Road Trip Gaming with a Bite: Featuring TSR's Vampyre

It’s officially Spring, and I am dying for a road trip. It’s been years since we’ve gone on one for obvious reasons, but it’s getting harder and harder to resist the temptation to pack some bags, hop in the car, and get lost on the nation’s freeways and back roads. My family went on the occasional road trip when I was a kid, me and my brothers crammed in the back seat, whining about when we were going to get wherever we were going. I don’t remember a lot of multi-day trips, but many day trips between California, Arizona, and Nevada. And you can imagine how boring some of those trips could be when the only thing flying by outside the windows is a uniform shade of brown.

Of course, we had our normal means of entertainment besides kicking the back of Dad’s seat. Some of these trips were before the Gameboy ever came out and most were before we could even think of buying one. There were plenty of games, however, that could be played between my brothers that only needed a pair of eyes. And a fist, because Slug Bug was the name of the game, and I was always the loser. It didn’t matter if I saw more Volkswagen Beetles than my older brother, he hit me a lot harder. Sessions of Slug Bug (or Punch Buggy as I heard people call it) didn’t last long and never ended on a positive note.

Other games we played were those travel bingo cards with the little red shade you’d pull down on anything you’d see. We had a number of those boards and would spend a long time trying to mark stuff off, but driving through the desert didn’t offer us a lot of check marks. When you could drive for hours without even seeing a tree, it could take forever before you got a bingo. I remember there being other games on similar cards, but I can’t remember what they were. 

The most prominent game in my memory, though, is a mini-game from TSR called Vampyre. This was a perfect travel game as the whole thing fit inside a small clamshell package with a ton of stuff inside. While the set included dice, everything else was paper and (easily lost) cardboard tokens. The Game of the Hunt for Dracula allowed for up to 6 players to travel across Transylvania to the titular vampire’s castle, fighting their way through creatures of the night: rats, werewolves, ghosts, and Dracula’s brides. The map of the game unfolds to show all of Transylvania on one side and flips over with a layout of Dracula’s castle on the other.

Image Courtesy of BoardGameGeek

Players pick from one of several characters based on Bram Stoker’s novel and as they travel across mountains and through valleys, gaining weapons and being ambushed by monsters as they flip over tokens on the map. The game is way more in-depth than I ever remember it being, but to be honest, when we played it as kids, we never once finished the game. Besides the danger of losing those cardboard tokens between the seats and a wayward bump in the road upending each of our pieces, the biggest problem playing the game was our terrible attention spans, especially when something as benign as roadkill could rip our minds away. 

Image Courtesy of The Haunted Closet

Image Courtesy of BoardGameGeek

Image Courtesy of BoardGameGeek

Most of my memories about the game are of just examining everything - reading the instructions, looking at the tokens, and imagining routes through the mountains and the castle. Vampyre was a great introduction not only to bigger role-playing games (which unfortunately I never had the opportunity to try further) but also just an inspiration for my young writer mind, making up my own stories of monsters and adventure. I remember not being much older when, instead of bringing a game with me on trips, I grabbed a pencil and a big yellow legal pad and spent the whole trip penning a story. 

Okay, I brought the Gameboy with me just in case. I was a kid after all.