Players: 2-5 (but ideally 5)
Playing Time: 1 hour

Summary of the Components

Van Helsing is a boxed game including: a 3-panel board; individual player boards; plastic figures; and cardboard tiles.

Quality: All of the bits are top-rate. The board and cardboard bits are all sturdy and linen textured. The well-sculpted plastic figures really highlight the quality of the game. 5 out of 5.

Beauty: There's attractive artwork throughout the game, which shows up on the board, the player boards, and the tiles. The plastic figures also add to the beauty of the game. 5 out of 5.

Usability: Unfortunately, the game falls down when we look at how easy it is to use all of those attractive and well-produced bits. This begins in the rule book, which is poorly written. Not only is the English bad, but it's also neglects to discuss lots of subtle details.

The next problems appear in the tiles and the board: either the board is much too small or the tiles are much too big, with the result being that it's hard to make out doors and room numbers because the tiles are in the way (especially the "locked" tiles, which there aren't any spaces for). The general darkness of the board probably also contributes a difficulty in reading it.

Beyond that, Van Helsing does very little to make the game easier to play through its components. The object tokens contain almost no information about what those objects do. You instead have to look them up. There are similarly no quick reference sheets to remind players of the different actions that hunters or vampires can take.

In the end, Van Helsing remains mostly playable, but the various usability issues all detract from the game. 2 out of 5.

Theming: In the broadest summary, Van Helsing is true to theme: hunters hunt a vampire. However, beyond that the theme isn't very tight. For example, Dracula's castle is largely full of objects that the hunters need to kill their host, Dracula. You'd think he'd get rid of them. Fortunately, Dracula can't mess with the would-be hunter objects, nor can the hunters even dump out the goblets of blood that Drac has hanging around. The details end up straining credulity in many places. Still, the big-picture theming is nice. 3 out of 5.

Overall the Van Helsing components look and feel great, but in actual use they fall down. I've averaged that all out to a "3" out of "5" for Style.

Summary of the Gameplay

In Van Helsing, 1-4 players will take on the role of hunters, while a 5th player will play Dracula. Drac is trying to turn all the hunters into vampires or else get 4 of his brides to his crypt, while the hunters are trying to kill Dracula or at least 5 of his brides.

(In one of several ambiguities in the rules, if Dracula kills all of the hunters, but doesn't transform all of them into vampires, then no winner is defined. I'm not going to dwell on other ambiguities like this that show up in the rules, but I simply wanted to note here the type of thing you'll run into: not show stoppers, but annoyances.)

Setup: The castle--a three-story affair with mazes of rooms inside and spaces outside--is initially filled with face-down item tiles. Most of them are good stuff for the hunters, but those face-down tiles also hide the brides which Dracula is looking for (as well as blood and other useful vampy stuff). The hunters all start just outside the castle with a couple of items while Dracula starts in his crypt.

Order of Play: Play goes around the table with Dracula taking his turn and then each of the players taking a turn. On a turn, a player gets a number of actions equal to his blood points, and these actions can be used to do several different things:

Move. This is a move from a room to an adjacent room. Dracula (and other vampires) get two advantages while moving. They can mist right through locked doors (where hunters need keys) and their movement is sort of hidden. To be specific, vampires only have to show where they start, when they move through the line of sight of a hunter, and when they search. However, the last restriction is a huge one, because vampires mostly need to search, to find their brides and win the game.

Search. The searcher flips up a hidden item and can take it if it's of the appropriate type (all items can only be used by hunters or vampires).

Take an Item. Sometimes items are left around. In this case a player can take one as an action.

Use an Item. Some items such as keys, first aid kits, and blood transfusion kits, take an action to use. (Many of them also require a roll, with the chances for success varying.)

Attack. Hunters with weapons can attack. They have between a 17% and an 83% chance of success (1-in-6 to 5-in-6 on a d6). If they succeed, they do a point of damage to the vampire being attacked.

Vampires can claw to do 1 point of damage or (with lesser chances of success) bite for 2 points of damage.

Characters reduced to 0 blood points are out of the game--unless the killing blow was a vampiric bite, in which case the bitten becomes a vampire!

Other Vampires: That's the first way other vampires can appear: hunters can become vampires over the course of the game. Brides of Dracula can also move about on their own once discovered (but they're slow and fragile, with just one blood point, so it's better for Dracula or hunter-vampires to carry them as "items").

Ending the Game: The game ends when one of the aforementioned victory conditions is met.

The Flow of the Game: The hunters will rush into the Castle and start flipping up items, hoping to get weapons to make it easier to hurt Dracula or else Brides that they can kill. Dracula meanwhile either starts flipping items on his own, trying to get his brides to safety, or else starts ghosting around the castle hoping to pick off hunters that are just a little too far from their fellows. Much of the game rests on which items end up where, as that'll probably push the game toward bride-slay/bride-save victory conditions or else hunters-turn/vampires-slay victory conditions.

Relationships to Other Game

The game was probably heavily influenced by The Fury of Dracula, recently revamped and rereleased by Fantasy Flight Games. That's the quintessential game of Dracula and investigators fighting it out, though it's a considerably longer and somewhat less abstract game.

Van Helsing's author, Frederic Moyersoen, seems to like hidden movement. I've reviewed one other game where he made use of it, Nuns on the Run (though I think that game makes better use of the hidden movement, as this one has some shortcomings, while I'll discuss momentarily.)

The Game Design

To start with, I should say that Van Helsing is a fine game for light play. The actions are pretty easy to figure out, the map largely constrains choices, and the monotonic need to flip tiles and/or attack supports simple decisions. Even with its theming issues, there's still some fun cheesy horror in Van Helsing which would make it a good game for a Halloween party or other "horror" event.

Hand in hand with this lightness is the fact that Van Helsing is very random. The placement of the various tiles (particularly the brides, but also good weapons) is probably more important to how the game plays out than any individual's choices. The random rolls for attacks similarly will skew things quite a bit, as there aren't really enough rolls over the course of the game to average them out. But, none of this is necessarily a complaint, it's just part of what limits the game to mostly light play.

With that said, I think the game does have some design problems too.

Most notably, the hidden movement that should have been at the heart of the game feels largely unsatisfying. This is due to the constant revelation of Dracula's placement (not just at the start of the turn, but also when he searches, which is largely a necessity). The result is not that hidden after all.

The player elimination can also really decrease enjoyment for players. A hunter is eliminated if he's clawed to death rather than being bitten to death. This leaves vampire players with the decision of whether to eliminate someone from the game or not, which might result in them sometimes taking a bad chance at biting just so another player won't be out--and that's not a nice decision to hand to a player. Worse, if a vampire is killed, he's just out of the game period.

I also felt like the game had insufficient development. Some of this might have been due to the awkward rules, but the game seemed full of overly complex rules that could have been polished. It also had potential for abuse: my least favorite problem was that a group of hunters could hand around a single gun if they wanted, each of them taking a couple of shots at Dracula with it, then passing it on.

Overall, I felt like Van Helsing worked if played in a light manner without a lot of concern over strategy or optimum play, but it started to pale if more attention was paid to its intricacies. I've thus given it only a "3" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

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