Catalyst Game Labs Dragonfire Deckbuilding Board Games

I bought this product shortly after i started enjoying deck building games. The local store had this game for sale at $68 and i found it here for cheaper. When this arrived, i immediately gathered my friends and we began to play with the quickstart rules. The quickstart rules are almost designed specifically to make you fail, but i believe this is to make you feel better about yourselves when you start the real rules. My two friends brought over two other friends because we were determined to beat the quickstart though. With five people, we just barely beat the quickstart rules, and moved on to using the full rules with a campaign. After a short break, we moved on to a campaign, we chose between using "Dungeon Crawl" or the start of a five mission campaign. We were not aware that the five mission campaign was very difficult, and started that. We lost in round 3 of the first mission of the 5 mission campaign, gained our experience, and stopped for the night. Even though we lost, we weren't discouraged and had lots of fun! Two friends left the next morning, so two friends and myself started playing through "Dungeon Crawl" with new character sheets so we wouldn't leave our other friends behind. (I went out to the local store, and bought every expansion and dragonshield smoke perfect fits because those were cheaper locally than on amazon, and i got them when i wanted them, which was now.) We had a great time playing through "Dungeon Crawl" and it was much easier. We recommend that if you do buy this: 1. Do not get discouraged if you do not win in the Quickstart rules. 2. Do "Dungeon Crawl" and the expansion adventures until your party are all at least level 3 or 4 3. Have as big of a party as possible, we notice if you have more players, you have more fun. 4. Learn from the adventures and how to create your own adventures. 5. Have as much fun as possible.

Great game, a lot of fun. That said it is quite difficult and a lot of people get frustrated with how often you die. The screens are laminated so you can use wet erase or dry erase markers on them, but they aren't super durable so It seems that they still kind of want them to be one-use things. That said, lots of people just print out and use character sheets instead. Lots of storage space in the box. I only have 2 real complaints. 1. The rulebook is VERY poorly laid out, making it nearly impossible to find what you are looking for at any given time. The index/glossary are also garbage and rarely contain the information you are looking for, but instead the most common and simple items. 2. There are tons and tons of stickers. Like I have this and the heroes expansion and my sticker pile is like an inch thick, and NOBODY wants to use them! They can't be re-used and because the screens aren't fully laminated and it's impossible to find sleeves for them, nobody wants to use the enormous pile of stickers.

This game does require a lot of reading from the host to setup ( about 1-2 hour initial reading of rules and everything). Once 1 person knows it all it can go super smooth. That person would have to explain to everyone, but it beats sitting down together fumbling through it (we did that). The game itself was very fun and impactful to play. The more you played, the more combos you could figure out, the dangers that lurked, and the things you could handle. The replayability is nice, but I wish there were some monster and campaign boosters that were cheap and ready available to buy. It would be nice to spend about $5-10 to get some more monsters, quests, even new/diverse characters, or more abilities that you could think of. This is a great base game and would love to see them develop it more! It is a great introduction to D&D with easy card game mechanics and play that anyone can learn!

I have a four person crew for gaming night and we just finished playing the introduction mission and the first campaign mission. It was an absolute blast. There is no denying that this game is HARD, but nonetheless, with good team work and having both an individual and a group strategy it is possible. We beat the first mission when a lot of people on here say it’s designed for you to fail. We will definitely let be playing the campaign and getting all the expansions!