• Game: Dragon Rage
• Publisher: Flatlined Games
• Designer: Lew Pulsipher
• Genre: Monster siege
• Players: 2
• Playtime: 60-120 minutes



• What's Hot: Vividly detailed monster siege concept; accessible wargame rules; respectful revisions and updates; flexibility and variety built into the scenario designs



• What's Not: Expensive, limited, and imported; some printing errors

by: Michael Barnes

If you are old enough to have played fantasy board games in the 1970s and 1980s, you’ll likely nod in agreement with me when I say that they don’t make ‘em like Dragon Rage any more. The kids today, what with their games covered in all of that artwork and cards with more flavor text than game information don’t know what it was like to have a counter with a crude drawing and almost no back story or licensed material to give it meaning. We used our imaginations to fill in the blanks. Theme and narrative came from rules rather than fluff. And the best games like this- such as Dragon Rage- created vivid stories and believable worlds for us to play in even when the hex maps were little more than simple line drawings and a dragon was a one inch cardboard chit instead of a made-in-China gumball machine figure.

Cane shaking aside, Flatlined Games out of Belgium has reissued Dragon Rage in a very nice new edition with some expanded content and respectful revision that includes counters with both new and the original art on their flipsides. Designed by Lewis Puslipher, who also did the classic strategy game Britannia, the game was originally published in 1982 by a miniatures company called Dwarfstar. It was a small format game not unlike the original Ogre, and appropriately the game definitely shows the influence of that classic one big unit versus many small units concepts. But in Dragon Rage, the one big unit (or units) is obviously dragons and the small units are humans trying to protect property values in their walled city, Esirien. The dragons just want to raise some hell, crashing through gates, roasting archers perched in towers, and hunting down the heroes that slay their young. Destroying victory point-bearing buildings in the city is their only agenda.

Dragon Rage is very much an old fashioned hex-and-counter war game. There’s a lot of fairly standard material. Units are rated on various parameters with almost everything you need to know available at a glance on the cardboard chit. Manmade and natural terrain has various effects, and there are some really cool details like how humans can put a unit behind a gate to brace it. Resolutions are conducted using a hoary, time-honored combat results table that produces a range of outcomes. Like most wargames, there is a certain degree of standardization that makes the rules easier to digest. Procedure is fairly simple despite being parceled out into a “read this first” startup guide and a full rules reference; if you’ve never played a wargame before, this would make a decent first time experience even if the subject matter steers well clear of the usual Panzers and paratroopers.

The asymmetry, just as in Ogre, is compelling. The human defenders get a variety of units including cavalry, bowmen, archers, heroes, and wizards that have a couple of fine anti-dragon spells. Dragons are complex units with separate damage tracks for its belly, head, limbs, wings, and tail. Naturally, they can breathe fire but they can also bound, fly, slither, and perform a variety of different attacks. But if you’re not into dragons, the game also gives you a couple of other creatures to do the medieval Kaiju thing with including giants, rocs, sea monsters and even Tyrannosaurs. Each of the beasties gets its own chart to track damage and abilities.

It’s scenario-based, which allows for different setups and permutations of the core rules and concept. The new edition has a second map on the flipside featuring an Orc village, so you can run a dragon versus Orcs game or you can even have the human forces raid the village. Six basic setups are included, but if you really want to see what happens when a Tyrannosaur dukes it out with a Dragon, you can probably pull it off. There’s a lot of versatility in the package with lots of fun to discover and replayability is high. The original version of the game didn’t include the Orc map or units