your cards for each of the 5 districts, and see who wins in a kind of a trick-taking fashion. There is a trump color that always wins (this will change throughout the game). Otherwise the bigger value card wins, ties are broken according to the strength of the colors (which will also change). If Dracula wins, they turn a villager in that district, if Van Helsing wins, they take 1 life token from Dracula.
The 8 different card values all have effects that trigger if they are discarded. For example discarding a 1 is useful because it's a weak number, but you have to uncover one of your five cards in exchange. Getting rid of an 8 is not good for you, but it instantly ends the round. Abilities are all fun, though the best is probably the 7, which changes the trump color.
I enjoy this game a lot, and I love this new combination of hand management, mind games and trick-taking. It’s really clever!
