Playing the haul from Spiel!

Not really my cup of tea (pun intended). However, Amanda was keen on this one. I believe it’s actually based on a webcomic series, and certainly has some lovely whimsical artwork. It’s for 2-4 players and takes between 30 and 60 minutes to play.

We were told it was a convention exclusive edition, though the only difference from the regular edition was the box itself (white cover, they did have some original boxes available as well with the regular box art).

The game is basically a fairly standard deck-builder. You each get a dragon to look after, which involves ensuring they nap, play, eat and get groomed as required. Each dragon gets a special ability that allows them to draw extra cards from their deck the first time a certain card goes into your active set.

The game revolves around trying to build up synergies either by purchasing memories for the current season (spring/winter/ etc…) or items from the market. Doing so will allow you to draw more cards, to build up more tea-leaves needed to enhance your buying power to get cards either from the memories or the market that will score more VP at the end of the game. As memories are purchased (e.g. Going to the fair with your dragon in the summer) the seasons progress until two memories are bought in the final season and the game ends. Then it’s just down to calculating the total VP that the deck you’ve built has given you.

My thoughts? The art and the story-telling ties beautifully with the mechanics. You really feel like you are raising this young dragon and buying things to look after them, and even spend time during memories on unique events during this relationship. The core mechanics are decent enough, you can build up interesting synergies between different cards to trigger turns with a huge number of card draws, leading to big purchases. You do have to balance powerful cards vs high scoring cards, they aren’t always the same. If you focus too much on building a deck with lots of purchasing power, you might find you can’t use that power to actually buy enough high VP cards before the end of the game. That all being said, the minimal interaction between players, and fairly basic nature of the mechanics isn’t enough to be engaging for me personally. The theme and setting are also not my favourites. I don’t hate them, but it isn’t enough on its own to get me on board with ok game mechanics.

We have played this game a few times with friends, and the general conclusion is that it is “ok”.