Dragon Tower

Note: This is a short really early legacy review before I started posting longer form review in our Facebook Group.

So we have easily kept up the game playing but it seems Daddy is letting the side down keeping up the “posting on Facebook admin side of the “Bailey School Holiday Boardgame Marathon (Christmas Edition).”

Game 12 is Drachen Turm (Dragon Tower) played by Jack(6), Toby(3) and myself. Drache Turm is a memory matching, tower building, race against the time dexterity game.

The game is broken up into 2 phases. You start with the dragon and his rock nearest the building giving you the maximum amount of slack in the rope. The first phase sees you turn over tiles trying to find the pieces needed to build the tower while hopefully avoiding other dragon pieces. Every Dragon piece moves the dragon back one making phase 2 harder.

Once your tower is built you start the dragon who starts to wind in the rope until it falls. You then have to move the princess out of the tower using sticks, down the tower you have made and away to her carriage before the tower falls.

Firstly with some positives. The game has an excellent table presence and looks amazing setup. The pieces are of the usual Haba high quality and the dragon figurine is excellent. Everything works really well and looks great. It’s really different and novel and my boys were super excited to see the dragon break the castle.

Sadly not all is perfect. the memory match game is really hard and requires some serious luck to not move the dragon back the whole way. Chances are you will move back at least 3 places minimum even if you make no mistakes. We just about managed to do it on the hardest difficulty but I suspect young kids solo would struggle.

The box is massive and way bigger than it needs to be. Finally, there is not much variety.

So what do I think? It’s a cool game and my boys had loads of fun playing it. I can see it getting to the table but more as a “this is super cool type game when we have family/friends over” rather than a Bailey game night staple.

What I will say is the boys started house ruling it including a variant where the rock was at the top and the dragon pulls the tower over (you can see Toby flirting with this at the end of the video). The Dragon is awesome and with a bit of imagination could be used in other things.

Its middle ground thumbs are slightly slanted upwards but def, not an essential purchase.