The first rumble of thunder

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 Nick and I have been designing. To be honest, all the heavy lifting has been done by Nick, who is the co-creator of Conquerors and Spacefarers, 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.

- posted by Dave Morris