Players: 3-6
Playing Time: 30-60 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)
The Components
Draco & Co. comes with 96 cards, a bunch of wooden bits, and a rulebook.
Cards: The cards are all printed full-color on medium-weight cardstock. They include 6 castles, 16 characters, and 74 action cards.
The artwork on all of the cards is by Julien Delval. It's very nice cartoon artwork that is appealing & improves the game. Some of the graphics are unfortunately reused for different cards, but there's still enough different artwork to keep things interesting.
Castle Cards. The castle cards are printed in the six player colors (red, yellow, green, blue, purple, and black). They just sit in front of you to remind everyone what color you are. At least one of our players was entirely nonplussed by their existence, but I've played enough games without markers for player color that I'm always grateful for them.
Character Cards. 12 of the characters are player characters, 2 per color. There's rogues, gnomes, goblins, and amazons. If you play with less than 6 players, make sure you use the colors suggested, as it ensures that the 4 classes are equally spread out among the characters. I neglected this in my first, 3-player game, and we ended up with no goblins, which made some cards useless. (Oops.)
The last 4 cards are special characters. There's Draco, who's the star of the game, plus Aunt Sarah, Brother John, and Zork. Unfortunately none of these special cards have any icons to remind you of what they do, but fortunately they're pretty simple.
Frustratingly, the character cards are all printed with the character on both sides, which makes randomizing them difficult, especially for the "Three-Card Monte" card. This was a pretty major production foul-up.
Action Cards. The 74 action cards show what you can do in the game. They have a lot of text on them, and this constantly slows down the game. I would have preferred simpler cards and/or icons to help show what they do. That would have sped the game up at the start (for new players) and also helped at the end when you can get a huge hand of cards.
Wooden Bits: 20 silver coins and 25 gold coins, each of which is a good sized wooden disc, painted the appropriate color. Also, 1 blue wooden goblet, which is a very cute, small bit of wood. Finally there's a wooden die too, for the occasional randomization.
Rulebook: A four-page, full-color rulebook. It's fine, though I would have liked additional info on some cards.
Overall the components are colorful and attractive, and the number of cards and wooden bits you get in the box is great. I remain pretty annoyed with the double-sided printing of the character cards, but have nonetheless let the game eke in an above-average "4" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Draco & Co. is to earn the most money when Draco divides the loot, by staying on his good side.
Setup: Draco is placed in the middle of the table Aunt Sarah, Brother John, and Zork are shuffled, along with two characters for each player. They're then all arranged in a circle, going clockwise from Draco. This is Draco's round table.
Draco has a cup in one of his hands, and the characters on his cup side are on his "good side". He likes them and will give them money while dividing loot. Contrariwise the other characters are on his "bad side", and he'll take money from them.
Many cards will move characters around this table. If a character moves "forward" or "in front of", that's toward Draco's good side, while if a character moves "backward" or "in back of", that's toward his bad side.
Each player also takes 1 gold coin at start (which is worth 3 silver). The wooden goblet is set in front of the player to the left of the starting player. (As we'll see, this is so that no one can toast in the first round of play.)
Playing a Round: A player can do three things in order on their turn:
- Play a Card
- Drink a Toast
- Draw a Card
Playing a Card: You play a card from your hand.
Most cards move characters around the table. Example include "Slander", which moves a rogue back d6 spaces, and "Confusion", which lets you move one of your own characters forward 4 spaces and the other backward 3 spaces.
Some cards involve physically tossing coins about, such as "Profound Joy", which involves flipping a coin and giving it to whatever character it lands on, or "Booze-up", which involves dropping 3 gold coins and 4 silver from a height
Some cards affect Draco himself, such as "Changing Move", which moves Draco a few spaces and "Mood Reversal" which flips Draco's good and bad sides.
There are other cards which have more dramatic changes, just affect the non-player characters, or affect toasts.
Drinking a Toast: If the goblet is in the center of the table, you can call a toast. This causes Draco to give out money (and take it). The four nearest characters on Draco's good side get 4, 3, 2, and 1 silver, while the two nearest characters on his bad side lose 2 and 1 silver.
The non-player characters also have special effects. If Zork has to pay money he has to pay double, but it's actually paid by the player at the table with the most money. (He's a skinflint and automatically locks onto the richest player as his "best friend.") If Brother John has to pay, it's paid by the person in front of him, and if he gets money it goes to the character behind him. (He's just there for the food & wine and everyone loves him.) Meanwhile, the players of any characters next to Aunt Sarah get a card. (She's a fortune teller.)
After calling a toast you keep the goblet in front of you until the end of your next turn.
Drawing a Card: Finally you draw a card. This occurs even if you drew extra cards due to Aunt Sarah and/or card plays. This means that your hand size can potentially keep going up (and can actually get a little crazy by the end of the game).
Ending the Game: The game ends after the next toast after the last card is drawn from the draw deck. Whoever has the most money wins except if first-place players are tied, then the next-place player wins.
Relationships to Other Games
There have been a few American card games centered around lines of character cards on a table. Family Business (1982) centers most of its gameplay on putting people on that line, while Guillotine (1998) is more about moving people around. However, suffice to say, things don't turn out well for the characters in line in either case.
German Michael Schacht self-published Die Tafelrunde (2000) about a circle of characters, who are getting loot rather than getting killed. Bruno Faidutti played it and liked it, but had a few additional suggestions, and soon the designers were working together on a new version of the game which added Aunt Sarah, Brother John, and lots of new cards. That was Draco & Co.
The gameplay is very American, much like Guillotine, which seems a pretty clear inspiration. It's card based, it's chaotic, and it's got at least some element of take-that play.
The Game Design
Generally, Draco & Co. is a light and fun game. Something about the mechanism of moving characters around a circle of cards is evocative and enjoyable.
There's not a huge amount of strategy to game. You can work a little bit to try and set yourself up for good moves just before a toast occurs, but it's pretty limited. Nonetheless, most turns seem interesting as long as you don't mind a fairly huge amount of chaos in your game.
The game does get more chaotic with more players, as is pretty common for this genre of games. As a result I think it plays better with 3 than 6.
My only notable complaint about the game is that your hand of cards can get excessive by the end of the game. This is because Aunt Sarah can continuously up your hand size, and thus by the end of the game you can end up with a hand of ten or so cards. As I already noted, each card is full of text, so this can result in a lot of paging through cards.
Overall, Draco & Co. has amusing, fairly average gameplay; I've rated it a "3" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Draco & Co. is a Guillotine-like game, centered around moving characters around a circular table. It's light and chaotic, but it's also evocative and colorful. It's recommended if you enjoy take-that style American card games.
