Session: Fist of Dragonstones

Five of us tried out Days of Wonder's Fist of Dragonstones this weekend. As we've come to expect from Bruno Faidutti (with Michael Schacht this time), there are lots of special characters with special abilities. In fact, those abilities are the entire game. Each round is a batch of in-your-fist auctions for the right to execute a character's ability. Auction, auction, auction. And it's the most unforgiving form of auction-- all players pay their bid, even if they lose. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Since players have a budget of coins which get returned to them every few auctions, spent bids aren't gone for good. This lessens the blow and actually makes the bidding far more strategic than it might otherwise be. There's quite a bit of group-think involved. When a terrific ability comes up for auction, everyone might think it's going to go for a huge sum and therefore not bid-- allowing one player to walk away with it for a minimum bid of 1. Success relies on judging what's going to be valuable to other players and how your opponents will react, and acting accordingly.

Our game moved briskly and did not overstay its welcome-- important for a game where you do the same one thing over and over and over again. The components are first-rate, making me very interested in seeing future efforts from Days of Wonder. This'll probably come back to the table tomorrow night, and I'm looking forward to giving it a second play.

Posted by Peter at March 3, 2003 01:12 PM