8 Dragons
- Board's Eye View
- 37 minutes ago
- 3 min read
You might be forgiven for thinking that this is a game involving eight dragons. There are indeed dragons: up to five full-grown and five 'wyrmling'/adolescent dragons, depending on the number of players, but never eight. The 8 in the title of this game from Wonderbow actually relates to the figure-8 flight path taken by the dragons.
With 8 Dragons, Sonke Schmidt has designed a whimsical but clever set collection and tile-laying tableau building game where the 2-4 players are parambulating around the board, mostly collecting tiles, coins and other goodies wherever they stop. Some locations correspond to various other magical creatures - elves, gnomes, goblins and fairies. When your dragon stops by one of them, you'll pick up one of the tiles from their realms to add to your lair. Those tiles contribute to end-game scoring but you'll also pick up gold every time you complete a connected group of three matching realm tiles or group of three tiles from different realms. And ultimately this game is all about the gold: the winner is the dragon that ends up with the largest hoard. And if we've learned anything from all the fairy tales and fantasy novels we've read, then that's exactly as it should be.
It's the figure-8 circuit that's at the heart of this game. On your turn, your dragon can fly around the circuit as far as they like, subject to the limitation that they can't circle past the north/south hemisphere divider more than once. Wyrmlings can't fly unaided. They form an orderly queue on Dragon Rock and the first wyrmling in the queue hooks up to form a swarm behind the next dragon that passes by. That means that more often than not your dragon will be towing one or more opponent's wyrmlings behind them. When your dragon stops at a location, you take the benefit from that location and any wymlings behind also collect the benefit of the location to which you've towed them.
There's more. You don't just affect the wymlings you have in tow but you can also push any swarm of dragons that is bumped forward by your move. They too take the benefit of the location to which you move them. That might sound like you are doing them a favour, and often that will be the case, but a judicious push can be used to take an opponent's dragon or wyrmling meeple beyond the space they were hoping to reach.
Tho' you know its colour, you don't know exactly what will be on a tile before you take it, so 8 Dragons deals out a good mix of tactics and luck. There are points to be earned from collecting and completing 'missions' that score for particular tile groupings or artefacts depicted. The mission tiles also double as wild tiles for the purpose of completing sets of three. However, it'll cost you 5 gold to pick up a new mission so you won't want to take one unless you can be pretty certain that the mission tile will earn you more points than it's costing you...
8 Dragons is a game with virtually no downtime. That's not just because turns are brisk but also because players are very likely to benefit from an action on each other's turns. Also, when players collect tiles, they don't flip them till the end of their turn, at which time all the players who picked up tiles that turn flip them simultaneously and decide how they want to place them in their lairs. Again, this helps to minimise downtime.
Tho' the figure-8 circuit design could just as readily have lent itself to a game with trains, trucks and a track, we've been charmed by the fantasy art from Pauliina Hannuniemi. Shown here on Board's Eye View is a preview prototype ahead of the game's launch on Kickstarter on 9 June. Click here to check out and join the campaign.
