Vikings of Dragonia

Played this at KublaCon, where it won the Board Game Design Contest. As a game designer who got third place in that design contest, it take a lot for a game to impress me. I am now a backer on Kickstarter.

Beautiful, playful art. Easy rules, quick gameplay, and relatively high strategy.

This is a rather light area control game with cute artwork, modular setup, take that! mechanic, and some hand management. There's nothing super innovative here, although I wouldn't say it's a bad game, I just think Eight Minute Empire overshadows it, as in this game I think I would pursue a similar strategy each time whereas in EME I can play somewhat differently, both have modular boards, and EME plays shorter without losing the light area control experience.

Building up a hand of fireballs seems to be pretty important to prevent your guys from getting decimated early. Turn order can be pretty important. The strength of the cards in the deck have a very wide variety, from a single fireball card to a card that just straight up gives you a point, and I wish there wasn't that much discrepancy. There's a lot of seesawing back and forth of who is ahead and I imagine it could get sloggy if everyone is pretty evenly matched (the game should still eventually end due to being able to buy VPs but the game I think would overstay its welcome). I wish having multiple units in a space was more of an advantage.

A very light war-game with quick game play and under an hour play time.