I've played half a dozen games so far, and Dracula has always won! It only looked like the hunters might have been able to take him out one of those times. Does this game favor Dracula?

I'll take credit for that. I enjoy playing Dracula quite a bit. I have actually never had a chance to play the hunters, but it seems that as long as the Dracula player isn't squeemish about spending his blood to use his specials (the double back and the wolf form ones in particular), it's quite hard to deduce his whereabouts without a helping of luck.

With me it is around 50 % dracula wins. However the strenght of dracula is determind by how good the hunters and dracula players are. Secondly there is also a bit of luck required on both sides to win or lose a game. This because the event card are a big advantange to dracula if he has some. So in general the better and more experienced normally wins, because he knows a lot of nasty tricks and know how to make use of the special abbilties and or use of event (risk) cards.

How do you play the game?

I got the impression that the game favored the hunters...at least from a cursory glance at some of the posts discussing dracula/hunter balance. I personally think it really depends on the group (what the above poster said).

I have played (iirc) 12+ games with 2, 3 and 4 players. We had a run of "Dracula always wins" followed by "Hunters always win"

When we play now, it is usually 3 player, and it seems a good bit more balanced since the players know what they are doing, the details of the cards, etc. I would say 50/50 between knowledgable players. Possibly 55% Hunters, 45% Dracula. Pretty reasonable, I think.

When we first started playing the game Dracula was very successful and I managed to have a 100% success rating as the Dracula player. At that point the group decided that they wanted to try as Dracula and we decided that we'd take it in turns and only change the Dracula player each time Dracula wins. To date we haven't changed the Dracula player as he has a 0% success rate as Dracula. That makes it sound like he's not any good but, other than a few mistakes, he's been pretty sneaky - it's just that the hunters have really developed some good team tactics and we're very good at pulling in the dragnet and squeezing Dracula in to a corner. I think, however, that Dracula is due a victory very soon as the games have gotten very close of late

If the Hunters manage to block the road between Eastern and Western Europe, it becomes much harder for Dracula to win. Still, I've yet to see Dracula beaten in our games.

Blocking East & West is a staple move in our game...but with careful play it is not as bad as it looks for Dracster.

This game is notorious about having zillions of little elements, combinations and interactions which are not obvious at first but those who are more knowledgeable in them will have a distinct advantage. Like combat cards interaction, a.k.a. how to survive a combat unscatched without winning any actual die roll.

Those who are saying that the game is strongly favouring of either side are simply did not find all of those little gems yet. It is maybe a bit in the favour of the hunters but only one wrong move on their side and a good Dracula thrashes them immediately.

Nagypapi said:

Agreed. It really does boil down to a contest of skill more then some blatent advantage mechanicaly for one side or the other. I have found that that dracula however takes considerably more skill to play then the hunters, but this I believe has to do with the fact that as Dracula you play alone (hence in a mental bubble) while the other players can collaborate ideas and tactics giving them a distinct advantage in discovering potential mistakes.

In my experiance thus far however it has been dracula more often then not that is on the run. The difficulty in playing dracula is that every round has the potential risk of someone getting lucky and discovering a key position in your trail that reveals too much. Combine that with the major disadvantage of not being able to use trains and the danger of day time combat and things can very quickly turn on Dracula.