7TV Dracula Campaign Playthrough

The campaign consists of 5 two-player games, the Agents of Light and Their Allies vs. the Un-Dead and Their Servants. The first scenario concerns Jonathan Harker’s escape from Dracula’s Castle with the help of some Transylvanian villagers.

This scenario takes place in a quaint eastern European village. Luckily I had some papercraft buildings left over from a 7TV game I did several years ago based on the 60s TV series The Prisoner, so the only new piece I needed for this was a church. All the other buildings are from David Graffam Models, and luckily he had a pretty impressive church model available which I was able to print and assemble without too much work.

The original idea was to use print-and-assemble papercraft buildings so I could just throw them in the recycle when we’re done, but I have to admit that so far I’ve held on to everything. We’ll see how quickly I run out of space…

The Kickstarter for this scenario pack provided most, but not all, of the miniatures needed for the scenarios. 7TV has always been a miniatures-agnostic game, and the assumption is that players will already have basic figures like villagers, priests, and the like. However, the overwhelming majority of my collection consists of science fiction characters, so I had to scramble a bit to make up the difference.

These three fellows came from Reaper Miniatures (we’ll meet the fellow on the right in chapter 2). The Reaper figures are a bit larger and more cartoony, but since the conceit of 7TV is that we’re playing out a made-for-television movie, I reasoned that some of the minor characters might have been cast with American comedians in an effort to boost the movie’s appeal in the lucrative US TV market…

For the Transylvanian villagers I borrowed some generic-looking villagers from the Monolith Conan board game.

The scenario is deceptively simple: Jonathan Harker has to get across the board to the river in order to escape. Along the way he can try to pick up objective tokens that will improve his player’s score but also put a game effect into play. These effects start out helping the Dracula player but eventually start helping Harker’s escape.

One thing that made this scenario tricky for the Dracula player was that the Un-dead (his two most powerful characters) couldn’t come within two inches of the church, which was dead-center on the board. It made maneuvering a little complicated, and as the Dracula player I had a hard time keeping up with Harker since my opponent decided to skip most of the objectives and just race for the finish line.

In spite of the Countess Dolingen von Gratz’s best efforts to blockade the river, the kindly villagers were able to keep her busy long enough for Jonathan Harker to escape across the river, resulting in a win for my opponent and the Agents of Light.

The game uses a deck of cards, the Diurnal Deck, to mark the passage of time through dusk, night, dawn and day (important distinctions for a game about vampires) and add an overarching game effect at the end of each turn. My opponent’s victory means that the Diurnal Deck for the next game will have one fewer night card and one additional day card, which will surely be a disadvantage for the forces of evil…