Dragomino

Game 17 and the second “Then” game of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is “Dragomino,” played with Henry(3).

“Dragomino” was the fourth review I did way back in the summer of 2021, and at the time, “Dragomino” was then three-year-old Toby’s favourite game and have included some old pics of Toby as well

Today, we decided to play the game with Henry and see if he enjoyed it just as much as Toby. Although Henry is not quite as able to concentrate on games as Toby was at his age, he is doing really well and has definitely made big improvements over the last few months as we’ve slowly introduced more and more complex games and encouraged the idea of concentrating, taking turns, and being okay if you don’t win.

“Dragomino” is a junior version of the popular tile-laying game “Kingdomino,” which I also reviewed around the same time, along with “Queendomino,” and we will definitely get to those. If you are looking for a review of an older version of this, I would recommend checking out our review of “Kingdomino Origins,” which, to be honest, renders the original “Kingdomino” obsolete in my opinion, as you can play the original “Kingdomino” with the “Origins” set as well as a lot more.

First, you start by setting up the game. Each player gets a starting tile, which is their starting point on the board. These starting tiles have different types of landscapes like forests, deserts, and mountains. You’ll also have a set of dragon egg tokens and domino-style tiles with various landscape halves on them.

The main goal of “Dragomino” is to explore these different landscapes and find dragon eggs. You do this by drawing and placing tiles in your play area, matching the landscapes to earn these eggs.

On your turn, you draw a tile which has two different landscapes on it. You then place your tile next to either your starting tile or any other tile in your play area, matching landscapes on the tiles, such as connecting a desert to a desert or a forest to a forest. If you manage to match, you then get to take a dragon egg. When you flip the dragon egg token over, you will either get a baby dragon, thereby scoring your point, or you’ll get an empty egg, scoring nothing. Certain rarer biomes are more likely to give you dragons.

The strategy comes in where, if you match your tiles correctly, it is possible to generate two eggs or, in rare cases, even three eggs on one turn.

Once all of the tiles are gone, you add up all of the baby dragons, and the player with the most baby dragons wins.

The components are of extremely high quality. The dominoes themselves are really nice cardboard, and the artwork on them is really colourful and engaging. There is a really nice dragon meeple, which is basically just the player counter, but it is super cute and lovely.

I’m not normally a fan of kid versions of older games and usually, I recommend you get the older version and, if need be, take out some of the rules. “Dragomino,” however, is different enough that it is worth owning for smaller children alongside “Kingdomino,” which I would probably say your average five- or six-year-old could definitely handle.

Henry really enjoyed this. He loved matching up different biomes and getting the really colourful dragons. It was really nice to play this with him again, as we haven’t actually played this a lot in the last year or two as Toby had grown out of it and preferred to play “Kingdomino” instead.

Lovely stuff and a very high recommendation.