Dragonwood Second Opinion

Following a friend’s birthday party my son came home extolling me with stories about a game they had been playing and how much he had enjoyed it. That game was Dragonwood. Released in 2015 by Gamewright Dragonwood remains a popular game with their similarly designed Dragonrealm being released.

Since my son was so excited, I decided to buy the game and see what all his fuss was about. Here are my thoughts.

Dragonwood In Brief

The first thing that struck me about the game was how much game was fit into so small a box. It packs away really tidily. The artwork is clever in that it looks like classic fantasy art but with a comic style twist, a nice complement to how the game is in its feel too. Like a classic adventure but with an undertone of fun.

Gameplay is nice and easy to pick up, you’ll feel confident nice and quickly with this game.

There are two decks, the Dragonwood deck and the Adventurer deck. On a players turn they may choose to “Reload” by drawing a card from the Adventurer Deck or to try and “Capture” a card from one of the five visible Dragonwood Deck cards.

The Adventurer Deck contains Adventurer cards that you use to make Capture attempts. These have a different colour and number that power three different attacks the Strike, Stomp and Scream that are then used to try and capture a card; more detail on this later. If this deck is played through twice the game ends after each of the players’ have taken one last turn.

The Dragonwood Deck contains three types of card Creatures, Enhancements and Events. The creatures are foes that players try to capture and include the Orange and Blue Dragons that are loaded into the bottom half of the Dragonwood deck. Both Dragons being captured is another way that the game can end.

All creatures have Victory Point value and players score points at the end of the game for each creature they have captured. Enhancements, on the other hand, look like creature cards with a purple background. They are generally things like items and potions that give advantages to future capture attempts. Events are just that, for example “Thunder Storm”, when they appear events are immediately resolved with good or bad effects.

Playing Dragonwood

Setting up the game you deal out 3 adventurer cards to each player and place 5 Dragonwood cards out on the table.

As noted earlier, players in Dragonwood can choose to make a capture attempt on their turn. To do this, they look at their adventurer cards, looking for numbers in a row (for a Strike attack), cards of the same number (for a Stomp attack) or cards of the same colour (for a Scream attack). The number of cards in either of these categories indicates the number of dice that they can roll for the capture attempt. They will then choose a creature or enhancement card to try and capture. The creature or item will have a required score for each type of attack and may be much easier to capture with a particular attack. For example, the Fire Ants creature is very weak to Stomp attacks when compared to their Strike or Scream values.

This is where strategy and decision making come into Dragonwood. The dice are custom numbered 1,2,2,3,3,4 and this needs to be kept in mind when considering whether to make your attack. How likely are you to fail? If you fail, you will lose an adventurer card for no gain. Might you be better to reload again, drawing a new card and hoping to be able to increase your chances on the following turn? This might, however, run the risk of allowing an opponent to capture a strong creature or powerful enhancement. Should you try and arm yourself with enhancements or capture a load of creatures to get an unmatchable quantity of points? The answer might change from game to game. This is something I like in a game, the capacity for it to feel a bit different each time you play.

This simple reload/capture system becomes muscle memory as you play so you’ll start quickly moving through reload turns and then having to slow down as you consider potential captures. This makes the game quick to play through.

You continue the game until either the adventurer Deck has been played through twice or the two dragons are captured, whichever happens first. At this point players add up their points to determine the winner.