Dragonkeepers
- Board's Eye View
- Mar 18
- 3 min read
Dragonkeepers is a 2-4 player set collection card drafting game from Kosmos that's designed and illustrated by Michael Menzel.
On display there will always be two cards depicting dragons. There will always be two draw decks: one that shows the number of dragons required that turn to form a set and its reward, and the other deck showing a colour of dragon (white, blue, red or green). To claim the reward, you need to lay down the requisite number of dragon cards of the colour indicated by the card on top of the dragon deck.
On your turn you can draft one, two or three cards but only from those displayed face-up - not from either of the draw decks; however, when a card is drafted it is immediately replaced. You can also play a card back to the draw piles in order to change the requirement; so, for example, if the top two cards demanded three blue dragons, you could play a card with a red dragon on its reverse in order to switch the requirement to three red dragons.
There are various rewards on offer but mostly you're collecting amulet segments. You are usualy required to take the lowest value amulet segment but there are some cards that let you take the highest value segment. Since the lowest value is likely to be just 1, at least at the start of the game, then being able to take a segment with a value of 20 is huge. When you collect three segments, they get pieced together to form an amulet, and you take a circular token to place in its centre. The red tokens are worth 8 or 9 points but the blue tokens are only worth 3 or 4 points; so there's a big incentive to be among the first to complete an amulet. The amulets also function as a game timer: the game immediately ends when the total number of completed amulets reaches a specified number (seven, eight or nine depending on whether you have two, three or four players).
When you play a set you simply create a stack for that colour dragon in your individual tableau. For the second colour, you just position that second stack to the left or right of the first. The dilemma comes when you lay down sets of the third and fourth colours because you can only subsequently add dragons to the outer stacks: if your blue dragon stack has a white stack on its left and a green stack on its right, you'll no longer be able to lay down any blue dragons. At least that's the case in the basic game; there are some tweaks that can potentially get around this if you add in one of the rule-changing Treasure Chests that can be activated by paying a crystal (part of the reward for laying down a 1 dragon set).
Egg tokens are worth 4 points, but with a 12-point addition for the player who has the most eggs); and it can be worth up to 16 points to be the first player to have all four colour stacks set out. This means players may be pursuing different ways of scoring points. In any event, Dragonkeepers remains a very accessible family-friendly game that plays quickly; most of our plays at Board's Eye View have taken no more than 20 minutes; mostly won or lost by the players who prove most adept at manipulating the set collection requirements.
