Vault of Dragons - Dungeons & Dragons Board Game

I have no idea what to think about stuff like this. My first reaction is fairly yawn but GF9 always merits attention, with any license, so...

Yeah. Also not much information yet. The picture looks like it’s all cards, no board, so not your typical dungeon crawl.

Looks a bit like Mistfall where the central tiles/cards are the location that your characters explore.

GF9 did a previous D&D game that looked a bit more abstracted than their usual games so they have been in this before.

I expected to be more excited about this. GF9 and D&D and now its tied to Waterdeep even. Maybe after some reviews come in or we learn more about it.

It’s an area control game. Thank Crom it isn’t a co-op! I for one LOVED Tyrants of the Underdark, which was published by GF9, but wasn’t their design team. I’m excited to see GF9 digs a little deeper into the themes as they tend to do.

From the description and pictures, the game is reminiscent of Sons of Anarchy. Since that line seems to be dead, I wonder if they're revamping it and/or taking some of the ideas and putting it into Vault of Dragons.

Josh Look wrote: I for one LOVED Tyrants of the Underdark, which was published by GF9, but wasn’t their design team.

Tyrants of the Underdark is great.

Tyrants of the Underdark might be my favorite D&D boardgame. It is my favorite deckbuilder by far -- in my opinion, it is almost the perfect game of its type.

Man, honestly, who knew all this love for Tyrants?

I've only played Tyrants once, and I found it boring as hell. I recall thinking it would have been great if it had shown up when deck building was still fresh.

I like Tyrants well enough, although I actually just sold my copy last week.

I second Grace's thoughts, this looks very much like Sons of Anarchy. There are differences (exploring the backsides of tiles), but the grid of tiles and the description of area control elements sounds very similar. There was word they were revamping Spartacus with a new edition without the license, this is probably a similar thing.

I'm also thinking sons of anarchy. If a expansion called Luck of the Irish...err...leprechauns shows up, that might be a clue.

Yep. Total reskin of SoA. Ahem, Men of Mayhem.
Which is an under appreciated game!
I suspect this D&D title will be great cause the bones are great.

I might be interested if the "followers" have different abilities that represent D&D classes. Otherwise, if it's just a re-skin of SoA, I already have SoA and frankly our hobby needs more games about biker gangs and fewer games simulating dungeon crawls.

I’m actually really happy to see them doing this. Some of those early GF9 games are really good, but there just isn’t enough crossover between the audiences of the IPs they were handling and board gamers. SoA sounded like my kind of game, but I hate the show and biker culture in general. It’s a hard sell for me and a harder sell to the people I play with. Gimme the D&D theme I’ve seen 1,000 times before.

I hope they do this with a few of their other games, especially Homeland. It’s a solid game but nobody wants spend their escapism time playing a game about terrorists and the politicians that profit off of them.

That's how I am with Spartacus. I like the game, but my fairly churchy player pool would probably not be that into it.

Wait... Didn't they retheme Spartacus into an xmen game?

What happened with that?

Maybe their retheme ideas need a bit more work?

I dunno. I too am not a fan of bikers or biker culture (lived and worked around bandidos my entire time in South texas. I don't want to go back to that in my egress) but would D&D setting fit the mechanisms?

The example of Spartacus turned Xmen makes me a bit skeptical.

I was curious about the X-themed Spartacus, but it seems that they didn't put a lot of thought into the re-theme. There is still an auction phase, only now you are bidding coins for mutants. The only major change seems to be that the gladiatorial combat has been changed into co-op missions. Thematically, it's messy.