Dracula vs VanHelsing Review— Easy peasy, human squeezey

I live for when games put me right in the headspace of a character, with the less I see it coming, the better. It's why I'll still start up a game of Sunless Sea every now and then, ‘cause before I know it, I'm a depressed asshole in a toxic relationship with the world. Imagine my delight and surprise when Dracula vs VanHelsing turned me into a haughty ancient vampire.

The game starts with both players drawing 5 of DvsV's card-tiles in order, which correspond to the map's 5 districts. Starting with Dracula, players take turns drawing and discarding in an attempt to improve how their hand will perform in the end of round clash, with each number having an ability that gets triggered on discard. After 6 turns, a player can call the end of round, giving their opponent one last turn before the clash is resolved (there's also the option to discard an 8, which will immediately end the round, but that doesn't work until turn 7). The clash resolves as you'd expect, with higher numbers winning and ties broken by suit order on the tracking board, with the exception of trumps that'll only lose to higher trumps, duh. When Dracula wins a district, he turns one of the 4 villagers into a vampire, and when VanHelsing wins, he does one of the 12 damage he needs to win the game. Dracula, on the other hand, has two victory conditions: completely turn a district, or just survive 5 rounds to run off to a different city. As you might've guessed, that means Dracula's just straight-up better, since he can pivot based on how the game's going, or use a couple wins in early districts to force VanHelsing to play defense. Not to spoil strategy for y'all, but through my plays I discovered that if Dracula successfully pulls off a couple trump near-sweeps and picks up a third vampire in one or two of the first few districts, it puts VanHelsing in a hole he rarely digs out of. Add in my family's insistence on playing as VanHelsing, and I developed a play pattern that I didn't really stray from with the exception of a handful of games.

So when I showed the game to Mike, I had already been conditioned to think like our favorite bloodsucker, set in my ways and sure I could not lose as Dracula. I had already defeated countless other hunters, and this one wouldn't be any different. Carrying out the almost braindead ritual of my normal strategy in the first game for a win just reinforced my mindset. But in our second game, the impossible happened. My strategy failed to materialize, I had to scramble. Ultimately, Mike got the win. We looked at our hands afterwards, and I would've won had I taken a better line in the last couple turns, but I had gotten so used to winning my way that it didn't occur to me to pivot when it was beneficial. Maybe this is all just some long-winded, pretentious cope from somebody who lost a game they should've won, but I think it's just evidence that this box has something special going on.