Review: THE DRAGON PRINCE: BATTLECHARGED is Fun and Thematic
Recently, Brotherwise Games and Wonderstorm released the board game The Dragon Prince: Battlecharged. This game allows you and up to 5 of your friends to take characters from the beloved Netflix series The Dragon Prince. The team at Wonderstorm was kind enough to send me a copy to review and it’s a game that I think many fans will enjoy.
In the game, each player picks one of 8 characters to play as in a 2v2 (or 3v3) battle. Each character has a unique 16-card deck of actions they can take including attacks and movements among others. On your turn you can perform 1 move action, 1 attack action, and as many techniques as you can afford/want to. An interesting aspect is that you use a special d6 that goes from 0-5 to keep track of your energy which you use to perform stronger actions. You gain energy by some cards, but also each character has a unique mechanic for charging energy. You play until your team has knocked out 3 characters on the opposing team (characters that are knocked out come back into play on their next turn).
Overall, the game is fun when you play in a 2v2 match. You need to be careful when selecting characters and make sure that you and your teammate have good balances. I would recommend being very careful if you both want to be ranged characters for instance. You also need to be careful because the characters don’t feel very balanced. As I already mentioned, characters have different ways to charge energy and they vary drastically. For instance, Amaya charges 1 energy every time she performs a Basic Attack. That sounds reasonable, but you can only perform 1 Basic Attack per turn unless you play a card effect (which typically costs energy to use) that allows you to make a second. This means she charges energy very slowly and in this game, energy is a very precious resource. Meanwhile, you have Rayla who gains 2 energy if she ends her turn not adjacent to enemies and Jaina gains 3 as long as she doesn’t move. This is probably my number 1 complaint about the game is that it’s very easy for some characters to easily get enough energy to use their best cards and a much bigger struggle for others. I didn’t even talk about how Viren has to hurt himself, which makes it a lot easier for your opponents to win, in order to charge and he doesn’t really have means of healing himself which means he has a very finite pool of energy to use.
Now, Battlecharged is rated as allowing for a 2-player game where each player controls 2 characters and combines their decks. I do not recommend playing that way. It is terrible because it greatly dilutes what your characters can do which is incredibly frustrating and not fun. Also, this brings about a weird mechanic where certain characters can play certain cards, but the only ones that can activate each other’s cards are Viren and Claudia. This is very thematic, but it feels like everyone else is getting cheated out of synergy with other characters. Maybe a future expansion will somehow add to this, but I’m not sure what characters they could add.
Other complaints I have are that Ezran just feels like he is all over the place. He gets bonuses for not attacking but then has cards that boost his attack and turn him into a machine. Also, he has some cards that might be able to be seen as support cards but they require him to do nothing else on the turn for very little payout. He just doesn’t seem like a greatly designed character in general. Also, there are two types of movement, but the Flying Movement is extremely rarely useful.
That’s enough negativity though. I do like the artwork for the game and the sculpted minis are incredible. You could paint them and really take your game to the next level. I also enjoy how thematic it is. While I disagree about the balance of the characters, a lot of their abilities fit who they are in the show. Claudia has to continually discard cards and it’s representative of her use of dark magic and her becoming evil. Viren hurts himself and gives up who he is for the use of dark magic. Ezran, in theory, is a pacifist and gets bonuses for acting that way. The game works well on that level.
At the end of the day, Battlecharged has fun ideas and mechanics, but feels like it could use some tweaking still. If you’re a fan of The Dragon Prince and want to pit characters against each other, this is a fine game to grab.
