Dragon Lords: The Battle of Darion

Great Game!

This is a fantastic deck builder where you can create a fantastic army of Good or Evil that can include Neutral units. There is a dice rolling element as well where you can be rolling a LOT of dice. Really fun game. Has a great solo variant as well.

So frustrated, backed this as it was advertised as 4 player option. After spending over an hour and 45 minutes trying to set up the game for 4 player and being unable to do so with lack of "0" value cards to add to decks. In the manual it says for 4 players it is best to play with 2 sets, but I challenge that to be instead should likely read "REQUIRED" to have 2 sets. After this frustration we didn't even get to play the game. I'll try with 2 players soon to find out if it was a TOTAL waste or not. ========update after playing 2 player============= I moved it from 2 stars to 3 star rating. Two players we actually played. It took us about 1.5 hours to play and 30 minutes to setup the decks. Honestly the game isn't horrible, but the book is the worst I've ever seen! If any play testing had been done and taken seriously or if someone writes a better one and post it, I'll likely like the game much better.

Skirmish based deck and dice game. The Wolflord Games site has a deck builder site that calculates your drafted decks and lets you print them out.

Great production. The game needed some more development IMO. Some cards seemed highly OP, while others weren't. The rulebook was not designed for beginners which made it really hard to set up and play. That rulebook needs to be reworked and revised.

I backed this game early on and really love the idea of a dragon game, call me a sucker. I also loved playing the original SW card game, back before it got simplified, as I like a game with rich content, and that is what I found with Darion. It is for sure not a game for young kids for that reason, the 12 yr old rating is legit, as its takes some brain cycles to get this running. That said once I did its I love about it, the well thought out complexity... its super fun with lots of nuance that my son and I really enjoyed.

If I had to say one bit of constructive criticism, is that I really did need to watch the videos to get a feel for the setup at first. The manual is good, and deep but it just took that hand holding found in the video to help us get over the hump. Once I did that then the manual is really tight resource for reference and checking what does what. So save yourself the pain and just watch it at the start.

I got 2 boxes (which is what you need for an effective 4 player game) but haven't tried that yet... when I do i will update this review with my thoughts. For now tho... my son and I are going to flying into battle and try and slay each others dragons like all good father/son afternoons should be like :)

Best engaged as an LCG... a game consists of 2 (or more) players using pre-built decks to fight. In theory, a set has everything needed for two players to sit down and draft decks to play against each other... in practice though, the deckbuilding is complex enough that I couldn't actually reccomed that. The game is best enjoyed with each player having their OWN set and using it to contruct a deck in advance, on their own... the deckbuilding process is simply too long and involved to be done quickly... an initial read-through of all the card options took me hours, an entire day, in essence. About the best you could do with a single set would be for the owner to loan it to an opponent so they could study and build a deck from it in advance. This is only more true because the rather exacting standards of building the deck makes the process even more complicated if two players are splitting the card pool... Spell and Order decks are the largest issue with this, needing to match (not meet a max or min, match exactly) both a point count AND a card count (with NO mechanic for even conceding to "short changing" yourself) makes it actively burdensome to balance both those numbers so precisely while splitting a limited build-pool. This doesn't make the game "bad" or "impractical" entirely, but it DOES limit how it can be enjoyed... in essence, a play group needs to plan in advance to play it, and either have muliple sets or live in a shared household. ASSUMING this is fine with your playgroup though, the game is quite good... so it's a bit niche in who it'd be a good fit for, but a fine game for anyone who is in that niche, I'd say.

In essence, the game plays like similar games... Android/Netrunner's previous edition would likely be the most popular contemporaneous example. This includes the facet that the game involves both luck and skill, but may favor the latter more than is desireable... as much as it's a WORSE offence to have too much RNG, no amount of lucky breaks on the dice will make a player win if they built a much worse deck than their opponent, and the gap in "quality" between decks can be extreme... while it's a shared and point graded card pool, failing to make proper strategic synergies creaps a massive gulf in efficacy. It's not as ruinous as it was for Netrunner, but novice players will need to work hard to compete with more proficient ones.

The game is simpler and faster to teach or learn from others than it would seem glancing at text-covered cards and a 40+ page rulebook... really it's mostly a simple core system, told patiently in large font text, with a fair amount of appendixes and variant rules, and the card have rules that are explained in their text as the means of adding complexity to a straightforward core ruleset. It could probably be taught inside 5 minutes. That said, learning it on one's own via reading the book is considreably more laborious... the deliberate formatting of the rulebook is good for clairty and ease of understanding, but makes for a plodding read. Also, despite being easy to understand and having a fair amount of erratta style appendixes and glossaries, there are still a few core rules that aren't very definitively and clearly defined, and a LOT of cards where how to interpret their unique rules is very nebulous.

The game doesn't particularly fit back into it's box well, the tokens not fitting back in if bagged but being a real mess left loose. As a regrettable paradox, there also aren't particularly enough tokens... biggest offenders are shield tokens and mana tokens. The easiest fix would have been making one side "1" and the other "3" or something of the sort, but as is, you'll need to homebrew some form of fix if you intend on splitting one set even 2 ways, because it's a real problem.

While this is a fair sized list of complaints, the game is not, to reiterate, bad at all... in terms of what it's designed for, it's very profcient... a meaty strategic duel that has a lot of heavyweight tactical depth at a humble price tag, a portable box, isn't much of a table hog, and even plays decently quick... not "fast", but not dragging either (at least assuming decks were built in advance). Regrettably, my own situation makes it less than ideal... I do not share a household with anyone in my playgroup, we have no other copies outside mine, and we've a different (let alone somewhat uncommon) game of this sort we'd be more likely to play if we were inclined to struggle through to pursue this sort of experience. Will likely seeks to liquidate my copy, but could be very enjoyable to the right group (even if it's not particularly mine) and I don't regret supporting it.