Drakon is a fun little game for 2 - 6 players. It shouldn't take longer than an hour to play, and that's with 6 players who like to bug each other. Half an hour is very realistic.

The game is about a bunch of heroes getting caught by a mighty Dragon. She decides to have some fun with them, and sends them into her trapped dungeon to find gold for her or end up lunch. Now, it's review time!

The components

The figures are 6 heroes and one Dragon, aptly named "Drakon". For the Descent players among us, did you recognise the others? Yes, it's Nanok of the Blade, Sir Valadir, and a couple of others! They can't get enough of those dungeons eh?

The figures are quite nice, really. Drakon herself could be a little more imposing, but that would make it hard to fit on the board, I guess.

The tiles have some nice artwork. Nothing overly special, but it works. They're also nice and sturdy. The tiles won't break easily, and you get a lot of them.

And every player also gets a handy reference sheet, explaining about the special rooms.

The Gameplay

The players all start on the same "starting tile", with the purpose of finding Drakon 10 gold. The first one to do that gets set free, the others end up in the stew. Nice and crispy.

Each turn, a player can either lay down a tile, or walk along a legal route to an adjacent room. Everyone got 4 tiles at the start of the game, and draws a new one when one is played.

Every tile has arrows pointing outwards, that's the only way the heroes can move. Some rooms have multiple exits, others only one. When playing a tile, the arrows must not touch each other, so you can't bounce between two rooms all the time. Most rooms have special properties.

If a player walks into a room, a special effect occurs. There's rooms with no effect at all, but those are quite rare. Some of the special effects are these:

- get a gold piece
- destroy a non- occupied room
- move yourself and the room to another legal place
- steal a gold piece from the left hand player
- move Drakon
- rotate any room (must still end up legal)

There are a lot of others, but you get the general idea. The gold pieces have a value of 1 - 3, and as said before: the first one to get 10 wins. Gold is drawn at random, and is hidden from the other players. You know how many coins someone has, but not the value.

Drakon also moves around the dungeon (when someone enters such a room), and she can make a player go back to the start and steal a coin.

Fun factor, and final verdict

Well, as you can read, this is a light game, with not a lot of rules. Yes, it's Fantasy Flight! Amazing!
The game itself is quite fun, if you're not in the mood for a serious game, or don't have enough time.

As soon as one player has three coins, people start moving Drakon, destroying his routes, or stealing his gold. There's quite a number of ways you can bug someone in this game, which is always fun, of course.

Th arrows on the rooms are so you can't just jump between two rooms, and get gold every turn, but there are ways to do just that. If the rest doesn't see what one player is building up, or they can't react because of bad rooms on their end, the game can be over very quickly. This is a bit of a downside, but it's the only one as far as I'm concerned.

Drakon is easy, light, fun, and doesn't take hours to finish. It's perfect to kill an extra half hour, and apart from hardcore wargamers, I would say quite a lot of people will enjoy this one. I know I do.