Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn is a cooperative battle game for 5 to 5 players. It is intended to be played with the Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen adventure. Let’s find out how to play it. Buy Warriors of Krynn: https://amzn.to/3Hu7GX6
Transcript
Cold Open
It’s deceptively simple and intriguingly complex at the same time.
Intro
Welcome to another DragonLance Saga episode. My name is Adam and today we are going to talk about how to play the Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn board game. I would like to take a moment and thank the members of this channel, and invite you to consider becoming a member by visiting the link in the description below. You can even pick up Dragonlance gaming materials using my affiliate links. I am referencing the Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn Rulebook and Scenario Book for this information. If I leave anything out or misspeak, please leave a comment below!
Discussion
This battle game centers around the Dragon Queen’s invading Army, and the valiant Alliance standing in their way for survival. You actually play both on your turn, but you are represented as a single hero of a single character class. It’s important to know that unlike BattleSystem from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, this has very little to do with Dungeons & Dragons or its rules. This is meant to be an abstract attachment or play experience that may enhance the Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen adventure for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Once you wrap your head around the idea that the classes are generic and not your specific player character, I believe it’s easier to grasp the rules. Warriors of Krynn features twelve scenarios. Scenario 0 is the training ground where you learn the basics of play, and the scenarios proceed from one to twelve as the adventure unfolds. You are suggested to keep track of the outcomes of each scenario for the conclusion of the battle game and its companion adventure. There are three tiers of play broken down in the scenarios. The Recruit tier focuses on Scenario 1-4, the Veteran tier contains scenarios 5-8 and the Legendary tier presents scenarios 9-12.
Each scenario centers around the battlefield. We will get into all of its components in a moment, for now, let’s focus on your character. Each player chooses a hero board to either represent their hero in the adventure, or one of the pre-defined heroes for the board game. The hero board presents you with possible actions you can take on your turn, and the stress tracker. The stress tracker allows you to monitor your stress in the game. Too much stress and you can lose the scenario. You can leverage your stress to perform actions and aid the Alliance in different ways. Next you need to take a look at your class card. This tells you which two abilities are your Mastered Abilities, which help you reduce difficulty in actions, and what abilities are associated with your class, all of which are used to activate your class powers, presented on the card as well. Remember you can only activate each class power once in any scenario. Each class has a different set of master abilities, ability cards and class powers, so understanding your strengths and weaknesses is essential in assisting the other heroes win the scenario. Ability cards can be used by themselves or to activate powers. Finally you need to select a token to represent your hero as they travel the battleground.
Once you have familiarized yourself with your hero, we can focus on the battlefield. This tutorial is presenting Scenario 0: Training Ground. How to set up the battlefield and how to run an individual scenario is presented in the Scenario Book. Let’s focus on what you see here. The large hexagon tiles are called Battle Tiles. These are the regions that are the flanks of the battles between the Alliance and Dragon Army Units. The top three lines are the Dragon army Lines, and the Bottom three are the Alliance army lines. Each army has varying numbers of units on each line and each line is represented by the three types of units, starting from the center moving out. The center are the Foot Units, the middle are the Missile units and the outer are the mounted units. Each unit type has a token associated with it. The Battle Tiles are controlled by Commanders, each side has a commander card associated with it. Commanders can be ready, and able to use their power, or shaken, and unable to use them. Heroes can refresh shaken alliance commanders, each card tells you how.
The smaller Trapezium tiles are called Adventure Tiles. These are areas where the heroes may encounter boons, obstacles and conflicts as they traverse the battlefield. Strategically utilizing these tiles is essential to success in any given scenario. The rectangle is the Key Moment Tracker. This allows the players to track progress of the scenario. Each scenario has a number of Key moments before the conclusion of the battle.
Next let’s briefly go over the various tokens in Scenario 0: Training Ground. Each battle tile represents a flank, the token explains which flank is active and which is not. Only active flanks are able to engage with the active flank armies on a hero’s turn. Objective Tokens are used to represent a scenario’s objective. Something the hero needs to interact with to win the scenario. Vile Champion tokens represent a monster that serves the Dragon Army. They can be attacked by or hinder the heroes. There are also Fire Tokens which occupy three unit spaces. They can be put out by the heroes. Next we have the different decks of cards. First is the Event Deck which guides a player’s turn and the events on the battlefield. The Equipment Deck which are items the heroes can win or find to use in the scenario, and unit deck for each of the dragon Army and Alliance units. And finally we have the two sets of dice. Battle Dice which tell you how well you, the alliance unit or the dragon army’s unit hit, and the Skirmish Die, which tells you the specific battle line that will be involved in the heroes turn.
Now that we have a basic understanding of your hero, and the battlefield, let’s talk about playing the game. A player’s turn progresses through four phases, the Event Phase where you reveal and resolve the event card, the Action phase, where the hero performs their actions, The respite phase where you reduce stress or regain cards, and the Battle phase, informed by the event card from the event phase. Determine the order of hero play, and they proceed in turn as follows. In the event phase the hero draws the event card. The box labeled right now tells you want to do immediately. The Battle Phase box tells you what to do in the battle phase at the end of the hero’s turn. If you pull a Key Moment card, you move the Key moment token on the key moment tracker and read the scenario entry specified. Next is the Action Phase. This is where the hero can activate a power, initiate a conflict, initiate an encounter, move their hero, play free action cards, put out a fire orf transfer equipment. Each option is labeled on the hero board for clarity. The hero’s only have four actions they may take on their turn from that list, so strategy is important.
A couple of these actions need a little further explanation. Initiating a conflict is used when you fight a Vile Champion or take a specific scenario task. Each conflict has a numerical difficulty and an ability associated with it. If your hero has a mastered ability that matches the conflict ability, the difficulty is reduced by one. You start with one battle die in this action, and can add a die by using one of your actions and discarding an ability card of that type. You roll the Battle die, and a single sword is one hit, two swords are two hits and the dragon head is Woe. This adds one stress to the attacker. Black means nothing happens. If you meet the difficulty number, you defeat the encounter. If you exceed the difficulty number, you can draw a card from the equipment deck. Moving your hero needs a bit of explanation as well. Normally you can move one tile per action. If the tiles are connected by roads, you can travel that road as far as you wish for one action. If there is a stop symbol you must end your move action on that tile. If you move off a tile with a Vile Champion you take one stress. And lastly you can only move through the Alliances side of the battle tile, not the Dragon Armies side. The final elaboration would be for the Initiate an Encounter Action. You can only perform this action if there is no Vile Champion on the tile, and you cannot perform it more than once during your turn. This action includes Activating a tiles power, refreshing a shaken commander and examining an object. You can reduce the difficulty of the encounter by having the mastered ability or discarding associated ability cards. No extra actions are required like with a conflict action. Also, no difficulty can be reduced below one. Next is the Respite phase, where you can reduce two stress, or return two ability cards to your hand from your discarded abilities, or any combination of the two. It’s important to note this is only if you’re not on an active battle tile or on an adventure tile with a Vile Champion .
Finally is the Battle Phase. This final phase of a heroes turn is itself broken up into four potential sections: Battle Starts, Heroes on the active flank can activate appropriate class powers or play cards, Activate Command Powers of ready commanders, first from the Dragon Army then Alliance commanders on the active flank, and lastly Resolve Fights between lines. This will be defined by the Event card on whether it’s an All-Out Battle where every line fights, or if it’s a skirmish and only a single line, or a commander and a single line fight, this is the result of rolling a skirmish die. To resolve a fight between lines, you always start from the inside Foot line to the Missile line, then the mounted line, unless it’s a skirmish. You need to determine the strength of each opposing line. Add the units and tactic tokens on each, and the line with the greater number attacks. If it’s equal, the Dragon Army attacks. Then turn over a unit card from the appropriate battle line unit card deck and resolve what it says. This will often lead to rolling battle dice and applying hits. Each unit can only take two hits, the first makes the unit shaken. Apply woe to the attacking line if rolled.
The first hit is always applied to barricades which destroy it. Then a ready unit takes a hit and is shaken, then a shaken unit is hit then removed. Heroes on the active flank can absorb the hits delivered to the Alliance line in the form of stress. If a Battle Tile becomes controlled when the other units are either all shaken or removed, you remove all battle commanders and one unit of each type as well as the flank token from the victorious side to a neighboring battle tile. If the Dragon Army took control add a stop token to the battle tile. Each scenario will outline the outcome of any major changes like a battle tile becoming controlled, but when all battle tiles are controlled, the scenario ends immediately in a win or loss. This will end the Battle phase, and the hero’s turn. Play then proceed to the next hero.
The strength of this game is that it’s a mixture of a massive battle game and an adventure. More often than not, the heroes are completing objectives while the battle is ongoing, so the goal is not to win or lose the overall battle, but rather complete the objectives. Each scenario will explain what actions are needed to end the scenario in a win, hold or loss. I highly recommend Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn in conjunction with Shadow of the Dragon Queen, and you can check out my Dragonlance gaming episodes where we play through the different scenarios.
Outro
But that is all I have to say about how to play the Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn Board Game. Do you feel like it’s too tied to the adventure and not enough of a standalone game? Are the game mechanics too complex? Leave a comment below.
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He lost the damn gem in a game of bones!
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