Dragons Down
By Scott DeMers
Players: 1-4
Time: 45-60 min per player
Played 6 times, 3 co-op, 2 competitive, and 1 solo
Review by Jonathan Franklin
I entered the land of Dragons Down as a Pip, the halfling archer. I came with a long bow and 26 gold. After trekking through the plains, I moved to the mountains, which took some extra time, and finally arrived at the Keep. Although knights were guarding the Keep, I was permitted to enter and therein found a crone. Fortunately, she had five treasures, four items, and three missions available. I picked up a Potion of Energy at full price and some Leathers on a deep discount after haggling with the crone. She also gave me two missions to fulfill: to bring some materials to the Smith and to find all five sets of caves. After doing business with the crone at the Keep, leaving me broke, I left the knights, walked through a forest, and came to a fork in the road–I could go north to the Lonely Mountains or west to the Secret Dens. I chose to go west, as that offered the option to explore some caves.
The adventure continued as the halfling found items, fought some goblins, and fled a juvenile dragon. None of this was scripted. It happened to me through the magic of the board game Dragons Down, a distillation of the classic Magic Realm by Scott DeMers. In over thirty snappy turns, you too can find treasure, encounter monsters, complete missions, and earn legend points, the goal of the game.
Recent adventure games are pretty phenomenal, whether competitive like The Witcher: Old World or co-op like Thorgal the Board Game or Under the Sun (which we don’t play with a traitor). Taken in context, Dragons Down is like fine slow food in that it is important to consider the emergent narrative and do what you want to do in the environment as if you were a halfling archer, not a bunch of people staring at cardboard hexes min-maxing a game. It is also slow food in that if you try to speed through combat in particular, you will miss steps, and the game might feel too easy or hard as well as having less story. In the game as designed, if you take a risk and you get hurt because of it, it is a lesson you won’t soon forget.
I have played co-op and competitive versions several times each, but have not explored player vs. player because that is not our style. I also joined the amazing Discord channel where they have a great rules hotline where volunteer experts are standing by to help you through any rules quandaries you might have.
Image by Ric Van Dyke – this is about as compact as this game can be (solo mode)
- Emergent Narrative
I often have a summary of the rules here, but this time I am going to skip it and explain why. There are excellent written and video overviews (for example, see the Gaming Rules video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCE8kJphgLg , but for me, the rules are there to create the story, and it is enough to know that each player takes four actions per turn, and then there is a monster phase, and then it repeats. Actions are quite varied, and all are listed at the top of the player board. You can loot, explore, enchant, and do other cool things. In addition, you can modify certain die rolls by sneaking around or remaining alert, but these take actions.
When walking, you walk through terrain. When you explore, you are not sure what you will find, but each hex you explore will have some item or benefit placed on that tile. There are hidden paths, treasure to find, and even a few gates that let you move huge distances. You can get missions to take out monsters, kill the knights, or deliver goods. Some deliver boons while others gain you infamy and other benefits. In some ways, it feels like each game is a turn within Tales of the Arthurian Knights with much fiercer monsters. Your character takes on a certain nature as the missions you choose and situations you discover lead you to feel you are the character.
Note that these two cards tell you the health and other attributes of your character but that there is high variability with different combinations. Photo by Scott DeMers
- Nature of Combat
Many modern games either minimize combat down to a die roll and expedite the game as a whole, or create a whole game around combat, with it being termed a boss battler. Combat is a critical part of Dragons Down that consumes quite a bit of the game, but it is with the context of an adventure game and is not all-consuming. Monsters and characters are represented by poker chips, so mercifully no grey plastic. If there is an old-school part of Dragons Down, it is that there is a multistep process to follow to generate and interact with the ‘living world’ of Dragons Down. The monster phase of the game has two parts, monster activation and combat. Monster activation means which monsters appear, where on each tile they appear, whether they see you, and who they target. It is during this phase that you determine your attack and maneuver speed, which affects combat. Remember I mentioned that I was a halfling archer? This means I have a maximum attack speed of 3 and a maximum defense speed of 3, due to the clever way the designer created the race cards and the combat specialty cards. A human knight has an attack speed of 4 and a maneuver speed of 1. Health and other skills are also determined by how the two cards fit together.
Image by Eloy Munoz showing two spiders attacking a hero.
This is not Diablo. If you treat it as a hack-and-slash, you will die. Often, having a high maneuver speed is a way to avoid combat entirely by evading. Often a good choice, as players have 1-3 total health. If you choose to fight, you choose one weapon or spell to cast by allocating other cubes to it – more on magic later. After a series of dice rolls, with slight modifiers for armor and depending on where you placed your cubes, players and monsters might be wounded, and we resolve all attacks on the board. If monsters are not killed in two rounds, they heal up, and this phase is over. The process is not complicated, but it is a multistep process to activate monsters and then resolve each combat. If this level of granularity sounds overwhelming, you might want a simpler combat resolution system in another game.
Image by Eloy Munoz – note that almost all dice rolling is pairs of dice of the same color to resolve something. This is not a dice chucker in the traditional sense of the word.
- Use of Dice
There are lots of wonderful dice in the game, but they are not your friends. Almost every die roll involves rolling two dice and taking the worst result. Want to haggle? The crone might leave with all her goodies (that is why I paid full price for one of the items). Want to loot a site, the lower the roll, the better. Roll a 1 & 5, you get the 5. Just to explain a bit more, the treasure stacks might have two Deep Treasures and 3 (regular) treasures. The card stack is made with the two Deep ones on top, and you count down that many cards to get what you get. If someone has already taken a treasure, so there are only 4 in the stack and you roll a 2 & 5, you get nothing because there is no fifth card.
Image by Scott DeMers – note the color on the top of the mission and what it is asking you to do. Quite a variety!
This process is the same for searching for hidden paths and treasure locations and learning spells. The dice system is excellent, as it is not as if it is rolling a d20 or even 2d6. The results are contained and make sense. They are used in a different way for monster spawning, but that is also intuitive and seamless. In short, don’t consider this a dice game; it is a way of adding variability to encounters that simulate the chance in life, and whether you take the time to take the chance or do something else.
- Magic Systems
Quite a few races + skill combos you can choose have minimal to no magic use. In other words, they have speed cubes and might cubes. Some characters have magic abilities, and there are seven types of magic spells/items and 7 colors of cubes that align with them. This feels realistic, as one does not expect a druid to cast necromantic spells or the Spanish Inquisition. It is tough in that many items you find might not align with your type of magic, so you end up selling them (for far less than what they would normally cost) to get things you can use. It feels thematic, and there is a wide range of healing and attack spells. Magic is a subsystem you can choose to engage with or ignore.
- The Ostensible Goal
The goal of the game is to have the most Legend Points (LP) after 30 turns. You get LP for getting epic treasures (somewhat random), finding treasure sites (not looting them), discovering certain locations (somewhat random), learning spells, killing things, and completing missions. Legend Points can be gained for most of the things you want to do anyway, but don’t go in thinking that the winner is necessarily the best player. This game is about the journey, not the ending.
The game comes with a separate scenario booklet that has a broad range. including an introductory scenario, solo scenarios, epic scenarios, and multiplayer scenarios. In addition, the front of the rulebook describes Open Realm Sandbox (all tiles visible) and Explore the Realm (build the map as you go), so there are at least fifteen ways to play, and likely more on the website as the game gets official and fan expansions.
Photo by Scott DeMers
Conclusion
If you enter this game to maximize Legend Points and ‘win’, you will have missed the scenery along the way. The story about the time you hid from a dragon even though you had not been sneaking. The time you got the two best items from the crypt that you used to overcome the Giant. It is a sandbox adventure with a core set of rules designed to optimize your adventure. I have not touched on sections of the rule book, from outlaw tokens to curses to flying to ranged combat to each class’s special abilities.
If you can handle twenty pages of rules and some minutia when sequencing monster activation and combat, you are in for a real treat. Go forth and may epic tales fall your way.
