"Just Rediscovered Dragon Dice" Topic

At Pax East this weekend, happily stumbled upon the SFR booth and discovered they have done a great job of revitalising the old Dragon Dice game!

They've polished up the rules. Done a superb re-packaging job so that you can buy specific army types. (Way back when, I opened up 8 of TSR's Monsters & Amazons expansion packs and didn't get a single large Amazon die or a single one of the Amazon's monsters, and gave up on the game in sad discouragement.)

The new rules and other play aides are free downloads on the SFR site: sfr-inc.com

Folks who have old hordes of the dice should give this a look.
(And, umm, if you have old hordes of the dice buried somewhere and just want to send them off to a good home, I'll be happy to put them to use trying to get games rolling again at the FLGS ^,^ )

I do have old hordes buried somewhere…

I know that this game has had several ongoing revival attempts.

I'll be taking a look to see if they've untangled the magic system which you could either keep in your head, or consult the 100+ page dice commander's manual to keep track of.

I really did enjoy playing this, and I still break out my dice to play counting games with my kid… so hopefully they've struck a balance with their re-release.

I got to use a little bit of magic playing the 'intermediate demo' at the con. That was very straightforward and they had the basic spells all printed out on the army deployment mat. The mats for each army are free downloads on their site.

The rulebook is quite thick, but not terribly daunting upon discovering how much of it is reference lists for all the icon variations (which do help make the dice so pretty and interesting). If I was going to use any specialty dice not listed on the game mat, I'll definitely paste up a corresponding cheat sheet addendum to just put on the table beside the army mat.

Wow. Their website looks so retro! It even has a webring! 1997 rocks!

The way TSR originally sold the game kept me out of it. Sadly, my interest in the game has long past.

This is one game that I always wanted to develop another set of rules for, but nothing worked. I liked the game, but it was more of those "play it every once in a while" sort of games. I do keeping running into my boxes of dice of late, and I have read the new rules. Hmmm …

CPBelt, maybe you have an old website cached? I get a nice green menu bar at the top of the page. And just went poking and couldn't find a webring.

Hmm, retro rocks, but didn't see it…

Still have all my old dice and I picked up a few new sets from my comicbook store. Now I just have to find the thime to play it. The new style packaging does help alot too.

Try playing skirmish battles with them where each miniature on the table has its fighting skills represented by a single Dragon Dice. The results are really fast and quite visceral compared to numbered dice.

Thanks for posting this…it reminded me that I have a huge pile of dice that I managed to dig out. And it also reminded me that I don't have nearly enough dragons or terrain dice to play my favorite races properly. >_<

Somehow, I did manage to get a balanced assortment of dragons (maybe we all traded those around sometime back when). But yes, just this weekend I've been reminded of the horrors of TSR's packaaging and what it wrought.

Of the first 4 races mixed in all the starter packs, 2 had the same home terrain. Dwarves and Lava Elves both need Highland out of the 4 Terrain dice options. On average then one would get 50% Dwarves and Lava troops, and 25% Highland terrains. I drew 60% and 20% to make it even worse than average. And ~15% Goblins, and ~40% Swamps for their homeland. >.<'''

But SFR has fixed those packaging issues!!! New generations won't have to suffer the way we did.

Now if I can get some active players going locally here, I might be able to trade around and redress some of the old collection problems….

Inspired since finding my dice, I decided to do a blog post about Dragon Dice.

link

I've been slowly working on putting together my own version of the playmats from the SFR site. Making mine in smaller sections that I can print out and laminate at home since I have a lovely thermal laminator.

Once I get this year's taxes done, hope to finish up this project and then start introducing the game to folks at the FLGS during open board gaming nights.

miniMo, I'd love to see what you come up with. The ones on the SFR site have an eye-bleedingly awful gradient aesthetic I could to without. A good, graphically pleasing mat, possibly with art, is what the game needs. I'd make one myself, but I am extremely photoshop challenged.

I had been meaning to drag mine out for some time; I misplaced my (SFR) rulebook ages back, and finally gave up looking for it.

When I was in Jacksonville, FL last week, I picked up a 2-player starter (feral & undead, which I needed more of), so now I'm set. My wife likes the critter-faction, go fig.

I haven't played much since it came out (when I played a lot). I have tons of the "base four" factions, plus lots of amazons (yeah, so that I could get the damned monsters).

The rulebook IS a bit intimidating, especially since the original was just a tiny fold-out pamphlet- many, many times smaller!

I use card coasters (with pictures affixed to them to designate what they represent) to keep the dice grouped; I like to have them placed so that the campaigning armies are in the center of the table, and so forth. They're substantial enough so you can shift them around to get to the dice, and easily replaceable when worn out. Plus, it's a good game over a few drinks anyway!

Great write-up, ImhotepMagi, thanks for sharing.