World of Warcraft (10 day trial)

A few months ago my willpower broke down and I downloaded the 10-day trial for World of Warcraft, or Warcrack as we have heard it called.
Also, please see this very entertaining bit of WoW machima. Billie Jean spoof!


It was fun - especially when getting into the levels of crafting skill, cooking , etc. and also exciting to finally have some reference points when everyone is talking about WOW.
I was surprised at the relatively unsocial feel at the lower levels. Compared with City of Heroes/Villains, where even a low-level newbie gets invited to team up by others, almost as soon as they venture out into Paragon City.
The low-level time of WoW felt more like a stand-alone single-player RPG, although I did get team invites a little bit. Felt like I couldn't hold my own on a team, and there are so many interesting quests to do, that I wanted to focus on my own and not have to work on all the party's quests.
In CoH/CoV, the fun for me is more in the team-ups and seeing how your powers complement everyone else's. Team leaders in COH/COV also seem to be more democratic about doing everyone's missions in turn.

But we can only have one MMORPG with a monthly fee at once, and we decided to stay with City of Heroes/Villains for the time being. (Now in the fall we canceled out of CoH/CoV as well, saving some cash.

Fury of Dracula!

One of the few new board games we've bought this summer - great production (lots of well-done bits, good looking) and original gameplay, definitely not exactly like anything else we have.

In Fury of Dracula, one player is Dracula, and the other(s) play the four Hunters (Van Helsing, Jonathan and Mina Harker, etc).
The board is a very legible and beautiful map of Europe in the 1800s. (See Revolution below for a much worse European map).

The object of the game is for the 4 hunters to travel around Europe and eventually find and kill Dracula (and for Dracula to evade them as long as possible and to throw his minion vampires in their path to fight while he darts away).
But Dracula is not just standing out there on the map like the other four, he's moving secretly by playing cards in front of him (in his path).

We've played this most often with Dave as Dracula and me as the others - Dave has won in those cases. Dave's nephew played with me once, taking over 2 of the hunters, and while he wasn't able to stay for the whole game, the hunters did kill dracula at the end.

Haven't played in the last few months...