Dracula’s Feast: A monstrous game of secrets and deduction
Created by Blue Beard Entertainment
A 10-minute social deduction game for 4-8 monsters. Featuring gorgeous, thematic art, no lying, and no player elimination!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
An updated timeline, and a small rant!
almost 7 years ago
– Wed, Jul 05, 2017 at 12:08:42 AM
Hey!
First of all, I’m sorry about the late update; it's been a ridiculously busy couple of weeks.
After Origins, my business partner Nicole came to Toronto and we had many meetings with many people. They were, I hate to inform you, many boring. It turns out running a business is not all fun and games*.
*Well, there’s lots of games...but also many very boring meetings.
She has her back to the camera, but here's a picture of her first ever game of Dracula's Feast!
After that, I went to Florida for a week (for more even more boring meetings) and was home for less than 48 hours before flying out to a wedding. (You’ll be happy to know the wedding was very lovely, and only a little bit boring.)
TIMELINE
So while I was traversing countries, having meetings, and watching friends get married, I got some bad news. Upon contacting the printer to find out if everything had finished, I was informed that they hadn’t started yet.
Well...they’d started, but only a few days before they were meant to have finished.
Needless to say, I am extremely frustrated by this turn of events. At this point, I could quite easily write a several-thousand-word rant.
This rant would probably be very cathartic, it might even be fun to read, but it ultimately wouldn’t be a great use of anyone's time, and so I’m going to skip the bulk of it and summarize:
Tania finished the last piece of art for the game at the start of January. Tom and I finalized the rules in February. The printing was supposed to start, already later than we expected, in MARCH.
It is now July, and the printing is supposed to be done. Long done! I signed off on the final final final proofs in MAY, after going back and forth several times to make sure everything was perfect.
So why didn’t they start printing?
If you are a backer on our first campaign, Scuttle!, you’d have seen me mention that we just did a reprint. (This is a big deal! Only a small percentage of games get a second print.)
The reprint had some minor tweaks - two cards got errata’d, and we added symbols to all the expansion cards for ease of sorting. Well, for reasons that genuinely escape me, the printer decided not to start printing Dracula’s Feast until we’d signed off on the Scuttle! reprint as well.
I had absolutely no idea this was going to hold things up, and so it wasn’t until mid-June that I finally got a chance to triple-check everything and sign off on it.
As you can perhaps tell, I’m pretty upset by all this. At this point, all I can do is tuck it away in the “lessons learned” basket; when you’re printing multiple projects at once, be very very clear about what’s getting printed when.
Well, the other thing I can do is apologize - I’m really sorry about this delay. I promise you, you’ll get your game, and it’ll be great. At this stage, I do not believe that anyone is more annoyed by these delays than me. (Except maybe Tania. She finished the art on this game over 6 months ago.)
We just really want to get the game into your hands! Believe me when I say that if there were anything we could do to speed up the process, we’d be doing it.
Here’s the updated timeline:
You’ll notice that I’ve moved “lock down addresses” to the same date as the game is due to finish printing. That’s because I do not want ANY delays between “the game finishes printing” and “we start shipping to backers”.
If you’re not sure where your mailing address is going to be in the month of August, send us a message (through the Kickstarter system, or directly to [email protected]) and we’ll delay the shipping of your game until you know exactly where you want it sent.
I’m going to say it one last time - I really am sorry about this! The delays on this are getting truly ridiculous, and no one is more aware of that than we are. All I can do is hope that the free notebook I mentioned in the last update will help make it up to you.
If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments or send us a message.
Thank you so much for your patience, -Peter C. Hayward
Delays!
almost 7 years ago
– Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 01:19:51 AM
Hey!
Firstly, and most importantly: we are locking down addresses at the end of this month.
To update your address, just login at draculas-feast.backerkit.com - if you have any questions, contact the BackerKit team and they’ll be more than happy to help you!
Estimated delivery date is mid-to-late July, but it could be as late as September. Please make sure to update your address to where you’ll be July/September; if you want us to hold your order until a certain date (say, if you’re moving at the end of July) then email [email protected] and let us know!
Secondly: it’s June!
This was the month that we were hoping to deliver Dracula’s Feast. As you can see, it looks like we’re not going to be fulfilling until July at the earliest. The printing is well underway, but by the time we start actually mailing packages out (we’re sending everything directly from China) June will be over, and we are officially going to be delivering late. :(
I’ve talked about the reasons for this before, but the main culprit was simply that we came up with a way to make Dracula's Feast better. Tom and I put a few solid months into development and playtesting, to make sure that everything was as strong as we could make it, and we’re so happy with the changes.
The end result is going to be a way, way better game (literally everyone who’s played the new version has preferred it) but, to my great regret, a delayed delivery.
I promise you, no one is as frustrated about this as we are! We made a commitment to four thousand of you, and breaking that commitment feels terrible. The team put our jellybean heads together, and came up with a small way to try to make it up to you:
This is a mockup of a spiral-ring notebook with some of Tania’s gorgeous Cthulhu and Friends art on the cover. Ever wanted your own Necronomicon?
Every copy of Dracula’s Feast we send out through the Kickstarter is going to contain one of these.
Surprise!
We’ve made sure that printing these won’t slow down production at all. These notebooks are our way of apologizing for the delay.
(If you’d like additional copies of the notebook, just send us a message. We’re printing extras, which will be available for $4 each.)
They're going to be coming inside the box, which means if you ordered 3 copies of Dracula's Feast, you'll be getting 3 copies of the notebook.
As you’ll know from previous updates, this whole process has been a helluva learning experience, and we’re going to apply the lessons we’ve learned here to all Kickstarter campaigns we run going forward. No one likes estimated delivery dates that are too far in the future, but I’d rather err on the side of caution than deliver late! Henceforth we're going to add 2-3 months to our guesses, just to ensure we never deliver late again.
Thank you so much for sticking with us through this whole process. The games might be late, but they’re also going to be:
gorgeous,
unique,
as polished as we could make them, and (most importantly)
super super fun.
As I said at the top of this post, we’re going to lock off addresses at the end of this month (I’ll post another reminder before we do!) Please make sure that your address matches where you’ll be living in July-September.
Again, email or comment if you have any questions!
Now that we know when everything is happening, I’ve updated the timeline:
If anything changes, I'll let you know straight away.
Thanks so much for your support, -Peter C. Hayward So excited to get this game to you. You have no idea.
P.S. In each of these updates, I like to highlight a currently-running Kickstarter that I think you might enjoy. This week, it’s an enormous aluminum twenty-sided die called The Tablebreaker:
It's sort of beautifully ridiculous, in the way that all the best Kickstarters are. Check it out!
Updated print-and-play, a video, and Jellybean Shirts!
almost 7 years ago
– Sun, May 21, 2017 at 01:17:21 AM
Hey!
Firstly, the printing news: No new printing news! That’s a good thing though; it means everything in China is chugging along exactly as it should. If anything changes on that front, I’ll let you know immediately!
Secondly, actual news!
ALUCARD-Level Video
During the campaign, anyone who backed at the $1 reward level (or added a dollar to their pledge) got to be personally thanked by me in a video. Backers of my previous project, Scuttle!, will recall that I read names in that video while juggling - poorly.
This time, I took the suggestion of one of the commenters and read out the names while sticking Jellybeans in my beard. Except instead of Jellybeans, I used “Weird Beards” candy, and instead of sticking them in my beard (it’s neither long nor bushy enough, alas) I stuck them all over my face.
Now that all the card text is 100% locked down, I went through and updated the print-and-play! If you’re champing at the bit to play the game, you can now head to jellybean-games.com/printandplay and download the text-final version of Dracula’s Feast for your viewing (and playing) pleasure!
There are visually a number of key differences between the print-and-play and the final game. I didn't want to waste your ink unnecessarily, and I had to resize everything to fit into standard, poker-sized sleeves. The final game, believe me, is going to be considerably more gorgeous!
BUT this is mechanically identical to the core Dracula’s Feast experience, exactly as it’ll be arriving at your doorstep!
The rules are available as a google doc, and the cards come in three files: the card fronts, the reference cards, and the card backs. If you’re using sleeves with opaque backs, the final file is an optional print; just make sure you use different colors for the Guest cards, the Accusation cards, and the Whisper cards!
The print-and-play file is currently English-only, BUT we have had some people volunteer to translate the files into other languages! As soon as those are up, I’ll let you know.
(If you are one of those people, and you’ve not yet heard from me - through the Jellybean Playtester Facebook Group or otherwise - then please, get in contact! You can reach me on [email protected] or by direct message.)
If anyone runs into any issues with the print-and-play (or the thank you video), let me know in the comments.
That’s all for this week! I hope you enjoy watching me stick candy to my face, and that you get a chance to try out the print-and-play.
Thanks so much for your support, -Peter C. Hayward Still more than a little sticky
P.S. In each of these updates, I like to link to a currently-running Kickstarter I think you might be interested in. This week, it’s one of mine: Jellybean Shirts, three T-shirts for gamers:
The shirts are illustrated by Tania Walker (the artist behind Dracula’s Feast) and were designed by Tom Lang (the DF developer) - there’s only two weeks to go on the campaign, so get in fast!
Jellybean Shirts and details on the printing process!
almost 7 years ago
– Tue, May 09, 2017 at 11:52:23 PM
Hey!
Before I start, I have an exciting announcement - we just launched a new Kickstarter campaign! Tom Lang (the Dracula’s Feast developer) came up with some cool T-shirt designs. Tania (the Dracula’s Feast artist) fell in love with the ideas, and so we decided to make them!
Today’s update is going to be largely about the printing side of things. If you’re interested in that sort of technical minutiae, read on!
Dracula's Feast is printing (as the vast majority of board and card games do) in China. But instead of dealing directly with a factory in China, we work with an American company with contacts in China, who can translate and facilitate the printing for us.
This means instead of emailing back and forth thirty times, trying to make sure our intentions have made it through the language barrier, we exchange emails with an American once or twice (or even jump on Skype with them!) and they take care of the factory communication for us.
I really like our printer! We use Liya International - they also handle a lot of the Greater Than Games printing.
This reads a bit like it’s leading up to a “But…” - nope! I just really like our printer, and wanted to share that fact. They've been efficient and a pleasure to work with throughout the entire Scuttle! and Dracula's Feast printing processes.
The first stage of printing a game (well, after designing/graphic designing/arting is done) is to email all the files to the printer, in PDF form.
When you do, you need to make sure that everything has what’s called “bleed”, which is not nearly as violent as it sounds.
Bleed is just excess content on each side of the document. This ensures that when the cards/box/book is cut up, even if the cards are cut imperfectly there’s no ugly white spaces. Unless you perfectly calibrate the machines (which is expensive and still not 100% reliable), there’s always a chance of stuff being cut slightly off.
Here’s an example card with bleed lines:
When we got to the printing stage in my first campaign, Scuttle!, we encountered what I call “micro-delays”. These aren’t huge delays like “we had to change printer” or “we redesigned the game mid-campaign”; they don’t set everything back by months, or even weeks. They’re just little problems that require you to go back and forth and play email tag for a few days, but when there’s a few of them in a row they can add up.
Having a representative in America definitely helps reduce the micro-delays; if you’re dealing with China directly, the earliest they’ll be able to read an email is their morning, and you won't get a response until your next morning at the earliest. Dealing with the US directly means that any little back-and-forth questions can be done in a day, instead of a week.
This time, however, the micro-delays were pretty minimal! The big one that I can think of is that the bleed settings for the documents were all too short, and so we re-exported (New and improved files, now with more bleed!) and sent those off.
After we’ve sent the PDFs to the printer, the next step is for them to send them back.
It might sound silly, but it’s hugely important. When you’re printing thousands and thousands of something, you can’t just hit “print” and wait for the inkjet to load up. You need to put everything into the system in a very specific way - if you understanding programming lingo, it’s sort of like compiling*.
*I think. I am not actually a programmer.
So once they’ve run our PDFs through their system, they send them back. These are called eproofs, or electronic proofs; I mentioned them in an update a while back. Here's what they look like:
Ignore the weirdly bolded letters! That's a zoom problem.
As you can see, the eproofs show exactly where the files are going to be cut (and sometimes folded, too). This helps us check that everything is lined up correctly, and we also use this to do a quick run for typos and anything that converted strangely when they entered it into their system.
(For example, the process of getting files ready for print can sometimes make é turn into ^e, or swap out ampersands for percentage marks. That kind of thing.)
The next step is the most exciting, and it’s the one we just finished: physical proofs!
If you’ve ever tried to send someone a photo of a paint color using your phone, you’ll know that colors and cameras interact in weird ways. The best way to check colors is to print and physically mail things.
Thus: physical proofs!
The physical proofs for Scuttle! were mailed to me in Canada; for Dracula’s Feast, we had them sent straight to Tania in Tasmania. Here’s what they look like!
For expediency and ease of reading, they’re not cut up - instead, they’re just printed onto huge sheets and sent out. The above image is the sheet for Dracula’s Feast's reference cards; when we sent it to Liya we only sent the file once, and then they duplicated it and laid it out on the sheet.
Tania went through the entire game, making notes of any colors that needed changing, incorrectly-placed die-lines (the marks that indicate where the sheets will be cut/folded), and inconsistent terminology or strange text formatting.
Tania was mostly looking for color fixes, but there’s something about reading text on paper that lets you notice things you'd otherwise miss, and so despite Tom and I going through the whole game again and again (and again and again and again…) Tania spotted a few mechanical things that we hadn’t spotted.
For example, here are her notes for the Dracula’s Feast character cards:
TRICKSTER: 'Yes' written in wrong style. See image above and compare to Beelzebub directly above Trickster for the standard caps way of writing '
WEREWOLF: title font too light. Rather than going to black, I STRONGLY advise just going a darker orange on that word - just add some Black to the existing CMYK value. This won't stand out as much as you think; smaller areas always appear lighter than larger ones so there's no harm darkening the text slightly.
ZOMBIE recommend same as above, though it only needs to be darkened a smidge. Already on the edge of comfortably readable
MIRROR: Same as Zombie, just a smidge more black
BRIDE: Same as WEREWOLF, needs to be quite a bit darker to be readable.
DRACULA: should his text read "at the end of the turn IN WHICH you're revealed"? Without, it could be misread at a glance as "at the end of the turn you reveal". (Alternative: "immediately after you are revealed"? This last would be closer to the syntax we used on Werewolf.)
I’m always surprised by how much content even a simple game has. Dracula’s Feast only contains about twelve cards with writing, but between the three of us we can have dozens of slight notes and tweaks.
We’ve done about four big passes of everything now - I’m as confident as I can be that there’s nothing else that needs to be changed, but it’s obviously impossible to guarantee.
Basically what I’m saying is that when you get the game, know that we genuinely did everything we could to eliminate typos and ambiguities!
(The process has left me with such a healthy respect for massive, hundreds-of-cards games that manage to go print without any glaring errors.)
At 2am this morning, I sent the final final final files to the printer! I mean, I say “final final final” but we’re going to get one fiiiiiinal final final final round of eproofs to make sure that our changes have gone into the system without a problem.
My prediction is that the proofs they send back won’t require any changes. And at that point, they’ll start the print run proper. We’re printing 5000 copies of Dracula’s Feast, which should take about 40 days.
If we can confirm everything by tomorrow (entirely possible!) that means the printing will end in late June. It’ll take a few days for the game to get to our distribution center in China, and then anywhere from 2-4 weeks for the game to get from China to you.
If you’ve done the math there, it looks like we’re going to deliver late. I’m really disappointed about this - we should be no more than a few weeks late (I’d be surprised if many people were still waiting after July) but I was hoping we'd beat the odds and get everything out on time, or even early.
Why the delay? It's largely because Tom and I ripped the game apart and rebuilt it, stronger and better than ever before. There were other factors outside of our control; a contractor we were working with delivered the files almost two months late, but we tried to use that time to continue improving the game - tweaking and developing.
(That situation left me with an unusual conundrum! On one hand, I want to make sure that you are kept in the loop at all times. On the other, I didn’t want to be unprofessional or seem like I was passing the buck. In the end - as you would have noticed - I didn’t end up posting anything about it. This is sort of my compromise; now that we have everything back on track and ready to go, I thought I’d mention it.)
As soon as the fiiiiiiinal final final final files have been signed off on, I’ll get an estimate from the printer for when it’ll be done and update the timeline accordingly!
This has been a heck of a journey! We’ve learned so much about every aspect of game creation from this, and I’m excited to apply the lessons we’ve learned to the Lady and the Tiger mailout and the Jellybean Shirts campaign.
I’ll be back in two weeks with the updated timeline, and another designer diary!
Thank you so much for your support, -Peter C. Hayward Excited to hold a fully-printed Dracula’s Feast for the first time.
Stakes! (Pun intended).
almost 7 years ago
– Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 10:32:06 PM
Hey!
Not a whole lot happening on the Dracula’s Feast front. The printer has sent the press proofs to our artist in Tasmania. That should theoretically be an easy enough process (they’re sent by airmail) buuuut they haven’t actually arrived yet.
We're expecting them in the next 24 hours (it's currently Monday morning in Australia) so at this stage, I’m not worried. I'll let you know as soon as we have further information, especially if we need to adjust the timeline.
A few people have been asking about card sleeves. Now that everything is done done done, I can tell you the exact card counts (including the promos).
Card Counts
Dracula’s Feast:
Tarot-sized cards: 23 (13x Character cards, 10x Reference cards)
Mini Euro-sized cards: 20 (20x Whisper cards)
Bridge-sized cards: 13 (13x Accusation cards)
Cthulhu & Friends:
Tarot-sized cards: 16 (6x Character cards, 10x Reference cards)
Let me know if you have any questions about that! I don't think you'll want to sleeve the reference cards; after your first few games, you're unlikely to refer to them much.
In this update I also wanted to share some happy news and another designer diary. Let's do it!
Happy News
Last weekend, I got married!
My partner and I flew down to LA on Friday and got married at Table Rock Beach. We eloped (no one knew about it beforehand, not even our parents!) and then spent the rest of the weekend at Disneyland for our honeymoon.
The ceremony was absolutely beautiful, and Disneyland was phenomenal. It was a perfect weekend; the best few days of my life.
This has nothing to do with Dracula’s Feast, but I thought you might enjoy knowing that the dude behind the game is now a happily married man!
Designer Diary
The developer for Dracula’s Feast, Tom Lang, is a board game designer and comedian. His housemate, also called Tom, is a board game designer and comedian. It never gets confusing at all.
In the early early days of Dracula’s Feast, the theme was ‘you’re all monsters at a masquerade ball, and you’re playing a game’. Tom (not Tom Lang, other Tom) mentioned to me that playing a game in which you’re playing a game is sort of...dumb.
There are exceptions, of course: sports simulations (like Bottom of the 9th) can be fun, or games that recreate sports that don’t/can’t exists (like Kaosball). And while I’ve never played Millennium Blades, I really really want to - it’s a game about playing a CCG, and it apparently captures the feel of that really well (without the roughly infinity money you need to pour into actually playing a CCG).
But ultimately, playing a game about playing a game is lacking what any good narrative needs: stakes.
Unless it’s a tournament, or there’s some kind of heavy betting involved, losing a game is pretty low-stakes. That’s good! It should be. If every board game you played was a life or death situation, they would quickly stop being fun and start being very stressful.
But part of the fun of playing a game is the story that you build. You’re not just rolling dice and moving tokens around; you’re winning wars and conquering continents. You’re not just removing tiles from a board - asteroids are smashing into your spaceship, causing you to lose huge chunks of your vessel.
For strong thematic immersion, raise the stakes.
(Side note: some people aren’t into thematic immersion! Abstract games have basically none, and a lot of games - particularly ‘Eurogames’ - have a very light theme. The stakes are low, and that’s absolutely fine for a certain type of player. For the most part, I am into games that suck me in with theme. That’s the kind of game I like to play, and that's largely the kind of game I like to work on.)
After receiving that feedback, I took a long look at Dracula’s Feast and tried to work out how I could apply it.
The original ‘story’ of the game was basically the setting of the song Monster Mash.
The zombies were having fun The party had just begun The guests included Wolf Man Dracula and his son
Delightful! But not really high-stakes. It felt like you were playing people who were playing a game; basically as low-stakes as you can get.
I should point out that if the stakes were too high, that would also be an issue. This is a Jellybean Game, after all; suitable for kids and grownups alike. A game where you’re mowing down people with a machine gun is never going to enter our catalogue; the closest we’ve ever gotten to violence is Scuttle! or the upcoming Ninjitsu! - these games have weapons in the card art, but the aim of the game is to collect treasure, not slaughter your opponents.
At this point in the game’s development, player elimination still existed. Any game with player elimination should definitely have high stakes; if you’ve been knocked out of a game entirely, you want it to have meant something.
(Whenever possible, games just shouldn’t have player elimination, but sometimes it’s necessary or even fun.)
So I went back to first principles. One of my favourite jokes of Dracula’s Feast is the idea that a tiny mask is enough to disguise the identity of these monsters.
Which one is which? There's no way of knowing!
The game relies on everyone trying to disguise their identities. But why?
Well, they’re monsters. That might be reasons enough. But if it’s a party of monsters, why would they have to hide the fact that they’re monsters?
At the time, the game was called Masquerade: Dracula’s Ball. I got some early feedback pointing out the redundancy; I might as well have called it Party: Dracula’s Party.
In my previous life (before I started developing games for a living) I was a full-time author. Writing stories is something that I am pretty comfortable with. And so after a bit of thought on the matter, I came up with the story that you heard in the Kickstarter video:
Dracula invited the townsfolk over for dinner (and maybe a few for dessert), but - what a pain in the neck - a mash of monsters have crashed the party looking for a bite. Now everything is at stake…
Expose the other monsters so that you can have the feast to yourself!
Now you’re not just monsters playing a party (which is too low stakes), nor are you trying to kill each other*, which would be too much.
*there is admittedly an unseen room full of villagers who will theoretically suffer (unless Van Helsing is the winning player) but so far no one seems to have taken issue with that.
It also gave the game a new name: Dracula’s Feast! It’s a unique title with a nice ring to it; something important for branding.
While I was working on Dracula’s Feast, I was simultaneously working on the next two games in the Unmasked line: Monster’s Ball and Night of the Mummy.
None of this is final, of course, but here’s a sneak preview of the narrative of those games. Tom Lang hasn’t come in and added puns yet, but they’ll give you an idea.
Night of the Mummy:
To celebrate the recently-added Mummy exhibition, the museum is holding a fundraiser! But the ancient Egyptian curse has brought artifacts to life, including the Mummy itself. If you can help the museum curators identify the other exhibits, maybe they won’t notice when you sneak out the door…
Monster’s Ball:
Doctor Frankenstein is holding a masquerade ball: it’s the perfect opportunity for his experiments to escape! Mr. and Mrs. Monster have disguised themselves as party-goers, and just need to find each other in the crowded event so they can escape together…
Having a narrative for your game is absolutely not vital. But I like it - they’re fun to write, they allow you to easily give players an idea of what you’re doing without using in-game terms, and it gives the game stakes that it might not otherwise have.
As well as that, my personal design style is from theme. Once I've worked out a theme, I almost entirely design from that front. If you asked me to come up with a new character for Dracula's Feast, I'd struggle: if you said "Hey, I want The Invisible Man to be in the game," it'd be far easier for me to come up with a power for him.
That’s all for this week! I’ll be back in a fortnight with all the latest in Dracula’s Feast news.
Cheers, -Peter C. Hayward Wondering whatever happened to the Translyvania Twist
P.S. In each of these updates I like to share a currently-running Kickstarter I think you might be interested in! This week, it’s Petrichor, a board game in which you play a cloud. Intrigued? Click through and check it out!
