Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I have played a lot of Yahtzee over the years; in fact, we love Yahtzee so much at the Bell compound that we have a handheld version of the game that lives in our kitchen. Nothing passes the time waiting for a casserole quite like lining up my next small straight or trying to score 63 or more points on the top half of the score sheet.
Not surprisingly, I always raise my hand when our founder and editor-in-chief, Andy Matthews, asks if anyone wants to review the latest Yahtzee-adjacent board game. Lately, that has included games like Piña Coladice, My Shelfie: The Dice Game, StegegetS Moomin, Sausage Sizzle, 365 Adventures: The Dungeon, King of the Dice: The Board Game, Dice Realms, and many others. Some games do the familiar formula exceptionally well—roll the dice, keep individual die results that you want, re-roll the remaining dice up to two additional times and “you get what you get.”
With that as our frame, I received a review copy of the game Dragon Clans (2024, Van Ryder Games) recently, and it was a very easy game to get to the table. That’s because my kids (ages 11 and 8) are always willing to chuck dice, Yahtzee-style, and it is because they are both Pokémon card collectors. In Dragon Clans, players take on the roles of dragon trainers who have to collect eggs and hatch “cute but fierce Dragons”, as the back of the box tells us. Those eggs are represented by dice, and using six dice and the three-roll mechanic mentioned earlier, players have to match die faces with face-up dragon cards in a shared card market.
When a player has hatched five dragons, or the draw deck has run out, the game ends. Each dragon is worth 4-10 points each, so it is very easy to tally scores to determine the winner. There’s a little more to it than that—including additional powers that make it even easier to acquire dragons—and games wrap up in about 20-25 minutes.
The Challenge is the Lack of Challenge
Across a couple plays with the family, we found Dragon Clans to be just fine. It certainly looks great, and my kids both loved the pictures of dragons provided by Jaime Gonzalez, Josie Jaede, and the team at Gen X Studio, and the requirement that players can only have two face-up dragons at a time meant that there was a light amount of strategy involved in pairing the right dragons at the right time to trigger powers that included a fourth roll or the ability to potentially steal another player’s dragon, assuming you rolled the combination of dragon eggs printed on another player’s card.
Our main issue with Dragon Clans came down to difficulty. In all but one of our turns across two plays, every player got a dragon on every turn. Sure, a player didn’t always get the best/highest-valued dragon from the market, but they always came away with something. And because of the tiny deck size (32 cards) mixed with the Magic Barrier ability—a player can earn a face-down card from the draw deck as a shield if they match five of the five eggs printed on a card, instead of just four matches—games will usually end when the deck runs out. That condition leads to an immediate game end, versus the five-dragon rule, where everyone gets equal turns.
Now, while my family thought the game was a bit too easy, it plays very well into the hands of parents looking for a game where there are zero spiky edges. Kids who don’t like having their stuff stolen can also take advantage of the game’s flexibility to play without the steal power. That means kids will probably get a card every turn AND they never have to worry about losing stuff. When my kids were 4-5 years old, that was very important, so Dragon Clans is a nice fit for a younger family.
Otherwise, no issues with Dragon Clans, but it already lacks the draw that games like Yahtzee and StegegetS Moomin have in our house. Sausage Sizzle has more highs as well, so for more fist-pumping excitement, I would look elsewhere. But as an introduction into other dice-chucking games, Dragon Clans is a handsome onboarding ramp. (It also doubled nicely as a game to play right after we saw the new live-action How to Train Your Dragon remake.)
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