I was approached by the game creators to playtest an upcoming board game, "Transylvania: Curses & Traitors" at the Gatekeeper earlier this month. The co-creator drove up from Kansas City to show some of our local guys the game and get some feedback and I have to say, I was pretty impressed.
It's a steampunk horror game where players try to solve the curse of Transylvania or be turned into a monster (at which point you try to eat the other players.) The game is in late stage development and finished artwork and game pieces are being added to the game at a regular pace. I'm not sure they really needed any of our suggestions for game play, but I think Brandon and I tagged teamed on a suggestion for a re-roll rule that they liked and Scott managed to find a loophole in discarding objects. However, we broke the curve on play time by clocking in at 120+ minutes when most games last less than an hour!Game play is solid. It's a tile building/exploring map game with some cool atmospheric mechanics like secret passages, clock towers, laboratories and haunted cemeteries. Players pick or randomly select character archetypes of various skill levels and travel around the board looking for clues to stop the curse of Transylvania. Of course, if you're bitten by a vampire or werewolf, or are exposed to a contagion and become a zombie, your goals change and you then start hunting the other players! I would only make one suggestion on how the player gets to allocate movement points and then completing multiple objectives but at this point, there aren't many tweaks left to be made and everything looks really good. The artwork is outstanding and the game moves pretty quickly.
The game developers hope to go to Kickstarter this spring and get funding and go into production. You can check them out at: WIBAI Games - Transylvania: Curses and Traitors
Another bonus of the playtest night; I got to hang out with my old buddy, Scott. It was like 1997 all over again!
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