Friday Filler: The Forest Dragon: Bang & Twang

In 2017, Jon Hodgson, Ben Hodgson, and Rory Hodgson published The Forest Dragon: A Card Adventure Game, a simple, fantasy-themed push-your-luck style card game. Despite its simplicity, it enabled players to tell tales of forest exploration and proved to be a delightfully charming filler. In 2018, the young and old followed it up with a second game, not quite as simple, but still set in the same world as The Forest Dragon and a good little filler. This is a second game is The Forest Dragon: Bang & Twang, a game of pattern matching and tune twiddling with take that elements in which musicians gather at crossroads and campfires throughout the forest, get out their instruments, tune them up, and not only play, but play to out play everyone against a tune which is constantly changing!

Designed to be played by between two and six players, aged eight and over, Bang & Twang can be played in just ten minutes. Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it consists of sixty-seven cards divided into three types. The first are the ‘Bang’ and ‘Twang’ cards. These are double-sided ‘Riff Cards’ which have ‘Bang’ on one side and ‘Twang’ on the other along with illustrations of their instruments. They form the Riff which players are trying to match with the sixteen Sequence cards and will constantly be flipped and changing place in the sequence. Each Sequence Card displays a sequence of the ‘Bang’ and ‘Twang’ cards, which if a player can match with a sequence of the Riff cards, will award him the Victory Points on the Sequence Card. The third type of card is the Tune Card. They come in sets of eight, there being eight sets, each of a different colour in the game. Each set of Tune Cards does something different. So the green Tune Cards let the players steal Sequence Cards from each other; the red Tune Cards let players flip and switch the Riff Cards; and the yellow Tune Cards lets players interrupt each other.

Game play is simple, but is only ever done with the Riff Cards on the table, the Sequence Cards, and one set of Tune Cards. The Riff Cards are laid out to display either three ‘Bangs’ or three ‘Twangs’. The Sequence Cards and the selected set of Tune Cards are shuffled together and each player receives two cards. On his turn, a player is trying to bank a Sequence Card towards his Victory Point total. He does this by matching a Sequence Card with the current sequence of Riff Cards. If they do not match, a player can flip a Riff Card to its other side or move a Riff Card so that it does match and if they now match, the player can bank the Sequence Card. Alternatively, a player can play a Tune Card, which lets him do something special depending upon the colour set chosen. Ultimately if a player can do none of these, he can just flip a Riff Card.

Play continues like this until the deck of cards runs out. The player with the highest score wins and, well, that is that. Bang & Twang is simple. In fact simple enough for younger players to pick up and play with older players, but possibly too simple for more experienced players. So it works better as a family game. And whilst the different types of Tune Cards do add some variety in terms of replay value, but each set is too one note to replay too many times. One option here is to mix and match the Tune Cards, perhaps two sets at a time? Certainly there are not enough Sequence Cards to mix them all in, which might have made for more varied play.

Physically, The Forest Dragon: Bang & Twang is bright and breezy, illustrated in the same style as The Forest Dragon. So very much like the illustrations of children’s storybooks. And that is charming. The rules themselves do feel as if they are written for adults rather than the younger age range the game is designed for, so for younger players, an adult or older player may want to supervise or teach the game.
The Forest Dragon: Bang & Twang is not without its charms—though nowhere as many as The Forest Dragon: A Card Adventure Game—but it is probably too light for hobbyist gamers to play too many times. Ultimately, The Forest Dragon: Bang & Twang is a decent family filler.

Rory's Mild Peril

It helps at nine years old, that if you want to design and publish your own board game, your father is the creative director for a British RPG and games publisher. This is not to say that the resulting game is published via said publisher, but rather that your father has some expertise and knowledge when it comes to designing a game and getting it published. And get the game published father and son did after a successful Kickstarter campaign. The game is The Forest Dragon: A Card Adventure Game. The designer is Rory and he is nine years old. The creative director is Jon Hodgson. The publisher is Cubicle Seven Entertainment and it did not have a hand in publishing The Forest Dragon.

Designed for two or more players aged six and up, The Forest Dragon is a simple, fantasy-themed push-your-luck style card game. It consists of sixty, full colour cards each illustrated by Rory and his younger brother, Ben. Seven of these cards give the rules. The others consist of resource cards—such as Sticks and Berries, treasure cards like Golden Coins and Crystal Compass, monster cards such Sinister Cloaked Gentleman and the Cursed Crocodile Knight, and adventuring item cards like Bow and a Friend. Both the resource and the treasure cards are worth Victory Points at game’s end, for example, Berries are worth a single Victory Point and a bottle of Ghost Milk is worth four. (The game does not explain what Ghost Milk is.) Monster cards typically end a player’s go, like the Wolf Pig, whilst others have an extra effect, for example, the Venom Spitting Snake also forces a player to discard three items. Adventuring item cards aid a player, for example, the Sword can be used to defeat one monster per turn, whilst Rations can be discarded instead of a treasure card.

At the start of a game, the cards are shuffled and laid out face down in rows of five. Only twenty such cards are needed for a two-player game, with a further row needed for each additional player. This forms the forest that is home to the Forest Dragon. Then on his turn each player explores the forest by drawing one card at time. If the card drawn is a treasure, resource, or adventuring item, the player puts them in his backpack. This is invariably sticks or berries—there are lots of sticks and berries in the forest. If the card drawn is a monster, the player has to what it says on the card. Typically, this is to end his turn, but he might also have to discard cards from his backpack. Should a player have an appropriate adventuring item in his backpack, he can use it to overcome the monster. For example, the Sword can be used to defeat a monster and carry on adventuring whereas other adventuring item cards have other effects, such as the Map which enables a player to examine two cards on the table and take one of them.

A player can continue exploring the forest and drawing cards for as long as he wants or until he decides to stop or draws a card that instructs him to stop. Then the next player begins exploring the forest and drawing cards, and so on and son. Play continues until all of the forest has been explored and all of the cards examined. At this point, each player totals up the Victory Points of the cards in his backpack and the player with the most is the winner.

This is all that there is to The Forest Dragon: A Card Adventure Game. It is simple to learn and play and a game will last no more than ten minutes at most. As much as it is a push-your-luck game, it is also very much a luck based game and this can lead to one player running away with Victory Points upon Victory Points—play can be a bit one-sided if this happens. Fortunately, The Forest Dragon is a quick game and once game is over, it is simply a matter of collecting the cards, shuffling them, and laying them out again.

Physically, The Forest Dragon: A Card Adventure Game is very nicely presented. The artwork is charming and the cardstock feels good in the hand. Even the tuckbox that the game comes in is easy to use.

Beyond the core game, The Forest Dragon: A Card Adventure Game has several expansions. The ‘Quest Givers’, ‘Fire Dragon Realm’, ‘Poo Cave’, ‘Ro-Bo Realm’ and ‘Dogs and Things’ expansions all come in The Forest Dragon Expansion Box, whilst ‘Faerie Mischief’ and ‘Star Gazer’ are separate expansions. Some of expansions these simply add extra cards to the core game, such as ‘Quest Givers’, but most add a single portal to the core game which once discovered allows the players to enter another realm, as often they like, and explore its environs. This realm is represented by separate deck of cards. So once the Fire Dragon Realm Portal card has been found, the players can enter and explore the Fire Dragon Realm. (This feels not unlike the expansions for the boardgame, Talisman.)

In terms of its rules, The Forest Dragon: A Card Adventure Game is not a sophisticated game design, but in terms of game play it is a surprisingly sophisticated design. When playing this game you can imagine yourself on an adventure to find monsters and treasure—or at least out collecting sticks and berries and discovering something more!—and so every time you play The Forest Dragon: A Card Adventure Game, there is a story to tell in the process of exploring the forest. For that, The Forest Dragon: A Card Adventure Game is a delightfully charming filler.