Dragonarium
- Board's Eye View
- 21 minutes ago
- 2 min read
In Dragonarium, from Wonderful World Board Games, the 2-4 players are drafting domino tiles from a market display and placing them out on their individual boards to build their dragon hatcheries. Tiles can be placed in any space on your board and you can place them on top of existing tiles: 'pillars' can be placed underneath one half of a tile in order to raise it so that the new tile lies flat.
In addition, you move your meeple around your board placing a crystal element on any available space in the rows or columns you pass. When all the element spaces on a tile are filled, the tile will hatch a dragon egg when it is covered. Dragons can be placed anywhere on your board; you can't add tiles on top of a dragon - so dragon placement limits further increases in height - but the tile on which you place your dragon adopts the colour of the dragon as well as its own...
After 12 rounds of drafting, building and dragon hatching, you score for the largest area of each colour: number of squares multiplied by the height of the highest square. In addition, you score 3 points for each golden 'royal' dragon.
Dragonarium then is an easy-to-play family-friendly game where each player is trying to optimise their scoring potential. You're all doing your own thing; so this is essentially multiplayer solitaire; and of course you can play Dragonarium as a solo player in competition with an imaginary second player.
If you're looking for more challenge, however, publishers WWBG and designers Wei Chang and Kuan Chen have you covered. You can swap out the board for the basic game with alternative asymmetric player boards, each of which comes with its own additional rule tweaks. That means you can introduce Dragonarium as a 'gateway' game for new players but then step up the complexity for more experienced players.
WWBG are bringing Dragonarium to Kickstarter on 18 November. Click here to find out more.
