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Dragon's Gold

Players: 3 to 6
Age: Blank and up
Playing Time: 30 Minutes
Publisher: Eurogames Descartes USA
Price: $17.95
Rating: 3.5 of 10

Review by Brutilus

Beneath the somewhat comical box top, Dragon's Gold is far too serious for its own good. It combines elements of combat, greed, and bargaining strategy while almost forgetting humor and fun. The basic game doesn't use magic items and was so boring that we almost didn't finish the first game.

Game Components

The game comes packaged in a small box for easy transport. Everything is fairly well made and looks like it will survive many playing sessions.

There is a bag of painted & lacquered wood tokens that are treasure markers. They are brightly colored, but you may have some difficulty differentiating between the gold and the yellow in a room that isn't brightly lit.

Treasure screens are included to hide your treasure from the other players that also act as reference cards for scoring. They are made of a good heavy board stock.

There are 3 decks of cards: warriors for each player, magic items, and dragons. (More on these later.)

There is also a timer for the market place & hoard negotiation, treasure tokens in a cloth bag, and rule book.

Game Play
Players are set against a host of dragons who did nothing more than gather treasure (... and eat peasants). The dragon cards are nicely drawn and list the dragon's strength, visible treasure, and hidden treasure.

Each player has 4 fighters to use in their battle against the foul beasts: a male knight (4), a female knight(3), a thief(2), & a wizard(1). (Very Gauntlet-esque, no?) Each character has a value representing their strength. As you can see, the thief and wizard are very weak, but they have special abilities that make up for the fact that they are wusses. (More on that later...) When the total values of the attacking fighters is greater than or equal to the dragon's strength, the dragon is defeated and cut throat portion of the game begins.

All players who helped to kill the dragon now get to argue over who gets what part of the treasure. Players are only allowed to bargain for the current treasure, not for "future considerations" or items already in an opponent's swag bag. They aren't allowed to form alliances, either. If the players can't come to an agreement on the distribution within the time limit, all treasure is discarded and nobody gets anything.

The thief and wizard's special abilities assist the players in their quest for loot. The wizards automatically get to take one red token, or magic item, from the treasure of any dragon they assist in killing before the timer is started. They could be real jerks about screwing everybody out of treasure if they refuse to agree to any settlement. After all, they already got theirs.

The thief allows a player to steal a piece of treasure from any player. This also happens whether or not there is an agreement on the rest of the treasure.

The magic items add a layer of complexity, and sometimes humor, to the game. There's nothing quite like a good stinking cloud reference to amuse gamers. Most of the items are fairly unoriginal, but they saved the game from being unplayable. I like the way they implemented the Invisible Hand card most of all. It adds a bit of a manual dexterity requirement.

Overall, this game suffers from repetitive game play and a somewhat uninteresting premise. I love fantasy and combat games, but this doesn't have enough of either. I think the only reason they chose combating dragons as the backdrop was that if they made this game about the corporate world, it would be too depressingly realistic.

Dragon's Gold is available from Fun Again Games.

All images are property of Descartes Eurogames USA. Article copyright 2003 MillionairePlayboy.com