LogFAQs > #898280597

10. Dracula's Feast
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/159575/draculas-feast

Genre/mechanics: Social deduction, player powers, hidden roles, party game
Rules complexity: 3/10
Game length: 5-15 minutes
Player count: 4-8
Experience: 20+ games with 4-8
First played: 2017

Dracula's Feast is a simple hidden roles game themed around Dracula hosting a mascarade dinner party. Each role is a monster, such as a Werewolf, the wannabe Alucard, Van Helsing, or a Boogie Monster, and each has a special power that's generally used upon revealing your role. The goal of the game is to make a successful Grand Accusation - guessing each player's role.

On your turn, you can either query (ask a yes/no question about someone's role); ask someone to dance (if they agree, you look at one another's roles); or make a grand accusation (reveal your own role and name everyone else's). If you are correct on everyone's role, you win. Each character also has a special power.

Enjoyment - A big reason for my soft spot for Dracula's Feast - it's my only Kickstarter game. Owning it made me special! But also, it's a game that no one ever wants to play just once after learning the rules and the roles. You want to experience being the other roles, you want to take bigger risks after you were just one turn away, you want to just experience it again. It hasn't always brought the house down, but it's always caught people attention and been played more than once.

Design - Dracula's Feast has excellent, simple components. The double-sided player aide explains each role on one side and entirely teaches the rules on the next. The whisper cards have shadowy whispers on the back, and they're differently shaded to distinguish between the two. The role cards are large, and the accusation cards - which are used during accusation and also serve to remind you what roles are in the game - have the same art, but on a smaller card. There aren't a ton of pieces, but DF nails it on all counts.

Oh, and the game itself is really pleasant, too. It's incredibly fast-moving (as long as you can track whose turn it is - the whispers and dances can make that a little confusing!) at one action per turn. Everything is intuitive, and each character has different incentives to ask different people questions. There's just enough deduction, since even when you are not acting, you should be paying attention to who initiates which actions, and what that might mean about their role. Like most great games, you'll generally feel like you wanted just one more turn instead of wishing the game were shorter.

I'm not convinced it's perfectly balanced at all player counts. Van Helsing always has a powerful role, and the Zombie and Werewolf are often favored as well. But it's a light enough game that that shouldn't matter, especially at lower player counts.

Future - With the right groups, I like adding the Advanced Roles. I also have the Cthulu expansion from the Kickstarter that I haven't had need to get to the table (as no single group has played the initial game quite enough yet!)

Bonus question - What game(s) do you take credit for "discovering" in your groups?

Hint for #9 - We're grouping three games together for #9 since they all come from a similar family. #8 reimplements the first of these games in a method that's becoming very trendy.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness