Dragonarium is the fourteenth game from Taiwan-based publisher Wonderful World Board Games, but their first Kickstarter project. It’s a quick 1–4 player tile placement game that, at first glance, looks like a combination of Kingdomino, with its central starting tile and dual-terrain tiles to place around it within a 5×5 space, and Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, in which you can build up as well as out, and critters on top of the tiles affect play. But there’s a bit more to it than all that.
Game Play
Each player starts with a player board, using either the common Library side or one of the asymmetric ‘B’-sides’ (which offer different benefits and challenges), and places a randomly chosen five-space starting tile on the spot indicated on the map. During play, everyone takes turn to draft a two-space territory tile from the ‘planning space’ and places it on their board, the aim being to maximise the number of connected squares of each territory. The territory spaces come in four element flavours: fire (red), water (blue), air (green) and royal (gold)—the last one scoring extra points at the end. Each territory square contains one or more spaces for element stones, which will be populated later in the turn. If all of a square’s stone spaces have been filled, that square is ready to hatch a dragon egg, which makes it available to be built on top of.
As well as horizontal extent, the final score is affected by height, so it pays to place tiles on top of others, and ‘pillar tiles’ are provided to support the loose end to ensure the new tile is flat. (For the sake of brevity, I’m skipping the details of how you acquire pillars.) When you lay a tile on another, you remove the element stones and get to add a dragon anywhere on the board, but it must match the element type of the covered space, and you can have only one dragon per square (unless you’re using the B-side map that allows for two). The neat thing about dragons is that they make the space they’re sitting on behave as if it has both the element type of the space itself and the type of the dragon, so can count as both when totting up the final score. Once placed, dragons can’t be moved, which does mean you’re ruling their spaces out from being built on later.
Circling the board is an ‘assistant track,’ and the final part of a player’s turn is to choose one element type, count the number of connected squares of that colour, and taking the largest of those, move the assistant token around the track by that number of steps. At each step, a stone of the chosen element is placed on one matching space in the adjoining row or column within the map.
Once all players have taken a turn, the planning space is replenished, and play continues until no more territory tiles are left.
Scoring is based on the largest contiguous region of each element type, including types of both dragons and the spaces they’re on, multiplied by the height of the highest level of the corresponding tiles, then add another three for each royal dragon. Highest score wins.
A solo mode is provided as well, in which a tile is discarded from the planning space at the end of each turn, as if it had been taken by an opponent.
Final Words
Dragonarium is a colourful, pretty game (I do like the dragon meeples), and offers a neat twist on the tile-laying mechanism with the layering of element stone placement and dragon placement strategy. If you have several tile-laying games, do you need this one? Possibly not, but it is definitely worth taking a look at. (On the other hand, if you do have several, then it’s pretty clear you like the genre, so what’s one more, hmm…?)
There’s more information at Wonderful World Board Games or on Kickstarter, where you can also find the rulebook and a pointer to a Tabletop Simulator mod to try the game out.
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
