Game Review - Iron Dragon

Iron Dragon
Number of Players	2 - 6
Play Time	180 minutes
Ages	10 years and up

In keeping with what appears to be an Empire Builder style game theme as of late, I will be reviewing Iron Dragon.

Iron Dragon is the fantasy world setting entry into the Empire Builder family of games.  It is the also that game that adds in the most extra rules that are unique to the game.

Let us start with the basics.  The players are owners of railroad in the fantasy world.  They start the game with 60 gold.  In order to win they need to build track to seven of the eight major cities and have 250 gold.  In order to gain more gold to be able to build track and get the money needed for victory, the players get a set of demand cards which have three delivery contracts on them each for a total of nine delivery options.  The delivery contract show an item demanded and they amount of money that will be paid to the player upon the delivery of that item to the city that has the demand.  Once one of the three deliveries is made from a card it is discarded and a new demand card is drawn.

In order to move between cities, the players must build track.  Track costs a certain amount per space or milepost to build.  One gold for clear or desert mile post, two gold for forest or mountain milepost, three gold for jungle milepost, and five gold for alpine milepost.  It costs an additional two gold to cross a river and an additional three gold to cross a wider body of water.

There are three additional special rules or what I like to call features that are introduced to the Empire Builder family of games in Iron Dragon.  Only one of which made it into any other game in that family.

First instead of costing 20 gold to upgrade a train to be able to move faster and/or carry more loads, in Iron Dragon a train upgrade costs 10 gold per step.  However there are four steps required to upgrade a train completely instead of two steps the basic game so to upgrade a train fully costs the same but can be started earlier in the game.  This is the feature that made it in to future games that are based in fantasy and science fiction worlds.

The second feature that is added is ships.  There are large bodies of water on the map that the players can cross to deliver loads.  The players may want to do this if they are short of funds and want to get to a place they do not have track to in order to be able to deliver a load.  The players draw from a set of ships in order to see what the ship will cost to rent and how many spaces it will move.  This feature while adding flavor to the game does little else.  Traveling by train over any long distance will get a player to their destination faster than if they move by ship and the player will need to build track in the area that they are ignoring if they are going to connect their major cities.

The last added feature is conductors.  The conductors give players discounts to build track over a certain terrain.  For example an elf makes if so that it costs a player only one gold to build to forest mileposts instead of the regular two gold per milepost.  This is a feature that a player could fall in love with trading out conductors every turn to try to make their builds cheaper.  Unless you are going to build more than five mileposts over the terrain that the conductor effect, then you are better off not changed out conductors.

Iron Dragon is my least favorite of the Empire Builder family of games.  The added features seem to bog down the game because they add options to the decision making tree with very little long term effect.  I believe that if you are interested in Empire Builder games, you should play this game at least once, but make sure that it is not the first one you try because it is different enough from the other games in the series that it is not a true test of what the game is like and may turn you off to the series.