Not balanced - looks neat though

[The Malcolm]

Played a game and within 15 minutes we could tell: Dracula loses almost always unless they get lucky.
Super lucky, super wacky swingy and all odds in Van Helsing's favor. Especially with Trump color and then swapping.

Better games to play. Best of luck to the designers.

[CRMagic]

Can you explain that conclusion?

It looks to me like good play favors Dracula, since all he really has to do is focus fire on a district. Which was my strategy playing as Dracula.

And it's hard to believe there's no possible way to balance it, especially since simply adding HP to Dracula by definition would move the game in his favor. What if he had 15 HP? Now VH can only afford to lose 10 districts of 25.

[briyonce1114]

I'm not sure why you think it's unbalanced. I have played 47 games and haven't felt any significant problem. Further, I kept detailed record of my first 15 games; in them, I won as Dracula 60% of the time and won as Van Helsing 80% of the time. While I did have a better record as Van Helsing, I think I had significant success as Dracula and didn't feel "behind" or particularly lucky in those games.

[agodd]

You can tell a game is not balanced after just ONE paly

[KillerClown]

I played this game quite a lot. It's very balanced.

[wittiw]

The game is very random. If players know how to play, luck usually decides.
It would be useful to have some draft mechanism, that would limit the dominance of randomness.

[Suoivax]

Played a game and within 15 minutes we could tell: Dracula loses almost always unless they get lucky.
Super lucky, super wacky swingy and all odds in Van Helsing's favor. Especially with Trump color and then swapping.

Better games to play. Best of luck to the designers.

I win with Dracula more than Helsing....

[Jballenas]

I got the physical copy of this and it's definitely not unbalanced, not sure how one could determine that after a single play. Luck definitely plays a factor, but I haven't seen that play heavier on one side than the other.

If you are finding it difficult to win with Dracula in your play group, you could have each person play a game as each character and see who was able to convert more people to vampires before they died and call that person the winner. (Same could be done if you find Dracula wins more, play two games and see who was able to deal more damage to Dracula before each game ended)