Dragon's Gold

Overview:
Dragon's Gold was created by Brunno Faidutti, one of the game designers of Incan Gold. It is a game of knowing when to stay and when to leave. This part of the game heavily depends on each player's personality, and knowing your opponent's play style and being able to make use of it is crucial to winning the game.


Gameplay:
Four dragons dealt from the deck are set in the center of the game area and each player gets a set of four adventurers. Taking turns, players place adventurers onto the dragon cards. When the sum of the adventurers' strengths numbers exceeds the dragon's defense, then the dragon is defeated and players have one minute to discuss how to split the dragon's gold. Both the total amount of loot and the known amount of loot prior to defeating a dragon vary by the different dragon cards.
20120420:
It helps to keep the distribution of gems in mind as the game progresses. Lack of this knowledge definitely hurt me in the end.

After playing a game of Dragon's Gold, a key strategy is trying to bargain for what you know you want plus one or two extra items. It's also important to not let other players harass you and denying them a trade when they get overly greedy is also important. That is, your greed will make it so that you want something over nothing. As a rule of thumb, it is only okay to get less loot if you believe the person getting the greater portion is currently the losing player.


There is regular play and advanced play. We pretty much played the advanced play except for the Wizard + Thief effect. Actually, we also agreed that the bonus for having one of each color (Yellow, Blue, Green, Purple, White) only happens once. That is, having three sets of each color still only gives 5 bonus points, not 15.

The last little tidbit I can think of is in regards to the black diamond. In a three-player game, the player with the black diamond should make it a goal to get at least an extra 15 points more in silver and gold than other players in order to reasonably compete with the other players. This is because the points in color are between 60 and 70 points (the extra 10 points comes from the color bonus). Theoretically, if the player with the black diamond also dominated in one other color, then the amount of points to be shared among the other players is between 48 and 58 points. If this is shared evenly then the non-black diamond players get between 24 and 29 points. Black diamond is worth 19. This is however assuming the black diamond player is able to dominate a color, which is likely harder, because he/she is already using their ownership of the black diamond to convince players that only silver and gold is valuable to him/her.

XX RC MS TT
Ye 02 03 05
Bl 06 00 06
Gr 06 01 04
Pu 06 01 05
Wh 02 00 04
Bk 00 01 00
Re 03 10 03
Si 12 11 12
Go 07 09 04

[20120530]
Dragon's Gold
Played 20120420 1824-1930. Ryan Mark Me. ? first.

Relevant Links:
Dragon's Gold (BoardGameGeek.com)

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