Taverns and Dragons Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Taverns and Dragons, a dice placement game published by Lord Raccoon Games. In Taverns and Dragons you are using your workers to cook up tasty recipes for your tavern.

The king is coming! But whose tavern will host the most auspicious feast to be held in his honor? Send your minions out to collect rare ingredients, prepare mouth watering recipes, and hire fearsome heroes to help defeat the pesky dragons that haunt the wilds! It’s time to prove your tavern is the only one worthy of a king’s patronage.

Taverns & Dragons is a dice placement game of cunning and cooking for 2-5 players.

In a game of Taverns & Dragons, each player is given five action dice, three minions, and a tavern board in their chosen color. At the start of each round players will simultaneously roll all of their action dice and then take turns assigning these dice to spaces on the main board or their personal tavern board, in order to take actions.

The actions are: earn gold coins, get energy gems equal to the value of your die face, activate a minion, or cook a recipe. In addition to these actions, you may also buy heroes that give you special abilities, activate location abilities, and, possibly, fight a dragon.

The main crux of the game lies in minion activation. To activate a minion, place a die on that minion’s space on your tavern board, then move its meeple that many spaces along the path on the main board. Your minion may collect one ingredient from either its starting or ending location. This ingredient is placed on your tavern board in the corresponding minion’s backpack. Ingredients may be moved from your minion’s backpack to your pantry (thus making them available for use in recipes later) only when the minion makes it back to the starting town space. You may also pay to use special locations adjacent to your minion.

Once every player have used all five of their dice the current round ends. Depending on which round it is, certain features will activate, and a new round begins