Tonight, I had the absolute pleasure of meeting up with a couple of local-ish guys to start a fresh campaign of Dracula's America - a supernatural western skirmish from Osprey, which really deserves the same level of releases and support as Frost/Stargrave, if you ask me!
Premise of the game is that it's 1875, and Count Dracula used the chaos of the American Civil War to assassinate Lincoln and his entire cabinet, ensorcelling Congress into declaring him president for life. Various supernatural evils have crept in in Dracula's wake, and other forces have arisen to combat the powers of darkness. The rules themselves are perfectly servicable for a solid, non-supernatural western game as well.
The table we played on was absolutely lavish - the game technically calls for a 3' x 3', but we played on a 4' x 4', densely packed with the the town of Shady Pines, Nebraska. I brought my posse, a group of Native Americans with a pair of lycanthropes in their midst (one turning into a bear, and the other a wolf), while Chris, my first opponent, had a warband of voodoo zombies. Our mission was to collect as many loot tokens (out of four available) as possible within the 8-turn limit of the game, with an amusingly interlinked pair of side missions - Chris got extra victory points if my posse leader was killed, and I got extra victory points if his posse leader was alive at the end of the game.
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| Elva Growing-Thunder darts across the street, past a drunken mountain man. |
We also had civilians on the board that could get in the way, become human shields, etc. Late in the game, a complication arose - the locals were sick of us shooting it out, and began unloading their own guns at everyone around!
Ultimately, the game concluded in a draw, though my one shapeshifter did manage to grab a loot token, transform into a wolf, and hightail it away from where all the shooting was taking place.
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| loot tokens portrayed by fortune cookie-shaped beads! |
The second game was between myself and Set, who was also the one hosting the game. We rolled up a mission that saw our respective posse bosses squaring off in the center of town with a pair of underlings close by, and the remainder of our warbands deploying in a corner of the table. He was playing the Dark Confederacy, a group of Confederates who had stolen the secrets of reanimating the dead for their own profit.
My boss immediately transformed into a bear, but didn't have the available movement to charge the mint-julep-slurping necromancer standing across the street. The necromancer summoned a minor eldritch entity (portrayed by a Confederate zombie holding a flag) between himself and the bear.
Unimpressed, the bear mauled the unnatural thing and sent it back to whatever hell it had been whistled up from.
Unfortunately, the second game was all downhill from there for me, with the bear being shot down and the rest of my posse being whittled away one after another - though thankfully, most of them bled out the turn after being shot, which denied Set the victory points for either killing them outright or finishing them off. The win went to my opponent, but it was fairly close, with him ending the game with 4 VP to my 3.
With these being campaign games, there's rolls to make after each game to determine who survived, if there are long-term injuries, and how much money your posse collects between games. Chief Kicking Bird, my posse leader, lost an eye to the Dark Confederacy, and unfortunately one of his followers, Charlie Iron-Knife (the blue-shirted figure in the staredown picture above), died of his injuries and a replacement will need to be recruited.
All in all, I had a great time, and I'm really glad I connected with these guys and was able to meet up with them for a few games. I'm looking forward to continuing this campaign!
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