Dracula vs Van Helsing Review

boardgamequest.com:

Almost everyone loves a story of nemeses battling for superiority: Batman vs The Joker, Holmes vs Moriarty, Bond vs Blofeld. One of the oldest in modern literature is certainly the uber-vampire Dracula vs the grizzled vampire hunter Van Helsing. Interestingly, in the original Dracula novel, Van Helsing is only described as a professor of rare diseases. Time and various elaborations in modern media have curated an image of the good doctor as eccentric and fanatical.

This evolution works well and provides a wonderful theme for a game about Dracula trying to change the citizens of Whitby, England (he loves northern British blood you see) into vampires. Dracula vs Van Helsing is a small box asymmetric lane battling slash area control slash trick-taking style game for two players. A full game takes 30 minutes. You can easily finish multiple games while you’re waiting for a blood transfusion.

The main concept is that the board represents the town of Whitby with five different districts. In each district sit citizen tokens who are all human at the beginning of the game. Dracula’s objective is to convert four (of four) humans in a single district into vampires or merely survive Van Helsing’s assaults by the end of the game. Van Helsing’s goal is to reduce Dracula’s health points (HP) down to 0 (fully staked) before the five rounds are over.

To accomplish the above, the players will play (up to) five game rounds. Each round, players will be given a set of five cards (they feel more like thin cardboard tokens) with each card having one of four suits and a numeric value. There are also tracking tokens to allow players to see which card suits are more valuable than the others and also which suit is the trump suit for the round.

To begin, players sit opposite each other, cards are dealt with their faces visible to the owning player on a small rack aligned with the board. The board sits in between the players populated with all tokens on their human side. Play alternates with