Trashdome: Fury of Dracula vs. Arkham Horror

WELCOME TO TRASHDOME!

This is part of a series of bloody matches to the death. Show support for your favorite game so it will do better in the fight. You can support it by writing why you think its the better game and more importantly by betting on it. End your first post in this thread with the title of the game you're placing a bet on (i.e. voting for) so its clear to me when reading it later. You have until Friday when I tally the bets and declare the winner. Counting expansions or not is entirely up to you just as playing with them or not is. I will reserve my bet for any tie-breakers.

Although you should be familiar with both games, there is no rule that says you have to have played both of them. The only rule in Trashdome is this;

Two games enter! One game leaves!

Both awesome games, no doubt. I normally would never vote for co-op games as I am automatically biased against them but in this case it's not just any co-op game it is the mother of all co-op games and it fucking rocks like an RPG in a box. Fury is cool and all but just the insane amount of shit I can choose from in Arkahm, the total immersion, the thick atmosphere, and the really awesome and imaginative universe wins me over.

Arkham all the way.

I may be wrong but I think AH is unbeaten in trashdome's. I haven't always voted for it but it's no surprise it's FFG's best selling title. It's perfect!

JonJacob wrote:

Both awesome games, no doubt. I normally would never vote for co-op games as I am automatically biased against them but in this case it's not just any co-op game it is the mother of all co-op games and it fucking rocks like an RPG in a box. Fury is cool and all but just the insane amount of shit I can choose from in Arkahm, the total immersion, the thick atmosphere, and the really awesome and imaginative universe wins me over.

Arkham all the way.

I may be wrong but I think AH is unbeaten in trashdome's. I haven't always voted for it but it's no surprise it's FFG's best selling title. It's perfect!

VOTE: FURY OF DRACULA

It's almost always great.

Compared with just playing the Call of Cthulhu RPG, Arkham Horror is longer, clunkier, fiddlier, and less thematic.

Vote: Arkham Horror.

You can play alone, you can play with up to 7 other friends. You have no idea what's going to happen when you play. Expansions galore. You can be a machine gun-toting hobo with a mangy dog or a spell-slinging Paris Hilton. Many paths to victory, many paths to horrible defeat.

VOTE: FURY OF DRACULA

I've never had a great game of AH. I've never had a bad game of Fury.

AH is has too many rules for too little gameplay. You are basically presented with a box full of random elements without seeming to have any point. Did I win or lose? Who cares man. AH is barely a game.

Fury is a much tighter game and a much better experience. Turns are faster without sacrificing any substance. It's still semi-coop, but having a dracula player means that there's a controlling intelligence in the conflict. The only thing I don't like about Fury is that the combat system stops the quick flow of the game, but AH is pretty much the same. Well, that and it's strictly 5p, or 2p with an expert hunter player.

Vote: Fury of Dracula. Playing against a bad guy controlled by a human is better than a bad guy controlled by a bunch of cards and dice.

Stormcow wrote:

I've never had a great game of AH. I've never had a bad game of Fury.

I've never had a fun game of Fury. AH is always at least a good experience.

Sure there's bloat, but that's only when you use too many expansions at once. I've since divided up my kit and only add a couple expansions per game, especially when a new one comes out as I want to fully experience the new stuff. GOOs and Investigators from every expansion, GOO combat cards, Injury/Madness and story cards are always in though.

VOTE: ARKHAM HORROR

Tough one, both deserving games with loving reprints by FFG.

FoD is easily the better strategy game, so if I only had time in a year to play a single match of a multi-player game, I would choose it.

However, I have a lot of other great strategy games (although perhaps none with the combination of theme and suspense that FoD has), and AH fills an underrepresented niche in my collection. I think the most underrated aspect of AH is its storytelling element, although it often requires a lot of work on the player to fill in the pieces (and there isn't enough time or energy to focus on other players' stories). I suspected that if I RPG'd I wouldn't like AH as much, but right now it's one of my hottest games.

To support this point of view, I've recently had to purge ~75% of my game collection. AH made the cut; FoD is on the trade pile (although a large reason for that is I would never play FoD without having the full complement of players, which is a rare sight these days).

Vote: AH

Fury of Dracula is a great game. Excellent design, excellent components, and flexible enough to allow a variety of strategies by all players. Some FoD games that I have played have been incredibly close, leading to truly dramatic finishes. And yet, it has a finite replay value, at least enough that I can't play it as often as I did a few years ago. On a scale of 1-10, I consider Fury to be at least a 9.

Arkham Horror is an amazing game. An excellent design that includes several interesting ideas, and once you start adding in expansions, a vast replay value. Where Fury of Dracula is only good for a certain range of players, 2-5, Arkham plays well for 1-8 players, though the game plays somewhat differently with 1 or 2 players unless they each run multiple characters. Although some players go to extraordinary and even silly lengths to customize the play experience to emphasize certain supplements, this is actually accomplished with ease by selecting a specfic herald and set of town boards. The only reason that I am playing less Arkham lately is that the staggering amount of expansion material has increased the setup and takedown time significantly. On my 1-10 scale, Arkham is the 10 that sets the curve. It's my desert island game. If I had to get rid of every game that I own except one, Arkham Horror is the keeper.

Vote: Arkham Horror

Don't do this to me!

hacksword wrote:

Vote: Fury of Dracula. Playing against a bad guy controlled by a human is better than a bad guy controlled by a bunch of cards and dice.

I have to disagree. It's truly humbling to be outwitted and defeated by a bunch of cardboard.

Vote: Arkham Horror

Didn't we have this matchup already?

Anyway, I never really get the love of Arkham Horror around here. To me it's a good game but there are better out there...

Which brings us to Fury of Dracula! Great fun, theme, gameplay. I like playing Dracula best, and misleading the hunters. Go down with a great fight... Arkham usually doesn't feel as dramatic, unless you put in enough options to make the game challenging. But I'm anti-expansions guy.

Vote: Fury of Dracula

I just can't get into the Lovecraft thing at all. Arkham is impressive when all laid out, no questions there--but there are too many other games to which I'd rather devote that amount of time.

Didn't we have this matchup already?

No, I actually went thread-diving to see if it was already done. Couldn't find it, although both games have appeared in other matchups lots of times.

I had a great game of FoD last night, three player game with me as the Count. I never win as I always do silly things like teleporting just behind the hunters with the Evasion card instead to on the other side of the board, get found and then mothered. Last night I decided to ... do exactly the same thing. I did a similar thing three times before all four hunters cornered me in Szegard (somewhere in eastern europe)- unluckily for them it was night and I was only 2 points off winning. First Mina had a go but after a severe clawing she escaped. Then all four hunters attacked in their turn and all four took a bite, the last on Mina winning the game. Brilliant fun.

But I'll still choose AH over it as it just provides more variety, depth, immersion and fun (for me).

Vote: Arkham Horror

Two things I don't like much in FoD:
- combat: die vs. die? It's hard to get more random. A MEQ-inspired deck would do wonders.
- cities: I wish they all had a slightly different character – special things to buy or to see or do. It would give the game a more 'adventure-y' feel. Incidentally, I wish the same for MEQ (this is why I'll never be a game designer – I love small details).

About AH: once we lost because someone decided, while exploring some other world, to *trust a lizard-like creature*. (He didn't know what was going to happen – we don't read the result until the player decides what to do. Two of us were prepared to close the last remaining gates; instead, as a direct an indirect result of that encounter, the Ancient One awoke.) No game I know can beat this.

So, in case you are counting also newbies' votes: Arkham, all the way.