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first look at two games
We started with Fury of Dracula. One player plays Dracula, who wins the game if he eludes the players long enough or kills enough of them. The players play four vampire-hunters; the game is balanced for all four being in, so if there are fewer players some play multiples. Play is on a map of Europe with cities, towns, and roads and rails connecting them. Hunters can carry a limited number of items useful in combat, and a limited number of "event" cards to be played at opportune times. Dracula has his own special events, items, and combat tactics. Dracula is more deadly at night. (Each turn advances the clock, so the game cycles from day through night and back again, six turns to the full day.)
The hunters each choose cities to start in, and then Dracula secretly chooses a location. Dracula moves every turn; the mechanic for this is that the player has a set of cards, one per city (and also one per sea and one for the Atlantic ocean), and the cards for the last six places Dracula was are kept in a buffer (face-down). This means Dracula can't double back on himself too quickly, so some care is needed to not get boxed in.
On a hunter's turn, the hunter moves to a new city or town and asks if Dracula has been there. If he has been (in the last six turns), the card is revealed. If he hasn't been, the hunter can acquire events (with some risk of giving events to Dracula instead) and (in cities) items. Items are free but there is a hand-size limit, leading to an amusing bit in yesterday's game where the other players boggled when I discarded a rifle. ("She has three things better than a rifle?!" Actually, at one point I was keeping a pair of rifles, which made sense given the combat system, but eventually I did in fact have two things that were better, so I kept only one rifle.)
If Dracula has been to the city, he might have left behind something to fight. If Dracula is currently in the city, once you deal with that you then get to fight the big baddie. Dracula is good at escaping (especially at night), by the way.
For a while we were having trouble making any progress, but eventually we picked up his trail and then things got exciting. At one point I had an event card that gave me a chance of revealing his current location; that succeeded and I then used a second event card to teleport there (taking damage, but my character had the most hit points in the game, so -- knowing nothing else about calibration -- I figured I should do it.) I managed to deal about two-thirds of Dracula's hit points in damage before he escaped. (Yay consecrated bullets! Yay crucifix! Boo near-useless rifle, as it turned out...) The next turn another player caught up with him (there being a limited number of adjacent cities he hadn't already been to), but Dracula escaped again. By then most of the hunters had converged in the area, so we each moved to a candidate city, and the one who found him managed to do the last few hit points. (Dracula also had a few self-inflicted points of damage; he can cross water but it does damage.) Dracula didn't bite anyone, so we didn't see how that plays out.
I forgot to note the times, but BoardGameGeek says about two hours and I think that was about right. I would happily play this game again. (The game designers did something smart, by the way, giving Dracula his own personal copy of the map of Europe so the player doesn't have to be obvious about looking at the board. That would make the difference between me being willing to play Dracula and not.)
Descent is a dungeon-crawling game, with figurines, modular dungeon pieces, and zillions and zillions of different bits of cardboard (chits, map features like pits and rubble, treasure, etc). One player is the GM (I think the game calls this "overlord"; I saw references to "OL"), and the rest (up to four more) are characters. The game comes with some modules and there are plenty more to be had on the net. Despite its apparent resemblence to D&D, those who know these things say it's more like Diablo or Warquest for tabletop.
Each player is dealt a random character (I think there are 20). As in Runebound (published by the same company), there are three combat skills -- melee, missile fire, and magic. Some characters are well-balanced and others are specialists. (Each character will have a total of three points of native skill distributed among those areas.) Characters have variable numbers of hit points, endurance points, natural armor, and speed. Some are clearly better than others. (Each character has a numeric value, which is the number of points the OL gets for killing that character.) Because character assignment is random, you can end up with some bad cases of party (non-)balance. Dani thinks giving each player two to choose from is too unbalancing in the other direction, but I think some sort of mulligan rule is needed -- maybe deal the party one or two extra characters for possible substitution? The two games I played definitely suffered in this area.
Characters also have three special traits or abilities, which are loosely tied to what the character is good at. As an example, my mage in the first game had: telekenesis (pay one fatigue to move a figure one square; I used this to fling some monsters into pits), a pair of familiars (ferrets who could be used to fetch and carry), and a third I've forgotten. My archer in the second game had a bonus against magical attacks, the ability to shoot through people, and the ability to trace line of sight from any adjacent square (the shoot-around-corners skill, though I used it mostly to shorten ranges).
The entire map is known at the beginning of the game, though not the contents of areas not yet explored. This is almost certainly a comprimise for practicality, but it didn't seem to affect play to have the players know that there are N rooms aligned thus. The OL has a deck of cards and a pool of points; the cards have casting costs (drawn from those points) and both cards and points are agumented each turn. Cards let the OL spawn new monsters, set off traps, and produce other inconvenient game effects.
The OL, on his turn, plays cards and moves monsters, attacking where applicable. The players can choose turn order each turn, so you can plan for things like "I'll try to kill it first; if I fail you do it" or "let me get out of the way before you blast it". Player turns can't intermingle, though; each player must complete his turn before the next starts. A player, on his turn, declares what he's going to do: advance (move + attack), battle (attack twice), run (move twice), or something involving special actions that we almost never used. Combat is by dice (different combinations for different weapons, plus you add your native skill). For non-melee attacks, the dice tell you both what range you achieved (maybe your lightning bolt didn't go far enough to hit the monster) and damage. There is always a chance that an attack just plain misses (if any die comes up with an "X"). Some weapons (or character abilities) let you tweak dice in various ways or extract extra range or damage from them. Armor absorbs damage, except in the face of piercing weapons. There's some other stuff like that. Mostly the combat system seems to work reasonably.
In our first game, the party was pretty weak and even though it was a beginner dungeon, the OL managed to win in something under an hour in what was a pretty unsatisfying game all around. So we played again, and the party was differnetly unbalanced and it might have taken more like an hour and a half or two hours for the OL to win. That was still unsatisfying. We broke for dinner and discussion.
There was general agreement to try again with a different player playing the OL for variety. (Dani was the only one who had played the game before, so he was OL the first two times by group consensus.) It was about 9:00 and I decided to sit that one out, so they played with a party of three. They got stronger characters (and finally some good melee fighters) and some better combinations of abilities. That's luck of the draw for you.
They played the same scenario as the one we had played second. (With all the variability available to the OL, no one felt it was a problem that Dani knew the broad strokes.) They were definitely doing better and seemed to be having fun each time I looked in on them.
However, the last time I looked in on them was 1:30, when I decided I was going to bed. I understand that the game ended at about 4. So while the game is nominally four hours, not one of the three games was close to that. (Hey, at least the last wasn't off by quite a factor of two...)
I would like to play this game again, but only with a party mix that stands an ok chance. Absent some sort of mulligan rule, it's really a crap shoot.