Wyrmspan: Dragon Academy
- Andy Page
- 19 minutes ago
- 3 min read
In the Board’s Eye View review for Wyrmspan it was noted that 'even in our post-Game of Thrones era, dragons don't have the same broad universal appeal of birds: Wyrmspan may be easier to teach and learn but it's unlikely to appeal to as wide an audience as its predecessor.' That predecessor is Wingspan, a game that ranks (at time of writing) at position #38 on BoardGameGeek and already has three expansions to its name. While I will agree that birds are indeed popular, where I will differ with the initial reviewer is on the popularity of dragons: dragons have inspired the imaginations of children and adults alike in far greater ways than birds ever have (I’d argue) and their popularity in Hollywood is testament to this. With the live-action remake of How To Train Your Dragon hitting cinemas earlier this year, it seems a perfect time to review an expansion for Wyrmspan, especially one that has a theme strongly related to HTTYD. So get your hiking boots on, as thar be (more) dragons in them thar hills.
Wyrmspan was already a slight departure from Wingspan. Wyrmspan: Dragon Academy (Stonemaier Games) flies even further away from its feathered counterpart, adding new guilds, an updated score tracker and, most importantly, new dragons. Jargon warning: if you’re unfamiliar with Wyrmspan, I encourage you to read our review of the base game and maybe watch a ‘How to Play’ video before carrying on as there’s likely to be terminology used in this review that might not make sense by itself. Carrying on…
The core mechanics of the base game are unchanged with this expansion – you still have to excavate caves, entice dragons and explore your cave network in the same way as before. However, now there is a new type of dragon you can entice - fledglings - bringing the total, different types up to five. Fledglings are the adolescents of the dragon world; they’re more grown up than the baby hatchlings, yet not as mature as the small, medium & large dragons – that is until you come in. The costs for fledglings are much the same as small, medium & large dragons, but in order to benefit from them you need to first train them.
Each fledgling needs to be trained between 1 & 4 times, which is done by exploring the cave they are enticed to and paying a resource cost. Like with the larger dragons, the benefits of fully trained fledglings will vary, and no two dragons will give you identical benefits (tho' some will be similar). What will be identical are the points that each of your fledglings give you at the end of the game: for each fledgling you have in your caves your points will increase in squares: if you have one fledgling it will score 1 point, if you have two fledglings they will score 2 points each for a total of 4, three fledglings score 3 points each for a total of 9, and so on, up to a maximum scoring of 144 should you populate your caves entirely with fledglings (tho' highly improbable I don’t think it’s completely impossible, but don’t quote me on that).
In addition to the new fledglings there are also more dragons of the other four types (with five of the dragons from the base game getting upgrades) and so here is possibly the only downside that this expansion brings - there are now simply too many dragons! A full draw pile of dragons sits 3-4 inches tall! Given that each dragon is unique you can never be sure which types will come out, so formulating any kind of strategy as to which dragons to focus on can be nigh-on impossible. In our plays we’ve had games at both extremes of the spectrum with regard to fledglings; sometimes you’ll play a game and only see one or two fledglings come out altogether, other times it seems that the deck is swamped with fledglings and little of anything else. The flipside is that you’re guaranteed a different game every time you play, and with the addition of the new guilds, new cave cards (Fully train a fledgling for free? Don’t mind if I do!) and new decisions to make at the end of each round, there’s certainly enough replayability with this expansion to warrant the headache of trying to shuffle that many cards at the start of each session.
All in all, it’s not quite How To Train Your Dragon but it unquestionably is lots of fun and well worth the gold you’ll be parting with to acquire it, even if it’s only to have more of Clémentine Campardou’s beautifully illustrated dragons gracing your gaming table.
(Review by Andy Page)
