Players: 2-6
Age: 8+
Duration: +- 30 minutes
Distributor: Jumping Turtle Games
World of Draghan: Sneaky Ol’ Dragons – Card Game Review
Recently we took a look at one of Jumping Turtle Games’ new additions to their label. We turned ourselves into detectives in Detective Club, which proved to be a very entertaining experience. We loved finding out who the imposter in our midst was, or perhaps loved being the imposter ourselves. This time we turn to a more majestic theme with this card game that revolves around Sneaky Ol’ Dragons. We picked out the dragon we wanted to be, and went on a fairly creative and child-friendly adventure.
Contents
- 6 dragons
- 3 tokens
- 110 cards
- 2 big cards
The contents of the game are very basic, but they look decent enough. We didn’t immediately found ourselves loving the art style of the cards, but it had a certain charm that will entice both children and adults. The dragons, however, we feel that they could have used a bit more work in terms of their design. The extra bits included in the box look a bit simplistic, but they do the job they have to do.
The big cards, that serve as the playing field after the finish, were poorly designed as the dragon pawns were actually too big to be properly placed on the tiny tiles. This felt quite tedious, especially when more dragons had crossed the finish line.
Mechanics
In Sneaky Ol’ Dragons it’s all about crossing the finish line with your dragon first. If more dragons cross the finish line during the same turn, it’s the one who crosses the line the furthest who wins. The game ‘board’ is decided by either picking the normal numbered cards, which have no special options to them, or picking the hazardous mountain track which has tiles that trigger certain events.
The game is pretty much all about performing actions during your round, be it with your own cards, or the cards that are chosen for you by other players. The actions can involve moving tiles, swapping cards, banning actions, performing tasks and so on. Most of the game is straightforward, but it’s actually quite fun that the rest of the players can also influence your round. The game is just a simple board game, albeit in card game shape, that replaces the dice with the actions on the cards which you have to flip in sequence, once each turn, during each of the different rounds. The game stops when the last card of a round is flipped, after a dragon crosses the finish line.
Basically you’re playing the game in a matter of minutes, and the rules actually overcomplicate things, making you read through them several times. When you look at the offset of the game, things become clear rather quickly.
While the base game is simple, and it can differ between the easy mode of play, which involves the standard cards and no hazards on the playing field, and the hard mode, which adds hazards and special cards, there are many variants you can try when playing this game. This adds a bit of extra play value to the game, which is always a plus. Then again, if the game doesn’t stand tall on its own, that’s not really a positive thing either.
Luck or Strategy?
The game involves both, as you have a tiny influence on what happens during your turn, but a big part of your actions per round are actually chosen by the other players. This means that more than often you don’t know what to expect for the coming turn(s). We lean a bit more towards the luck aspect of the game, but you do have some say in what happens, or what happens to the other players.
Conclusion
World of Draghan: Sneaky Ol’ Dragons is a fairly fun game for young and old, but it didn’t wow us. The game has amusing mechanics, the cards have entertaining tasks for you to perform and the many different variants will keep you entertained for a while, but it’s not really a memorable experience.
World of Draghan: Sneaky Ol’ Dragons - Card Game Review,
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