By Ed Fortune
Dragonlance is Dungeons & Dragon‘s big, cinematic setting that has always enjoyed a good amount of spin-off media, from comics to board games. The latest iteration of this is Shadow of the Dragon Queen, an epic war story in which players desperately try to stop the steadily encroaching forces of darkness from taking over the land. And true to the setting, they’ve launched a board game called Warriors of Krynn, which (optionally) integrates into the roleplaying adventure.
The board game is available as a standalone or bundled in with the book; the idea being that you can use this as a supplement to the RPG if you wish. We found that this wasn’t as smooth as we’d thought it would be. Warriors of Krynn isn’t an epic battle simulator but, instead, a hero-focused cooperative game where you work together to try and steer the battle in the direction you want it to be. This means it doesn’t seamlessly fit with Shadow of the Dragon Queen because, in that game, you can just run a battle as an ongoing narrative.
What Warriors of Krynn does that the TTRPG doesn’t is that it presents a bunch of cool battles in quick-to-play scenarios where you get to be one of the action heroes. You’re essentially running around the board from incident to incident, trying to solve as many problems as you can so your side wins. Do you help the villagers or strengthen barricades? Do you lead the troops? Each character has special abilities that can help, so who does what can really matter.
All of this is managed through a pre-constructed deck of cards that push the action forward and also limit the player’s options; if you run out of cards, the battle ends, and if you’ve not achieved the right goals, you lose. One of the game’s flaws is that no specific mechanics slow down one player trying to take charge and solve everything by directing other players to follow a set plan. Be warned that this is a game designed in which each scenario has multiple solutions, so armchair commanders should sit down and listen to everyone else; there’s always more than one way to win each scenario.
Component-wise, the game comes with a lot of pieces. We get models for the heroes, and these are grey with a light amount of highlighting ink applied, which is a nice touch but nothing special. The rule book and cards feel like they needed a bit more time spent on making it all clear and accessible; there are a lot of elements here that could have been either streamlined or dropped, and there’s just a lot going on.
Though Shadow of the Dragon Queen has a great narrative, it isn’t expressed that well in Warriors of Krynn; more flavour text would have also helped make this game more fun and maybe tied it together better. This is a very good attempt at a tie-in game that, alas, falls short by not being one thing or another; it’s not a narrative co-op game, it’s not a crisis management game, nor is it a war game. It tries to be all these things and isn’t quite any of them.
Still, if you like co-op games and Dragonlance, check it out.
