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After a long day adventuring, why not take the initiative and sit yourself down for a critically important roll at one of Waterdeep’s most famous establishments – The Yawning Portal.
Dungeons & Dragons: The Yawning Portal (hereafter just ‘Yawning Portal’ to save me typing and you reading) is a 1-4 player game from Avalon Hill who’s other titles include Betrayal At House On The Hill, HeroQuest and Risk Legacy to name but a few. At its simplest, Yawning Portal is a basic manipulation and matching game which is easy enough to pick up. But there’s a moderate amount of sophistication that goes along with it, where some crafty moves based on the right action selection can quickly turn things in your favour.
Setup
To begin, place the modular board in the centre of the table, including a small table extender piece for each player above one (so a three player game has two inserts). Separate the four hero card decks into piles based on their respective backs, shuffle, deal one to each player and then place the decks face-down on the marked spots at the far ends of the table. Take the starting food pieces from the box and set them out on the extender pieces in the centre of the table in any order you choose, though they must all be adjacent – no spaces.
Shuffle the objective cards and deal five face up in the centre – these are communal ‘first to…’ cards for players to score that aren’t replenished. Finally, give each player a set of four coloured action tiles, placing them with the food symbol side face-up to start. There’s also a reference card for anyone who wants one, but that’s basically it.
One of the great things here is that the gems you’ll score for placing heroes at the table come in their own lift-out mini box so there isn’t a lot of unbagging stuff along the way, making the setup time pretty quick.
Sit Down & Dig In
As I’ve said, scoring points is essentially done through a pattern matching game, but the main core mechanism you’ll be using to take turns is action selection. Each player has four tiles that correspond to one of the four different types of food. Red is your classic Smoked Ham, green is Vegetable Platter, yellow is Tankard of Ale and blue is a delicious looking plate of Quippers and Chips.
Each tile is double sided, and when you’ve taken the action that’s showing, you flip it over to reveal a different set of actions.
Tiles have between one and three things that you can do to manipulate what you see on the table in front of you, including playing, removing and drawing cards, adding, removing or swapping food tokens, gaining bonus potions and swapping gems. You have to be able to take all actions showing and you have to follow them all completely in order, otherwise you need to choose a different tile.
Helpfully the actions on the reverse are shown with small icons at the bottom so you’ll always know what’s next.
To rack up the gems (thematically, what weary heroes are paying you with for the food) you need to take some “play a card” actions, which are often handily coupled with “play a food token” actions.
Each hero card has 1-4 symbols across the top that correspond to the different food types you can play. If you manage to play a card into a seat at the table that matches some of those symbols, you’ll take a coloured gem for each match – not a bad day’s work. However, if you can perfectly match what the hero needs, not only do you get all the gems, you also gain a lucrative Perfect Match Bonus (or PMB) as indicated in the top-right of the card. This could be an extra gem, a white diamond (a wild gem that must be assigned one of the four main colours when you take it), a card or even a combination of those things.
If you trigger a PMB then you flip the card face-down, revealing its gem type on the back – we’ll see the significance of this in a moment. If you can’t make a perfect match when you play the card, that’s fine too – you might be able to manipulate the table by swapping food tokens around to get everything just-so for the twitchy looking Barbarian who was seated a few minutes ago. At that point, you trigger the PMB, take the benefit and flip the card.
Each card also has an ability that you’ll activate when played. This might include flipping the other tiles you didn’t use this round, moving food icons, discarding face-up cards from the table, or removing face-down heroes.
Play essentially continues like this until both end spaces of the table have food tokens on. The player that triggers the end game finishes their turn, and every other player has final turn, where they must take an action if possible, even if it would be detrimental to their score.
So How Do You Score?
This is where Yawning Portal steps it up a bit. Each player scores for each colour, multiplying the number of gems by the number of cards showing that gem symbol (including the four decks themselves – basically ensuring that each gem is always worth at least a point each). In our house, this is referred to as “Bunny Kingdom Rules” after the bunnies x spires scoring in that game.
With this knowledge, the game’s layer of strategy comes to the fore. If your opponents are heavily investing in acquiring gems of particular colour, it becomes in your interest to limit the number of face-down cards that match that colour, and so reducing the overall multiplier for each gem.
In the early part of the game, I’d say there’s a limited amount of value you can get from that – you’re more likely to be maximizing the multiplier for your own gems. But people’s strategies will become clearer, and the tile actions to remove cards, the hero abilities to change the board up, and the canny swaps to trigger a Perfect Match Bonus can all be crucial. In the first game I played, I ended up with the final turn and managed to simultaneously remove a red card from the table and play a perfectly matched blue to have a big final shift on the scores.
You also score five points for each objective you were the first to complete, and this is indicated on the bottom of the card for an easy reminder.
What’s On The Specials Board?
There are a few things I really like here. First and foremost is how tactile the game is. Each of the four food types has its own molded pieces which feel great when you’re playing them and look fab set out on the table. Similarly, the five types of gems are all different shapes and sizes, and they’re all pretty chunky so have a great feel in your hand.
It’s pretty easy to learn and I think you can grasp the basics of it with in a few minutes. Learning how and when to best mix up the board to move things in your favour needs more thought and probably a good degree of adaptability in-game
Final Thoughts
It’s fun, and I think that’s always a positive thing to be able to say about something that you’re going to spend 30 odd minutes doing. On one hand I like that it’s basic and uncomplicated but with that, I don’t think it massively stands out.
I suspect if you have a more-than-passing acquaintance with Dungeons & Dragons, then you’ll appreciate the character card art a little more, and the fact that particular card abilities are tied into particular classes from the famous RPG.
How often would I choose it over something else on my shelf, I’m not sure. I do know that the 150+ chunky pieces are a big draw, and having something I can get into quickly is a plus point. I think maybe it’s the ‘gotcha’ element of the last bits of table manipulation that can really mix it up at the last that has me hesitating more, but equally perhaps that’s right on theme for a D&D game where anything can happen.
I do think The Yawning Portal is a great introduction into a kind of ‘changing economy' style game where there’s a kind of market for things that fluctuate in value, and the second layer of strategy makes you think more than you first expect to.
