For all the Dragonslayer tie-in merch out there, it surprises me that there is just one board game. It is both interesting and underwhelming.

So, the bulk of the game sees you moving your mage around the board from settlement to settlement, accumulating items and companions. You can only carry an amount of stuff equal to the number of people accompanying you. When you’re done moving your mage, you move a company of soldiers to harry the other players, potentially killing them and removing them from play. Once you get enough stuff, you can go to the dragon’s cave and do battle.

This part is both neat and frustrating. You get a big play mat and put all your tiles in the appropriate places. Then you put the dragon tiles in the appropriate places to determine the conditions of the battle. Then you crunch a bunch of numbers on both sides, plug them into a combat matrix and…see which of you dies. I really love the big table and the placing the tiles and such. I really hate that a multiple hour game really comes down to a climax of looking up a result on the equivalent of a multiplication table. It’s a weird choice, but then, that’s true of just about everything surrounding Dragonslayer.

All the bits are nice as is the map. The cover is a bit strange, with all that copy on it, but you get a nice view of Vermithrax Pejorative, so I can’t complain too much.