Dragomino

Overview

Dragomino has you in the role of a novice dragon trainer sent out into a mysterious island. Your goal is to scour this island for baby dragons that you can potentially train. But be aware that there are other dragon trainers that have been sent to this island for the very same purpose! Will you be the dragon trainer who can discover the most baby dragons?

In Dragomino, you will place terrain tiles and discover eggs in the process. Some eggs will be broken! Those dragons have already hatched and matured. But some eggs will have baby dragons. Perfect! Those are exactly what you were looking for because those dragons can be befriended and trained.

Core Mechanics: Tile-laying, tile selection

Victory Condition: The player who finds the most baby dragons from the eggs they collect is the winner.

Ease of learning: Because Dragomino is positioned as a children’s game, particularly for kids 5 years old and up, learning the rules should be easy for adults. And because the core concept behind this game is to match up similar tilesets, it’s something that younger kids should be able to grasp.

Playing Dragomino is easy. Each turn, the player with the mommy dragon acts as the first player by choosing a tile from the set of 4 available tiles and adds that to their board. If any of the added tile’s sides touch an existing tile with the same terrain type, that player gets a dragon egg of the appropriate terrain type for each matching edge. Some eggs feature a baby dragon, which is worth 1 point; others feature an empty shell, which allows that player to take the mommy dragon, giving them first pick next round. The next player then goes and chooses from the remaining tiles, and so on until all players have chosen a tile. Once that happens, all remaining tiles are discarded and a new set of 4 tiles are drawn and play restarts with the person holding the mommy dragon.

Honestly, this game is pretty simple for adults to grasp. For kids, I can see one potential pitfall. Thankfully, that pitfall isn’t about learning the game but figuring out how to play it well. After all, it’s easy to match two different tiles, dominoes-style. But there might be more efficient ways to arrange the tiles that will net more eggs and younger children might not necessarily see that. That’s simply something that they will learn with experience, especially if parents guide them along.

Thankfully, because of Dragomino’s random element with broken eggs, kids, even when playing sub-optimally, can still have a chance to win. This usually means that games are pretty close, even if one player has more eggs than the other. More crucially, the smaller point gap means kids won’t be too discouraged even when they lose because parents can tell them just how close they’ve gotten.

Purchase from: Amazon