Dragons Down board game

 

So, Dragons Down is a really long game to play. We started around 8pm and finished up some time after 1 AM. Yet in its way it was a fun enough game. We played scenario 4 which saw us declare at the start of the game what we hoped to achieve, gold, fame, spells and or epic treasures. It reminded me of the old careers board game. 

So we dealt out the tiles and took turns laying them out to create our board. My opponent wound up with all three of the civilization tiles, which I thought was something of an advantage, but in the end it was only sort of an advantage. Take a look at the board, note how we managed to divide the board making it difficult to move east west. I started the game in the lower left tile, where the monster is in the picture. It might be tough to see, but if you can expand the image you will see that I can only advance on the six tiles to the left, then I hit a dead end in the caves to the far left. I could not reach the actual civilization in the civilization tiles even though I could at least touch the Sanctuary tile. To go north or east I would have to go south and slowly trudge through the mountain tiles! I chose not to do that. My opponent had far more tles that he could travel through and explore, many options. Thankfully I had luck on my side.

My hero

My opponent

So, while I did not have any easily accessible civilization tiles I did get lucky with sites.  At one point my opponent revealed a site, but because of the board layout he was unable to explore it, but I was able to and did. I also got lucky by finding two sites in one tile, with another right next door. This led to a lot of looting, which helped with my pregame victory conditions, as did the fame in actually locating these sites.

He did manage to get close to my hero, but this also meant that he was too far away to get back to civilization before the end of the game

I ran into some challenges, in this case 13 enemies ganged up on me, eight Orcs and 5 juvenile dragons!

For maybe half of the game I had two curses on me courtesy of two epic treasures.. One prevented me from sneaking or going on alert, this made it harder to hide from monsters.  The other curse was a monster magnet, that meant if any monsters were rolled for any surrounding tile, I would see those monster show up in my tile. What a revolting development that was.

In the end I was able to dodge (hide) from most of the encounters, but I did fight two epic battles that drained me a lot. Thankfully I had enough wounds/cubes to absorb most of the damage, but it was close. Fortunately I was able to retreat from the enemies to lick my wounds, and spent three turns just healing and hoping for no wandering monsters to find me, they did not.

So in the end, while my opponent suffered a penalty I was able to touch part of a civilization tile and not take any penalty when I retired. In the end it was all the treasure sites that gave me the victory. Out of the four points that we had to spend before the start of the  game I had put two in fame and two in epic treasures. I never did get any more money nor spend any money than what I started with. As for spells I found three near the end and never had a chance o learn any of them.