Child Of The 1980's

I only ever played I Vant To Bite Your Finger once. A friend of mine had it, and I remember playing it round his house one day and finding it quite fun. On the face of it the game was fairly standard, just being one of those games where you move a counter around a winding path on the board. What made the game special was the big plastic Dracula that came with it, which was actually capable of biting your finger!

Of course, it didn’t actually bite your finger. The model Dracula had two little red felt tip pens in its mouth which when you placed your finger inside might draw two little red blood dots on your finger. This was the luck element of the game, as sometimes Dracula would bite, and other times he wouldn’t. Dracula also had a cape which could be folded over him in the classic vampire pose, with just his eyes poking out over the top of the cape. There was a clock next to Dracula which randomly caused the cape to open when the hour hand was moved round on it.

I don’t think my friend knew the proper rules and was kind of making it up as he went along, but this it what I remember of how the game was played. Each player took it in turns moving their counter round the board a space at a time, then threw a die to see how many hours they had to wind the clock on. If they were unlucky, Dracula’s cape would spring open, which meant you had to put your finger in his mouth to see if he was going to bite you. If he did, you had to go back to the beginning of the path, otherwise you were allowed to stay where you were. Play continued until one player made it to the end of the path.

All in all it was quite a fun game, and I especially like the way you couldn’t help say it’s title without using a mock transylvanian accent, all because of it being called “vant” instead of “want”. The only problem with it was that it lost some of its appeal when the felt tip pens finally dried up and stopped working, which was what was beginning to happen to my friends copy of the game.

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This entry is filed under Toys - Boardgames and was posted on November 21st, 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.