Players:3-6Fist of Dragonstones is also published in French and German by Days of Wonder.
Playing Time: 45-60 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
This is a revision of a review originally published in February, 2003.
The Components
The Fist of Dragonstones box is utterly jammed full of very high quality components. These include:
- 119 wooden coins
- 36 glass dragonstones
- 6 scoring dice
- 6 player screens
- 36 character cards
- 1 bag
- 1 rulebook
Coins: The wooden coins are thick disks of wood, colored yellow (fairy gold), silver (silver), beige (common gold), black (black magic), and red (magic amulet). About half of the coins are fairy gold and most of the rest are silver. The coins are all nice, but the beige and yellow colors are a bit too close in hue which can cause problems if, say, you're secretly choosing your coins for the auction under the table.
Glass Dragonstones: The dragonstones are ovoid stones made of glass, colored red, blue, and yellow. Most of the stones have air in them, but they're still pretty to look at.
Scoring Dice: The scoring dice are simple, oblong wooden six-sided dice that are marked on three of the four long sides with "*", "**", and "***", which show how many victory points a player has. The dice are very high contrast, with black ink on white, and thus are easy to read across the table, which is what you want scoring dice to do.
Player Screens: The player screens are used to hide your current coin resources. They're printed on medium-thick cardboard and are short enough that they don't get knocked over as often as most similar screens. The front of the screens is colorful and shows a variety of the characters from the game, melded together. The graphic design is top notch. The back of the screen is printed in grayscale and shows the game turns and the auction rules. All of the rules are pretty easy to grasp in this game, and I don't think any of us actually used the rules printed on the screen; however it would have been useful to have a listing of the 8 standard characters' powers here, or even better, all of the characters with the standard eight highlighted. (Though I'll note that a standard character power listing is now available on the web.)
Character Cards: The 36 character cards are divided into 8 standard characters, 25 special characters, and 3 blank character cards. Each is printed at normal cardsize on medium-thick stock with rounded corners. They've all got nice artwork (well, except the blank cards), with the name printed to the left, and the power printed at the bottom. The graphic design is again very good, and the cards are easy to understand. The backs of the cards are grayscale, which is a bit disappointing in an otherwise very colorful game, but as it turns out you won't see those backs very often during play. I also would have preferred a little more differentiation between the standard and special characters, to make them easier to sort out. The only real difference is in the coloring of the card titles; some sort of icon on the standards could have made them stand out better.
Bag: The bag is a simple black cloth affair. It's used to hold the dragonstones when you need to draw one randomly.
Rulebook: The rulebook is full-color, printed on glossy pages, and runs 8 pages long. A bit over half of the book is taken up describing the powers of all the characters. The rules are attractive to look at and easy to understand.
Though I had a bit of kibitzing on some of the components, overall they're of a very high quality, especially in regard to the $24.95 price point. When I first opened the (fairly small) box, I was amazed at how jam-packed it was, and thus give Fist of Dragonstones a full "5" out of "5" points on style.
The Game Play
The object of Fist of Dragonstones is to earn the most victory points through the sorcerous transmutation of the rare dragonstones.
Setup: Before the game starts, each player is given 8 fairy gold, 2 common gold, 5 silver, 4 random dragonstones, and a scoring die, which is set to zero. Then, the first round of play begins.
Character Cards: The gameplay of Fist of Dragonstones centers around the character cards. There are 33 different ones, but the 8 "standard" characters form the core of the game. Each of them has a special power that affects either the auctions or the three markers used in the game (coins, dragonstones, and victory points). The standard characters are:
- Witch: Can void one auction with her black magic coin.
- Magician: Can turn any 4 dragonstones into 1 victory point; or take 3 silver coins.
- Sorcerer: Can turn 4 identical dragonstones into 2 victory points; or take 1 common gold.
- Thief: Steals one dragonstone from second highest bidder.
- Wizard: Can turn a set of 3 dragonstones, one of each color, into 1 victory point; or take 3 silver coins.
- Blue Dragon: Take 1 blue dragonstone.
- Red Dragon: Take 1 red dragonstone.
- Yellow Dragon: Take 1 yellow dragonstone.
The other 25 characters also affect those four general categories of gameplay in various different ways. There's one that steals common gold and silver from another player, one that destroys dragonstones of a specific color, one that lets you take a character who hasn't yet been auctioned, etc. Each of these other cards is evocative of the same fantasy setting as the standards, so you have dwarfs, trolls, ancient dragons, and more.
Starting an Auction Round: At the start of each round, the witch is set aside, then the remaining 7 standard cards are mixed with 2 randomly selected special cards. A set of 10 auctions then occurs, starting with the witch, and proceeding through the other 9 in random order.
Conducting an Auction. Each auction is "closed fist", which means that each player decides how much he's going to bid, puts those coins in his fist, and holds it out. When everyone is ready, all the bids are revealed at once.
Only gold is initially bid--either fairy gold or common gold, which can be mixed together and are of equal value--and the player with the highest bid wins the character currently up for auction. In case of a tie, the tied players then do a run-off auction, this time bidding with silver. In case of another tie, no one wins the auction.
All the coins that everyone bid--win or lose--are expended. Common gold and silver go back to the bank. Fairy gold goes in the front of the player's shield, to be recovered at the end of the round, when the current set of auctions is done. (Those pesky fairies.)
Using a Card. After winning an auction a player takes the character card and immediately uses its power. (Though a few of the cards actually provide markers, like the witch's black magic coin, that can be used in future auctions.)
There's a hierarchy of effects from the cards. Some provide silver, fairy gold, or common gold which can be used to help increase the odds of winning future auctions. Some provide dragonstones. And some turn dragonstones into victory points.
Winning the Game: The first player to gain 3 victory points through the transmutation of dragonstones wins.
Playing Online
Days of Wonder has also made several of their games available online; Fist of Dragonstones is one of them. You get a web card with the tabletop game, and you can use that to sign up to play the online game.
Interface: The online interface for Fist of Dragonstones starts off in the "lobby" which is plain and purely utilitarian. It's a place where you can chat with other players and wait for a game to form.
Once you get into the game interface itself, everything gets considerably more beautifully. The cards are all well-presented (and easy to read, because you can magnify them) and the "fists" that people use to bet are neat looking. I do find the interface kind of cluttered, because of the coins and dragonstones scattered about, but at least it provides all of the information that's required.
Gameplay: The gameplay of Fist of Dragonstones Online is pretty much identical to that of the tabletop game. However, I think that gameplay works better in the online venue. You know that your selection of coins for auction is really secret, which is always an issue in tabletop play, and the computer helpfully keeps count of numbers of coins and dragonstones for everyone, as well as cards left, which just makes it that much easier to quickly assess what's going on.
Other Issues: The biggest issue with Fist of Dragonstones Online is that it's hard to find enough players to play. For whatever reason, the game has never reached critical mass, and so there are rarely enough players online to play a game. This is a pretty serious issue, and one that I hope eventually resolves itself.
If I were writing a separate review of Fist of Dragonstones Online, I'd probably rate it a full point lower than the tabletop game for Style because of the cluttered nature of the online table, but a half-point higher on Substance thanks to the fact that some elements play better. Thus, it comes in at 4/4 while I rate the tabletop game 5/3.5. (I haven't included the fact that it's currently hard to find players in this calcuation.)
Big Caveat: Though I don't have an affiliation with the tabletop game that I'm reviewing here, Skotos offers the online version for play through its game channel, and RPGnet offers the game for play by its members. Thus, take what I say about the online game with the appropriately sized grain of salt.
Relationships to Other Games
Fist of Dragonstones was originally conceived of as a sequel to Bruno Faidutti's very popular Citadels.. And, Fist of Dragonstones does share a few general ideas in common with Citadels: they're both about attaining characters in order to better your position in the games. A few character names (e.g., the thief) are also shared between the games. However, wheras Citadels was a "building" game, Fist of Dragonstones is a very pure "auction" game.
Nonetheless, if you play both games it's kind of fun to see the interconnections in game design ideas.
As noted, Fist of Dragonstones is an auction game. To use my auction terminology, it's a unconstrained English auction with simultaneous one-time blind bids. However, the thing that really makes Fist of Dragonstones stand out is that it has an all payer, single winner victory system, which means that every player has to pay out what they bet, if they win or not. This is pretty rare in auction games (and I've heard some people claim it's not a "real" auction, whatever that is, because of this element).
There are a lot of auction games on the market. Fist of Dragonstones is one of the simpler ones out there, much like similar filler High Society, by Reiner Knizia.
A common element in many of Bruno Faidutti's games is a chaotic element which can undercut some traditional strategy and force players to think more on their feet; some players like this, and others don't. Fist of Dragonstones contains this element through the extra character cards, though it's less prevelent than in many of Faidutti's other designs.
The Game Design
Overall, Fist of Dragonstones plays well, without problems. Some of the best game design points include:
Randomness Builds into Strategy: There really isn't a lot of randomness in this game. Sure, which special characters will appear is random, as is the order that the 9 auctions after the witch ... but the player is given a large amount of control over that because he knows what characters are available, and what their powers are, and thus gets to make his own decisions about how to bid for them. The only other bit of randomness comes from the dragonstones, which are randomly picked at various points in the game. However, this too is offset, because players can gain VPs from dragonstones in three ways: a matching set of 4, a matching set of 1 each, or any 4 stones. In addition, the dragons allow players to capture the specific stone color that they might be looking for.
Multiple Paths to Victory: Closely related to this is the fact that there are multiple paths to victory, which generally increases the strategic gameplay in a game. As already noted, there are a number of ways to achieve VPs. In addition you could work for strategies where you collect more gold or even more silver, as a way to bootstrap yourself up to victory.
Good Trading Valuations: In my opinion any good trading or auction game requires the same resources to have remarkably different valuations to different players. The aforementioned multiple paths to victory ensure this in Dragonstones. Sometimes you might be totally uncontested for a character card that only you see the value in, and at other times you might be in for a fierce battle.
Characters Add Fun Variety: The standard characters revolve around a pretty staid set of basic functions. However, the additional characters can be somewhat wacky and really disrupt the game; this adds some nice replayability to the game design.
Good End Game: The end game is designed quite well because it doesn't have the "rollback" problem that many games have, where a game continues forever because the winner keeps getting knocked down. Despite that, there's still ways to keep a lead player from going out, by bidding for the characters that he wants or by casting black magic upon his winning bids. Nonetheless, when a player advances to a sufficiently mature end game stage he will be able to win, because he'll have multiple paths to victory, as already discussed, and they can't all be blocked.
My complaints about Dragonstones' game design are mostly minor ones:
Game is Overly Abstract: There's a story in the rulebook, "The Legend of Dragonstones", which is intended to give a background for this game, but it still comes across feeling too abstract, even moreso than most European designs. Who are you playing, exactly? Why do you have fairie gold that returns every night? Why do these characters do your bidding? Adding extra specificity to the backstory might have done the trick here, but the lack of any physical locality in the game also contributed to the feeling of abstraction.
Granularity for VPs Low: The granularity for VPs, which only went from 0 to 3, felt low. Someone could jump from nothing to about to win (e.g., 2 points) with one move. This feeling has gone away somewhat through extra play, as the ability to grab victory points is usually presaged by the collection of dragonstones.
Secret Auctioning Hard: Keeping your bid secret is a bit tricky, because other players can discern whether you're picking up coins or not even if they're trying not to. We solved this by choosing bids "under the table". As already noted, this problem totally disappears in the online version of the game.
Auctions Repetitive: Any pure auction game faces the danger of being repetitive. Here, I feel like that's a genuine issue, because there's only the one type of auctioning, and you engage in it pretty constantly.
When I first reviewed Fist of Dragonstones, I was quite entranced with it and gave it a full "4" out of "5" Substance rating. Since, I've played a number of additional auction games, and found that a lot of them have much more variety than Fist of Dragonstones. I still like Dragonstones a lot, especially because of the fantasy color, but now think that the repetitiveness of the game would have better suited a shorter gamelength, as the aforementioned High Society! manages (and, ironically, another aspect presented better in the online game, as online games often play 1.5x-2x as fast as their tabletop brethren). Thus, this time around I've rated it a high "3" out of "5" (meaning "3.5" if I had that rating available). It's still an enjoyable, above average game.
Conclusion
If you like auction games, and you like fantasy games, Fist of Dragonstones should suit your fancy. Well-designed and with some neat fantasy touches, it'll probably continue to be enjoyable for some time. My only real complaint is that it goes on a bit long, for what should otherwise be a short filler game; nonetheless, it still works OK as a filler in many situations.
