A Thunder of Dragons

Tension and excitement fill the room as A Thunder of Dragons begins! Players take on the role of these mighty flying reptiles, soaring above a sprawling 15 by 15 playing board filled with raging rivers, perilous mountain ranges, treacherous swamps and dark forests. Castles, villages, towns, and abbeys are dotted about the game board. Such settlements offer rich pickings for the dragons. But beware! These havens of prosperity are guarded by garrisons of bowmen, knights, foot soldiers and wizards alongside powerful heroes. Bigger and richer settlements are even more fiercely defended. Players swoop in to pillage these strongholds for their treasure and relics: coins, jewels and magical artifacts of great power. They will need crafty tactics to bypass or obliterate the defensive units that stand in their way or else they risk being driven off into the wilderness to lick their wounds. As dragons claim victory they return to their lair triumphant and laden with booty, growing ever richer and stronger. But other players won’t just sit back and watch; they can unleash potent spells from afar in an effort to thwart dragon attacks and aid NPC defenders.

A Thunder of Dragons is a board game I've been designing with Nick Henfrey, co-creator of Conquerors and Spacefarers. (To be honest, all the heavy lifting has been done by Nick while I chip in with suggestions about game balance.) The prototype is a lot of fun to play, and I'm not saying that just because I won our first full game.

You start by shuffling and laying out terrain and settlement cards. This ensures the game board is different every time. Players establish their lairs and can either walk (slow but easy) or fly (fast but uses up power), picking on settlements which they can plunder for treasure, captives (princesses and princes too; no gender bias from us), and spells. You can hold cards to add to your hoard or hand them in to increase power. 

It's really rare for an early prototype of a game to play as smoothly as this. Normally what happens is you start fitting pieces into the rules jigsaw and it's all going well till you hit some part of the design that just refuses to fit with the rest. I've been struggling with something like that in my Jewelspider RPG design (nearly cracked it, though) and I thought Nick and I would have similar problems as we had with finessing the Zombomba boardgame. But no -- we laid out the map tiles and got playing and it all came together like Smaug swallowing a hobbit. One gulp.

My victory in the first game was a bit of a fluke. I began by attacking an abbey. Little did I realize that abbeys are really well-defended and when you're starting out there's a high risk of being driven off and/or being badly injured -- and if you use up all your power in the attack you'll have to try and get back to your lair on foot while pursued by the settlement's defenders and reinforcements. Luckily I survived and carried off a major relic, putting me way out in front. But even that didn't secure a sure victory, because the other players can see who is ahead and will team up to harass them with spells.

As you can see in the picture above, the dragon playing pieces are 3D printed models, making the game as visually appealing and tactile as it is fun to play. But the frustrating thing is we just don't know what to do with it. Patreon and Kickstarter would never raise enough for us to be able to sell physical sets of the game, and nobody is willing to shell out for PDFs of a boardgame. These days, the successful crowdfunded games are all by established games publishers. But if anyone out there can suggest a company we can team up with to turn A Thunder of Dragons from fantasy into reality, please shout it out in the comments.

You can follow A Thunder of Dragons on Facebook and Twitter.

An adventure in a box. On cards. With an app.

Looking for something to keep the kids occupied? Or the parents, come to that? How about Expedition, which is billed as a "lightweight roleplaying game". That's not strictly accurate -- it's more of an app-plus-card game for playing gamebooks with friends. Hmm, that reminds me of something...

It looks like the gamebook is at least partly procedurally generated with some authored content. Personally I'd prefer to play either a real roleplaying game with improv and left-field surprises (see below) or else a card game (try this or this), rather than a hybrid of the two. But in this lockdown or the next I've got plenty of time to change my mind about that.

A game of perilous longing

I don't always play card games, but if I did I'd reach for a Dos Equis* and settle down to an evening of something like Cultist Simulator, the dazzlingly gorgeous new story-weaving game currently being run on Kickstarter by Alexis Kennedy.

Mr Kennedy, as you may already know, is one of the originators of Fallen London, and it looks like his new project will match that for eerie beauty, stylish design, and prose that is both numinous and luminous.

In the designer's own words:

"Cultist Simulator is a narrative game that lets you play a seeker after unholy mysteries, in a 1920s-themed setting of hidden gods and secret histories. Perhaps you're looking for knowledge, or power, or beauty, or revenge. Perhaps you just want the colours beneath the skin of the world.

"There's some Cthulhu Mythos in here. But there's less cosmic nihilism than Lovecraft, and more perilous longing. The setting also looks to the novels of Roger Zelazny, Mary Renault and Umberto Eco; to Anglo-Saxon poetry like 'The Wanderer' and 'The Dream of the Rood', and mediaeval Welsh texts like 'The Battle of the Trees'." 

You can back Cultist Simulator here. And come back on Friday if you fancy a debate about role-playing styles. Looking ahead, next week we'll be going back to Victorian times with a tale of witchcraft and curios, and with more goodies coming thick and fast through the autumn, including Powered By The Apocalypse, an Arthurian sci-fi romance, the high-risk profession of the demonologist, more Questworld, and even a free gamebook before the year is out. All your gaming longings gratified here, folks.

(* Actually a Singha, but it doesn't fit the meme. )

Conquerors rules

That was the last page of the book, the idea being that if you reached that page it meant that you'd won. But you don't need to know about that, because you're not going to be playing the book version. The card rules are as follows:

1. Each player shuffles their deck of 15 cards, placing the cards face down beside them.

2. The players each take their top card and reveal it to the opponent.

3. Each can study the other's card, but when either player is satisfied he knocks on the table and says, "Ready." The players then take up their cards again.

4. Each player now decides which of the characters on the card to send into battle. He turns the card (face down) so that character is nearest to his opponent.

5. The cards are now turned over and compared. The winner discards his current card and draws the next card from his deck. The loser retains the card he has just played to use again next round. If there is a draw, the player who is behind (ie, has discarded fewer cards so far) gets to discard - a levelling factor. If there is a draw when the players are neck and neck, both discard.

6. Play now continues to the next round as before. The loser from last round uses the same card as before, but he may choose a different character on the card to go into battle.

7. The winner is the first player to discard all his cards.

The game is, as I hardly need to tell you, Rock Paper Scissors only in a five-way matrix:
Hope you enjoy it. And if you do, or if you can suggest improvements, that's the comments button right below. The illustrations are by the ever-brilliant Russ Nicholson, of course.

Conquerors cards 3

The last five cards today. If you're planning to try it out, you'll need to cut these out and stick them onto square pieces of white card. (Oh well, it could be black card if you must - all the same color, that's what I'm getting at.)

Conquerors cards 2

Five more cards tomorrow, and the rules on Friday.

Conquerors cards 1

The first five Conquerors cards today. Rules to come at the end of the week.

Conquerors

The enemy is close at hand. The time of the final battle draws near.

Your own forces and those of your foe face each other across the dusty plain. Sunlight glints like droplets of fresh blood on bronze shields and polished armour. Swords and spear-tips bristle above the ranks.

Horns and war-drums sound. The troops advance grimly. Each warrior has sworn to fight and even die on your behalf. As their general, you must make sure their sacrifices are not in vain.

To beat your opponent you must strike through to his fortress. Your armies are equally matched in strength, but that is not the only factor that will count in this battle. Luck and skill are even more important.

So, floridly, ran the intro for a series of little books I devised in the late '90s with my schoolfriend Nick Henfrey. (I don't mean we were at school in the late '90s, that was much earlier; I just want you to know that the RGS Guildford is to blame.)

They were square-format books, quite short, and each page looked a bit like the image above. Here's how they were played:

Find someone else with a Conquerors book and challenge them to a duel.

You both start at the first spread in the book, where you will see there are four characters to choose from. Holding the book up in front of you, decide secretly which of the four you are sending into battle. When you and your opponent have both chosen, you hold out your books to each other with the character you have chosen facing towards the other person. Reciting your character's catchphrase is optional.

Now compare the characters to see who wins. For example, say you chose Greebo the Hog and your opponent chose Sir Grim of Grinn. Sir Grim is CAVALRY and Greebo's results table shows that he beats CAVALRY opponents, so you have won that round. The winner moves on to the next spread while the loser remains on the same spread.

Both of you then decide which character to send into the next round of battle as before. Last round's loser can choose the same character as before if he wishes, or one of the others on that spread.

If you draw with your opponent, both of you move on to the next spread. The winner is the first to win through to the end of their book.

As you see there, we called the series Conquerors (like conkers, geddit?) and although the prototype was done using fantasy characters, we intended you could have all sorts of themes: Wild West, superheroes, horror, gladiators, aliens, and so on.

The reason you never saw a Conquerors book is that publishers, almost without exception, hated the idea. One said to me, "I cannot conceive of any reason why we would ever publish such a thing." The exception was Richard Scrivener at Puffin - the only male editor who we pitched it to, indeed possibly the only man in a senior position in children's publishing back then. Richard saw that boys of 6-10 years would have a lot of fun with something like this in the playground. No, it wasn't getting them to read Sir Walter Scott, nor to abandon their doubtless woeful and (so it was thought then) culturally programmed interest in violence, gusto and gore. It was Top Gear for small boys.

Unfortunately, though Richard and I worked at it, we couldn't get the costings right and the series never got started. By that time Jamie and I had started working at Eidos on our RTS game Plague (later Warrior Kings) and so I didn't have the time to chase up Conquerors further.

Anyway, although designed as books, Conquerors can equally well be played as a card game. And, as many readers of Fabled Lands and Dragon Warriors now have sons or nephews of the right age, I'm going to post up some cards over the next few days and you can give it a whirl.