Base price: $XX.
1 player.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter!
Logged plays: 2

Full disclosure: A preview copy of A Dragon’s Gift was provided by Button Shy Games. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game. 

It’s Kickstarter season again, and I’m a little bit ahead of the curve this time! We’ve got new games to talk about, as always. I was originally considering doing two Button Shy games this week, but that felt excessive, so you’re getting two solo games instead. Great way to come fresh off of the holidays with a bunch of games I played myself, right before OrcaCon where I instead play a bunch of games with others. It’s the perfect system. Anyways, it’s a Button Shy game, so let’s check it out!

In A Dragon’s Gift, your village has long been protected by a friendly dragon who doesn’t really ask for much, which is cool. No sacrifices, no sheep or goats, and it doesn’t want to marry any of your town’s women. You’ve gotten considerably luckier than other towns, unfortunately. Don’t worry about it though; that’s out of scope for this game. To celebrate its benevolence, you offer it a gift every year during a crafting festival where everyone makes for the joy of making. Seems like a good deal for all parties involved, which is also nice. Can you bring joy to the village and your protector with the stuff you make?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

This one’s pretty easy to set up. You just shuffle up the Gifts, first:

Set one aside, and flip three over to their Transport side:

Set the other Gift cards aside. Shuffle the remaining Village Cards, and make an Unsupplied side-up deck.

Place the top card into the center of the play area to start a Village, then draw one card into your hand. You should be ready to start!

Gameplay

Your goal here is simple: there’s a dragon and he guards your village. As a thank-you, the town wants to do something nice for him, so you’re going to make him a gift!

Each turn, you can expand the village, craft a resource, or attempt to craft the Dragon’s Gift! To expand the village, place the card in your hand somewhere in the Village orthogonally adjacent to another card. The roads need to connect, but you can offset it or rotate the card 180 degrees to place it.

To craft a resource, you need the resource and its destination to be two or fewer cards apart by road, or you need to use a Transport to bridge the connection. Transports are great, but once they’re used they’re used until you craft the resource on the card, which refreshes them. So be careful!

Once you’re out of cards and can’t craft more, the game ends! Your best bet is to try and craft the Dragon’s Gift, same rules as earlier. If you can’t, you lose, so prioritize that.

Either way, total the number of resources you did craft, and that’s your score! The Dragon’s Gift doesn’t count. If you crafted the Dragon’s Gift and scored 9+ points, you win!

Player Count Differences

None for this one! It’s a solo game, though, so you could certainly play with more people all agreeing on an action together.

Strategy

• A core goal is setting something up so that it has nearby resources. If you place things far away from what they need, it’s not going to work out. Focus on trying to set up small and compact networks unless it’s a resource that’s, itself, a secondary input that something else needs later. That might be a good point for Transports.
• Don’t forget about the Dragon’s Gift! If you don’t craft that, you lose, so, make sure you’re doing that.
• The Transports are great, but you need to use them so that you can reactivate them again later. They’re very good and useful and all that, but the price of utility is that you will not be able to use them more than once unless you activate them by creating the corresponding resource. Don’t get precious about them, though; you can reactivate them relatively easily, but they have to be spent to be reactivated.
• Build your Village to accommodate Transports, as well. Look at what you’ve got and see how the different features of a village could make it work. Certain cards benefit more from certain structures or village shapes or valleys.
• Just because the cards are close together doesn’t mean the paths work out to be short. The paths go off all edges of the cards, which may or may not work out for how you’re planning. Just double check your cards.
• Don’t forget that you can rotate cards around, as well. I usually forget to do this, which is its own issue, but that can sometimes help you get different configurations in place.
• Making the Dragon’s Gift isn’t enough; you need to supply resources to enough buildings to score over 8 points, too. Yeah the Gift alone won’t win you the game, but not building the Gift also means that you lose. Make sure that once you build it, you go through and build as many additional resources as possible (or vice-versa).

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• The art is fantastic! It’s extremely whimsical; I love it. The colors are bright and pleasant and the characters are upbeat and bubbly in a way that makes me want to learn more about the game’s world.
• The path-building elements are a lot of fun as well. It’s tricky but not too much of a brain-burner. Path-building is one of my absolute favorite mechanics, so any time it pops up in a game I’m pretty excited.
• Another quick and cool puzzle game. Sometimes I just like having a solid repertoire of quick puzzle games that I can play, and this goes straight into that bucket.
• Very portable, as is the usual Button Shy allure. I love being able to take a bunch of games with me wherever I go and Button Shy always meets me where I’m at for that.
• Pretty simple to pick up! I was surprised, especially for a path-building game, that it wasn’t too bad to pick up and play.
• I maintain this in other places as well, but I really like how different all the Simply Solo games are in theme and type. It’s a really varied set that’s very straightforward but still fun and puzzley, but there’s a lot of different games to appeal to a lot of different sensibilities and preferences.

Mehs

• As with a few of these games, the luck element can be pretty critical, since that’s the only way you can reactivate certain transports. If you don’t draw things in the right order it may be difficult to do what you want or you might have to scoot things around to make it so that you can activate what you need. There are usually sufficient redundancies, though, so it mostly works out.
• A lot of the Simply Solo games are spatially intensive, so you can’t really play them on planes and such. It’s just worth noting, mostly; not really a problem with the game. Still great for travel and such.

Cons

• It would be nice if the “Supplied” side of Village Cards were a bit more distinct from the “Unsupplied” side. It’s got the cost replaced by a checkmark, but still, more visually distinct would help me when I’m getting things set up or put away.

Overall: 8 / 10

Overall, I like A Dragon’s Gift! I’m never mad about a little path-building game, and the resource collection aspects of it make it more interesting to boot. I’ll be particularly interested in seeing what expansions are going to be popping up with the Kickstarter this week, as well. There are a lot of cool ways to take a game that’s a little pick-up-and-deliver while abstracting out the most annoying parts of that genre. I particularly like the art style; it’s not quite like much I’ve seen in the genre and it maintains whimsy while still being very inviting. A good-looking solo game usually catches folks’ eyes at conventions, and it’s a smart selling point and a good conversation point. I was surprised that the “Supplied” side of Village Cards weren’t a bit more distinct, just because it helps to separate them out each game and then reshuffle, but perhaps I’m just lazier than a lot of folks playing this. Either way, though, I’m always excited to see more Simply Solo titles. I don’t know how Scott Almes keeps the pace up, but I’m not mad about it. If you’re looking for a quick and thinky puzzle, you like deliveries and paths, or you’re just a big Button Shy fan, A Dragon’s Gift is a lot of fun! I’d recommend it.

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