Wouter & Ymke 
Having the strongest dragons sounds like a fairly sensible way to win a game about dragons. Dragon Overload disagrees. You’re trying to control five territories by sending dragons of different strengths into them, but if your group ends up at least twice as strong as your opponent’s during final scoring, you lose that territory instead. Apparently, putting several powerful dragons together is asking for trouble.
Playing a card also gives your opponent a new one. The dragon waiting above your chosen territory goes straight into their hand, so you know exactly what you’re handing over. Add the overload rule and a 9 can be considerably less useful than it first appears.
👥 2 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designers: Jay Bendixen
🎨 Artwork: Nele Diel
🏢 Publisher: Lookout Games (review copy provided by Asmodee Belgium).
Gameplay Overview
Five territories are placed between both players: Cloudy Crests, Boiling Basin, Lava Lagoon, Mossy Meadows and Crystal Caves. Each corresponds to one of the five dragon suits. Both players can place up to three dragons on their side of each territory.
You start with four cards in hand, with the starting player drawing an additional card. On your turn, you choose one dragon and place it into a territory. When played face up, its suit has to match that territory. A fire dragon can go into Lava Lagoon, for example, but not into Crystal Caves.
There’s also a face-up dragon above each territory. After you play a card, your opponent takes the dragon above that territory into their hand. A new one is then drawn from the deck to replace it. You know which card you’ll be giving away before deciding where to play.
Each player may also play up to three cards face down during the game. These can go into any territory, regardless of suit, and count as zero strength while hidden.
The first player to place a dragon in a territory takes its claim token. From then on, the token changes hands whenever the other player has a higher visible total. A tie leaves it with its current owner. The overload rule doesn’t apply during play.
The game ends immediately if one player controls all five territories. You can also lose if you still have empty spaces but can no longer make a legal play. Otherwise, play continues until both players have filled their three spaces in every territory. Face-down cards are revealed and any that don’t match their territory are discarded. You then compare the totals. If one player has at least twice their opponent’s strength, they overload and lose that territory instead. Whoever controls the most territories wins.
Artwork & Components
Dragon Overload comes in a small box containing 45 dragon cards, five territory tiles and five claim tokens. There’s one dragon of each value from 1 to 9 in every suit, and no card text to deal with. The cards overlap as the territories fill up, so the large values in the corners are useful. We rarely had to move cards around to check a total. Suit symbols are clear as well, and the chunky claim tokens are easy to spot among all the dragons.
There isn’t much else in the box. Once both players have cards spread across all five territories, the table is already rather full of dragons.
Our Experience
Reading through the rules, our initial reaction was almost: “Oh, that’s it?” We had no trouble understanding how everything worked, including the overload rule. We still looked at the higher numbers first. Years of board games have apparently done some damage.
A few territories ended up much stronger than they needed to be. We also had high cards sitting in our hands that we didn’t particularly want to play. There was no grand moment where the overload rule suddenly clicked for us. We understood it from the beginning. Actually treating a smaller number as the better card took a little longer.
The dragons above the territories probably caused more hesitation during our games. There were places we left alone because neither of us wanted to hand over the card sitting there. We’d play somewhere else instead. Once spaces started filling up, we also paid more attention to which suits the other player could still use. Giving someone another card for an already full territory became increasingly tempting.
Our face-down cards were rarely elaborate bluffs. Quite often we just had an awkward dragon and needed somewhere to put it. Three opportunities to do that disappear quickly.
Hands occasionally became awkward enough that we could tell the other player was having trouble with a particular suit. We couldn’t see the cards, obviously, so there was always some guesswork involved. It was enough to make us suspicious whenever the other person suddenly seemed very keen to give away a particular dragon.
Our Thoughts
The card exchange is the part of Dragon Overload we enjoyed most. We spent plenty of time checking the dragon we were about to give away before looking back at our own card. Improving a territory by a few points didn’t seem particularly useful if it handed over exactly what the other player needed elsewhere. Giving away an inconvenient suit could be more attractive.
I don’t particularly like the immediate-loss condition. Once your face-down plays are gone, an unusable hand can simply end the game. Sometimes your opponent has clearly helped create that situation. Sometimes the cards coming from the deck have helped as well. I’d rather play out the five territories.
The three face-down cards worked fine for us. There are few enough of them that we never felt completely in the dark about a territory. At final scoring one can disappear because it’s the wrong suit, change the total or cause an overload. We were happy with that amount of hidden information.
There isn’t much built-in variety. Every game uses the same five suits, the same values and the same territories, without special powers or alternative setups. I don’t see us spending an entire evening with it or trying to explore it over dozens of plays. We’ve tended to play two or three games and then move on to something else.
Players of Schotten Totten or Battle Line will recognise the idea of fighting over several areas. Passing cards directly to your opponent gives Dragon Overload its own problem to deal with, and the overload rule stops the usual race towards the biggest numbers. It’s part of Lookout Games’ Games for Two line, which feels like the right place for it. There’s also an official version on Board Game Arena if you want to play it digitally. For us, it has worked best as a short game to play a couple of times in the same sitting. That’s probably how it’ll keep coming back to our table.
📝 We received a review copy of Dragon Overload from Asmodee Belgium.
