A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to playtest a new game by WIBAI Games (Wouldn't It Be Awesome If) named Transylvania: Curses and Traitors. They're from Kansas, like myself, and I had an absolute blast playing their game. You and your friends take on the role of adventurers traveling to Transylvania to solve the curse of three great monsters: The Vampire, The Zombie, and The Werewolf. As the game progresses (on modular tiles that ensure the gameboard changes each game) you gather powerful weapons and ancient knowledge to help you solve the curse. But there is also danger of turning into the monsters yourself. The game has three ways of winning: Either a player solves the curse first, a player kills a monster (one of the other players after they have transformed), or should you become a monster you must kill half of the other players on the board. It allows the game to be very diverse with a lot of options for travel, victory, and gameplay.
For a horror game, this games mechanics are very forgiving to players. It can occasionally seem to act against theme, but I honestly really appreciate the fact that it does its best to keep players in the game and not have them fall behind too harshly. The monsters are epic and provide powerful new mechanics, but they're still beatable. The game has a lot of layers as far as player interaction. At the start you are all working toward a similar goal without necessarily attempting to undermine one another. If one of the players becomes a monster then you must either work together with the rest of the group to kill the monster, boost yourself up and make the other players more appealing targets, or delve into dark powers and become a monster yourself! As a monster, your power level dramatically increases, but other players are actively trying to harm you, so you no longer have the quiet truce the players share when they're trying to solve the curse.
The creators are nice folks who were great recipients of my and my playtesting groups criticisms, and I'm excited to see how it has changed since I had a chance to play it. Also, the video in which they address the funders in front of a bunch of shelves covered in games is at the hobby store I work at, Gatekeeper Hobbies!
I just skimmed through the rules and am confused about Trait Rolls. The numbers on the character panels is the number of dice you roll for each trait, yes? It looks like the average number of dice for each trait is around 4. But when I look on the Event cards, it looks like you will typically get a positive outcome for the Event if you roll a four or higher, depending on the card, which doesn't seem at all hard to do given that you'd typically get to roll four dice.
Same with the Quest tokens. They have 3s, 4s, and 5s on them, and you need to roll that or higher to be successful, but I don't see how that will be at all challenging given the number of dice I'd get to roll.
The dice are d6s composed of 1, 2, 3, and three sides of a wolf howling at a full moon. Those sides are zeroes for every character but The Werewolf. It makes the challenges considerably more difficult when you have a 50% chance of any die rolling a zero.
We played a game of this tonight using the print-and-play files they provide. Was pretty fun. We ended up with all three monsters chasing after a lone Witch Hunter who managed to pull out an unlikely win when he unexpectedly killed off the werewolf who'd attacked him. Good times. I'll back this. Might even need to make some custom accessories for it...
Awesome! I'm glad you liked it! I had a lot of boosts without actually turning into a monster in the game I played. I think we had a Vampire and a Zombie in our game and still managed to barely pull a win. I didn't deliver the killing blow, but I'd like to think that I was on the winning side!
The rules seemed to indicate that some actions were limited to one/turn (activating a card for example), but didn't say that rolling against quest spaces to get quest cards was, so we played where you could move, try to get a card, move more, try to get another one, etc. until you ran out of movement. Kosher?
I know that if you have the Skeleton Key you can breeze through locks, but that doesn't unlock the lock for anyone else (right?). There doesn't seem to be any way to unlock locks permanently except for a monster smashing them open. Is that true?
Lastly, I didn't see anything putting a limit on how many times you could attempt the same quest spot, but I assume you can't just stay in one spot trying infinity times until you make it, so we said you could only try each spot once per turn. We thought it was also maybe possible that you had to move at least one space before moving back onto a quest spot to try again, since that would naturally limit your attempts by your movement value. Any thoughts as to what's the actual way to play that?
Feels weird discussing another game on these forums, but I didn't see that that other game company had a forum I could use. Sorry to all the SotM forum goers who are having to put up with this conversation.
When I playtested I think we played it that way. I can't really remember because the playtest group was rolling extremely below average. I didn't get much in the way of quest cards. We played only one game over the course of a few hours!
Fun fact: The "Determination roll" used to be a "Failure roll". I mentioned that the name seemed a bit of a downer. It seems they changed the title! I don't know that I was directly responsible, but I'd like to think I contributed a bit!
I can't remember, but I feel like we played it to where when a lock was unlocked it was unlocked for good. The game has changed some since I played it, and I don't recall the specific wording of the card. I wouldn't be surprised if you were playing it right.
I think that's how we played it. You get one chance on each space and I think you can "retry" a space if you move off of it and move back on, but I'm not 100% on that.
That's what's great about the Off Topic forum! As long as we don't start rambling about T:C&T on other topics we're good!
Any other games blowing your mind right now? I'm really loving Hanabi, Love Letter, and Takenoko at the moment!
I had someone suggest to me that Hanabi should have a traitor mechanic. I could maybe see that working. Certainly sometimes I wonder what someone else was thinking.
I love Hanabi, but I'm terrible at it. Seriously, my brain just can't remember things like that easily (fibromyalgia has killed my memory, I have to look at my hand in SotM again and again while waiting for my turn or I forget what my plan was) and I'm reluctant to write things down. But I like the game anyway.
I arrange my hand so the cards I want to play are in order at the front, so even if I forget I can see this is the card I want to play this turn, and the one behind that is the one I will be playing next turn etc etc.
I usually have to reassess anyway by the time it gets to me again, especially if TLT's around.But yeah, I do often arrange appropriately because that helps.
