Friday, October 11, 2024

Oh! This game isn’t meant for me!

Dragon Hero absolutely baffled me until I realized it was designed for younger kids. Only after I realized that it really was as simple as it seemed to be AND that was a feature, not a bug, did the game makes sense.

It is an eighteen-card soliatire or cooperative game. You build a column of prison cities where dragons are trapped. You then use movement cards to move the dragons of fire, thunder and water along the sides to free the trapped dragons.

Each prison city has two symbols, one on each side. If the two dragons that match the symbols end a turn on the appropriate sides, you free the imprisoned dragon. You have a hand of nine movement cards that you move the dragons up and down and side to side. Free all the dragons before you run out of cards.

So here’s the thing. You choose the initial placement of the dragons. The movement cards have two values each (0,1 or 2) and you can choose either value to move each dragon. And you have access to all the cards at the start. 

My first play was the base game with a column of three cities. And I won in three turns. 

I was sure I had missed something. The game was too simple, too easy. And what I had missed was that I wasn’t the demographic. Dragon Hero is for young children, a game designed to help introduce gaming mechanics.

There are variations, having the column of cities go up to six cards and having dragons blocked from landing on ‘opposing’ symbols. Those do add some more thinking to the game. Maybe even enough to lose (?) Still, even at its most complex, Dragon Hero is a simple game.

I have enjoyed Dragon Hero. It’s been a change of pace from play testing and Roll and Writes. It’s been a distraction from Hurricane Milton. However, for me as a gamer, it doesn’t add much.

However, I think that, in the world of children’s games, Dragon Hero is dandy. It gives a place to make deliberate choices and an environment to manipulate. At the same time, it’s not that taxing or long so it shouldn’t be too frustrating.

Dragon Hero fulfills its mission statement.

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