You’ve read about the world’s great explorers: Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, Henry Hudson, Amerigo Vespucci…they traveled to new and distant lands, they traded for supplies, they had adventures, and now you can too!
Almanac: The Dragon Road is an adventure filled caravanning, traveling, trading, exploring board game with unique and beautifully designed elements. Players travel through the magical fantasy realm of Baeloria from the Outpost to Dragon City, collecting and selling goods, acquiring wealth and riches along the way.
Each player starts the game with a caravan card, a few coins, 6 adventuring meeples, two Contract Cards and a screen.
Players use a screen in their color to obscure their coins and extra workers. Keeping your wealth hidden gives you an advantage later on in the game… keep reading!
The game board in this game is so unique, it’s a spiral bound book. Each page is a location with a different theme, rules for placing workers, benefits, and potential locations for the next stop.
The Caravan Deck is placed with the same number of cards as there are players, face up. The Contract Deck is placed on the table, as well as the coin and resource tokens and the Encounter Deck.
Dragon Road is played in 3 phases. In the main Action phase, players place their workers in locations around the board. Each location on the board has a symbol which indicates what kind of action you can take like gaining resource tokens, selling resource tokens, completing a contract, building strength, choosing new contract cards, or extending your caravan.
Players can only collect as many resources as they have cargo space for on their caravan cards, so extending your caravan is important!
Earn resources to collect and sell for money to buy caravan cards, which cost both resources AND coins.
The goal of the game is to gain “Fame.” Players can earn Fame (indicated by a number value inside a green diamond) from buying caravan extension cards and completing new contracts.
As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts to this game, but it’s not hard to learn!
At the end of every phase, players have to flip over an ENCOUNTER card and resolve it as instructed.
At the end of each round, players bid for who gets to be the next Guide. In turn order, each player holds up an undisclosed amount of money. The person who made the highest bid gets to be The Guide for the cost of the lowest player’s bid. The Guide gets to choose the next location (there are always 2 options) and go first in the next round.
Players continue moving through the locations, traveling along the path until they finally reach The Dragon City where the player with the most FAME wins.
The Dragon Road is a great gameschooling way to study the Middle and Far East, Marco Polo/other explorers, merchant trading, travel routes, geography, cartography, precious metals/stones, economics, and math.
Players have a lot of decisions to make in this game and every choice has a price for every player. This game is a really fun way to work on decision making skills, logical and analytical reasoning, strategy, and cooperation. It also adds some welcome excitement to the study of history and industry!
Thanks to Asmodee USA for sharing with us!
