by Ed Fortune
Dungeons and Dragons: The Yawning Portal is a game set in a place familiar to fantasy adventurers of all types; the tavern. In this game, you don’t take the role of a brave adventurer; you’re a tavern keeper trying to keep hungry heroes happy and get paid.
The board depicts the tavern, and food tokens are placed down the middle of the board. You then play heroes from your hand and match characters to the available food. This gets you gems, which are added up at the end of the game to score points. The sort of actions you can take each turn depends on your previous actions. Each player has four’ action tiles’, food-themed things that let you place tokens, put heroes into your hand etc. Once used, you flip it over, and it has a slightly different set of actions. So you can’t just ‘pick one thing and hope it works’.
Or, to put it in more straightforward terms, it’s a colour-matching game where you manage a deck of cards, change the available colours on the board, and juggle action economy. This is one of those European-style games that takes you a few minutes to figure out the mechanics, and then you realise everything slots together neatly, presenting new puzzles with each turn.
The components are rather nice. The art is a nice balance between traditional fantasy and comedy, with recognisable tropes and character types on pretty much every card. The food tokens are food shaped, and each of the different sorts of gems is different shapes as well, which means colour-blind players aren’t disadvantaged. Each player has a rules reference card, and the board is well-designed and slots together nicely.
The Yawning Portal is a great setting, one of the D&D’s most notorious, and yet this game fails to embrace that. All the adventurers on the cards are from D&D, but they’re generic. It would have been nice to see some familiar faces. Similar products, such as Dungeon Mayhem, felt like part of the world as well as their own thing. The Yawning Portal doesn’t feel very D&D. We weren’t expecting the heroes from Honour Among Thieves, but it is a surprise to see a D&D thing without Minsc in it.
Game design-wise, it isn’t as elegant as the colour-matching classic Azul, and doesn’t embrace the food-based anarchy of Halfling Feast or evoke the tavern atmosphere the way Red Dragon Inn does. It is, however, pretty easy to understand, and it’s absolutely stuffed full of quality components. It’s also easy to set up and feels like a game one plays before you play something really complicated or play because you want something distracting and complex enough to feel like you’ve played something deeper than Monopoly but not so complicated that it is hard work.
Dungeons and Dragons: The Yawning Portal is aimed at families and those new to board games that are more intellectual puzzles than they are about a particular theme or story. It isn’t very Dungeons & Dragons, but it is fun.
