Dragon Wars & some expansions

DragonWar is a classic RPG card game from Robert A. Kraus (also known as RAK) from about 1989.  It was a deck builder game before deck builder games really caught on.  And a kind of board game generator before that was a thing either.  Bob is one of the true good guys in the industry, and we used to get together ever year around ComicCon, including the year where I was helping him at his dealer table and I got grossly ill and vanished.  He's still doing cons with as much energy as ever, updating fans on Facebook as he goes from city to city.  He can sketch any of these characters any time, and at least 100 more, cranking out custom signed art cards on demand, baking weird resin creatures at home by the gross, you name it.

DragonWar was pioneering in that each card has three squares of a game board printed on them, so laying out the cards creates a fresh new game board layout each time you play.  Combine that with all the available expansions, and I have to say we had a lot of fun when I pulled out my box of these and played some games again.

You can also customize it to suit your style, time available, space available, and more.  I took one look at the available table space and decided to go with a 5x5 (25 spaces) layout instead of the basic 4x10 (40 spaces).  I figured the games would go a little faster, giving time to try more of those expansions.

 

The Start card and End card are fixed, and you deal out the cards in between to make your board game.  The basic game has you take a character card and start at 25 life points.  Put your piece on the game board, then take turns rolling dice and doing what the squares on the board say.  There is a small deck of Fate cards as well: in this deck, Life and Death cards are played immediately but you can keep Weapon and Treasure cards to be played later on.  It's simple, but unpredictable.  Expect wild ups and downs.  Gain 4 life, lose 5 (blood donor to the vampire), go back 10, fight a dragon, fight other players, go back to the start ... you name it, there's a space that has thought of it.

Anne died in our first game but there's an alternate rule where if you die you can choose to respawn at the beginning with 10 life points.  So she did, and almost caught up to me on the final stretch anyway since I was rolling all 1s and 2s and having crap luck.

For our second game, we added the Undersea expansion.  This adds 10 cards of an undersea realm, with the board-building rule that the cards have to be laid out in order (1 to 10) and players have to land on an Air space at least every third turn or go back to the start of the undersea section.  We played this with a small die set at 3, and thought of it like the air bubbles in Minecraft.  Next turn, 2 bubbles left if you don't hit an Air space, then 1, then back to the start.  A good game expansion should add new twists or new game mechanics without breaking the feel of the original games and this one is a winner. 

 

 

Here's Mango guarding the gates to Atlantis...

 

Next we played the Gypsy Caravan expansion.  This adds 4 entry cards into the layout, and a larger card that acts as its own side game.  If you land on a space that tells you to enter the Caravan, it will say to roll one or two times, or roll all the way through that side game.  Each box you land on, you are buying trinkets from the gypsies, so write down the numbers and use the reference card to play those trinkets later on.  Cross out the numbers when done.  The written numbers were less convenient than the little printed Fate cards but they make a nice chaotic addition.

 

We hit one snag with this set.  When you finish your run through the Caravan card you are supposed to return to the main game board on the first square on the card after the card that sent you to the Caravan.  And one of the entry cards had the very next space say Go Forward 4, which landed on the space saying Back to Start.  So we ended up going into the Caravan so many times, with so many numbers written down that I had to make a judgment call as say the Caravan has left town.  It was pretty hilarious pulling those cards.  We had plenty of numbers left to use.

 

It made me ponder other possible expansions and house rules that might add a way to defeat an entire card and eliminate it (flip it over) during the game.

Fun times.  DragonWar is a classic. Check out the DragonWar site here.