Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn (Dungeons & Dragons Cooperative Board Game for 3-5 Players)

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As players work through the Shadow of the Dragon Queen scenario book, they’ll occasionally enter full-scale battles. When this occurs, the book will prompt the players to (optionally) lay out the Warriors of Krynn board game, with select rules in place. Commanders will be set by the book, as well as certain combat conditions and win scenarios, letting players take on tactical combat gameplay in physical form. With special rules involved, and instructions to remove characters from play when they’re no longer active in the main story, the board game should also evolve to stay relevant to your personal adventure. Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn is a cooperative, campaign-based board game designed as a tie-in to the D&D campaign book Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. Players of the tabletop RPG are encouraged to use Warriors of Krynn to stage large-scale battles during their adventure, with the board game’s campaign story loosely following the events of the RPG book.

Pairing a dense narrative with a more ‘active’ tabletop component is a frankly ingenious twist, and one that elevates both the board game, and the scenario book. It makes both more involved, and should help players visualise and enact the action of the Dragonlance campaign in grand fashion. Beginning in the small fishing town of Vogler, players in Shadow of the Dragon Queen will become familiar with the charming town and its inhabitants before they’re all besieged and set aflame by the forces of the Dragon Army. Despite supporting an entire wargame board game tie-in and revolving a lot of action around battles, according to Wizards the upcoming Dragonlance releases will not glorify war. Instead, the costs of war will be laid at the players’ feet from the very beginning, with the quaint town they’ve come to know being destroyed before their very eyes. But if you rally your heroes together, using the skills of your battlefield leaders, you’ll be able to conquer your goals and move on with the overarching Dragonlance story setting. Once a major Warriors of Krynn battle is concluded, the Shadow of the Dragon Queen scenario book will guide you on your next steps through the main narrative. Image: Wizards of the CoastAnd the abilities are all handcuffed as well. you get what you get if that is your class. There is no "porting" characters in. Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks and adventure books have featured battles and wars in the past, such as the aftermath of the vast conflict in Eberron: Rising from the Last War. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to play out conflicts that feature hundreds and hundreds of people in a tabletop roleplaying game wherein smaller scale fights can take hours to complete. Warriors of Krynn looks to be providing dungeon masters and players with a way to experience the kind of epic battles featured in Shadow of the Dragon Queen, presenting a wargame board game wherein players make strategic decisions to help alter the flow of battle. The costs of war will be laid at the players’ feet from the very beginning. Depending on whether players have the adventure book or board game, or both, they’ll experience these battles in varying ways. If players just have the Shadow of the Dragon Queen book then they’ll play through large-scale battles by making various decisions. Players who only have the board game will play through a total of 12 scenarios without most of the RPG elements featured in Shadow of the Dragon Queen. By combining Shadow of the Dragon and Warriors of Krynn, players will be able to experience the adventure book campaign and decide the outcome of large-scale battles through a wargame board game. The Alliance armies are often outnumbered in the battle scenarios in Warriors of Krynn. | Image credit: Wizards of the Coast/Daarken But in reality all you do is "take over" the same class. There is no porting or customizing your character. Which is a missed opportunity if you ask me. Additionally, Warriors of Krynn doesn’t really give fans of campaign or legacy board games enough to look forward to. It relies on its accompanying RPG book to tell the real story of Dragonlance, offering disconnected intros and scraps of isolated lore instead. There’s no compelling plot tieing events together.

The game’s design comes from Rob Daviau, who’s perhaps best known for his work on legacy board games like Pandemic Legacy and Betrayal at House on the Hill legacy. And while there are legacy elements to Warriors of Krynn, the game is a mish-mash of genres and mechanics. This is one part wargame, one part roleplaying game, and one part legacy game. Those will certainly come in handy. As a general rule, the evil armies of the Dragon Queen outnumber those on the good side, so the bad guys will slowly push their enemies from the field (which is another loss condition). If there are heroes present on the same tile as the fighting, they can stall this inexorable advance by soaking up hits or using their response powers.

Heroes of War: Includes Hero characters representing core character elements from the Dragonlance setting The book will be sold alongside Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn, a cooperative board game from veteran wargame designers Rob Daviau ( Risk Legacy) and Stephen Baker ( HeroQuest, Battle Masters). While both can be played separately, they’re meant to work in concert, with players turning to the board game to simulate large-scale battles. The decisions made in those fights and their outcomes will impact both future rounds of Warriors of Krynn and what happens in the story of Shadow of the Dragon Queen. Warriors of Krynn is an abstract battle game — not a traditional wargame — one where tiny rectangular plastic markers stand in for large formations of warriors. It includes cardboard tiles with different terrain, shaped in such a way that they can create a single massive front line or multiple discrete battlefields, called “flanks,” in different undulating shapes — maybe even in a circle. There are also 28 mm heroic scale miniatures standing in for the heroes — representations of the same characters that will be exploring the world of Krynn in Shadow of the Dragon Queen. In fact, there’s nothing stopping players from bringing their own bespoke, personalized miniatures from their D&D game right into the board game. After being initially revealed during the a D&D Direct that took place earlier this year, more details regarding the Dragonlance book and board game were unveiled to Dicebreaker by D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast.