LogFAQs > #967748090

15. Dracula's Feast

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/159575/draculas-feast

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Hidden roles, social deduction
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 15-30 minutes
First played: 2017
Experience: 30+ plays over 10+ sessions with 4-8 players, incl with extra roles

Dracula's Feast is a hidden roles game, having each player secretly assigned a classic monster - the titular Dracula, Alucard, Van Helsing, the Boogie Monster, a Werewolf, and more. The goal of the game is, on your turn, to make a successful Accusation - by revealing your own role and then attempting to simultaneously guess each other player's role. Until you're ready to make that accusation, you can either Whisper between players - secretly inquiring if a specific player is a specific role - or Dance, a mutual proposition where you and an opponent look at one another's cards.

If you've been following my lists for a while, you might recognize Dracula's Feast as a mainstay - it's been a longtime favorite of mine, and the only game I've ever backed on Kickstarter, because a friend of a friend of a friend designed it.

I love hidden-roles social deduction games - I came up through B8 mafia! - and Dracula's Feast is, in my eyes, one of the absolute best of the genre. The variable player powers are awesome, and I love how the tenor of a game can change so much depending on what roles are in - games with the Boogie Monster or Werewolf should feature much more dancing; games with heavy reliance on roles like the Trickster and Alucard will feature extra "are you Dracula?" queries. It's not a perfect game - I think Dr. Jekyll is a little too fiddly, Beelzebub isn't particularly fun, the Werewolf feels OP, and Van Helsing is too strong in a game with over six players. I actually quite like the extra roles, but they add a fair bit of complexity, and more annoyingly, they require a second reference sheet, which feels like a sin to me.

But the core mechanics of the game are extremely well thought out. With a tight player count, you very often find yourself juuust about ready to make an accusation before someone else has it figured out. Whispering and dancing are both super-fun; people pass cards face-down with sketchily drawn yes and no to represent the whisper, and it's never not fun to say "Would you join me for this dance?" And of course, the table can ooh and ahh depending on whether the invitee rejects the asker. The game moves ultra-fast, with no turn realistically taking longer than thirty seconds. And of course, an accusation process is fantastic - because all of the role cards have additional accusation cards, there's the fantastic satisfaction in dealing those out to players, collecting their answers, and flipping over all yeses (or even more hilariously, all nos).

As I said, if I would change this game, it would be largely in terms of rebalancing roles a little bit. I don't mind a little bit of OP, but I'd like a slightly more ideal scaling. I actually also have the second edition and a Kickstarter-exclusive expansion Cthulu and Friends, but I have yet to get those to the table. I've massively gotten my money's worth out of this game - the Kickstarter was something like $25 for some truly delightful art and an extremely clever mid-player count game - but I'd still love to get more plays on this game. Someday I'll regularly have 5-6 players again. Someday!