by mads l. brynnum

Dragon’s Roll is a game that combines three things I love: monsters, dice, and cooperative games.

I’ve already made a game where you play as the monsters trying to catch humans (Monster! Monster! Which is inspired by a book of rhymes I’ve written), so this time I wanted to flip the script. And while I quickly found what has been the backbone of the game since the beginning, developing Dragon's Roll has been a matter of constant tweaking to get the balance and game feel just right.

In Dragon’s Roll you have to protect your town from a boss dragon and its minions. They attack in three short lanes and gradually move towards your town. Every turn you roll your dice and then place some of them on dragons in order to defeat them. Specifically you can only use dice showing one number (so all threes or all ones etc). I got this mechanism from the very excellent Roll For Adventure, and I think it does a great job of limiting the player’s options while still allowing for some tough choices. You want to play a lot of dice, but sometimes just using that one six is the right play. In early versions I had rules for how you could reroll and thus reactivate your dice, but in the end I felt like it created a lot of overhead without adding extra excitement. Instead I settled on simply rolling those of your dice not currently on monsters each turn. This also adds the excitement of hoping for a specific roll which for me is a core part of dice based games. I know I can’t control the roll, but if I think really hard of the two ones I need, then maybe I can.


Testing one of the very early prototypes with my then almost 7-years-old. Yes, I bribed him with candy.
I also tried several different ways of spawning new enemies and moving the ones in play. At first, every time you rerolled your dice, you moved a token on a track which spawned and activated monsters. But it became too predictable and boring, so in the end the solution was simple: an evil dice that can move enemies and spawn new ones. And by giving the enemies different numbers and allowing them to push other enemies forward, suddenly different lanes would behave differently depending on the monsters spawned in them.

Bossing Around

At first the game didn’t have a boss – they are called master dragons in the final game. Instead you just had to clear the lanes in front of the town. It kinda worked, but it felt anticlimactic – especially since you could potentially win if the last monster in the grid attacked the village and then left the grid empty. Also, bosses are fun, but how to incorporate them?

The first boss was placed at the bottom of the monster deck. You had to grind through monsters and then finally defeat it. It was okay, but it felt like you were just going through the motions in the first half of the game. And if the boss moved just like other monsters, it could risk only being in the grid for a few turns.

The solution was to place the boss outside the grid and to give it a special abiilty that is always in danger of activating depending on the roll of the evil dice. That way you can attack it on any turn so you feel you progress towards victory, and you get the sense that you are actually pitted against the boss. And because bosses are tough, you have to defeat it twice to win the game.


The prototype I pitched to HABA. Note the character on the right hand side with abilities that needed to be activated with dice before use.
It’s the Number of Rules, Stupid!

When I pitched the game to HABA, they liked it, but felt like the game had too many rules. Basically each monster not only had a combination of dice needed to defeat it, a lot of them also had special abilities. They asked me to make a simpler version without all the special rules, and it led to a much more streamlined game where reading the board state is easy, and with a tighter focus on the core game play loop.

Another thing we simplified was the help you could get. In the game I pitched, you could use your dice to build structures or activate personal character abilities. It added depth and extra choices too the game, but it also made the board state a bit cluttered. And when playing with young and new players, they would often forget about activating their cards with dice. Instead HABA came up with the idea of one time-use magic scrolls the players share. It’s a very small change, really, but it had a big impact. It made balancing the difficulty easier, it made it easier for new players to understand their options (I can use this card vs. I can spend dice on this card and then use it later), and it also opened a new conversation between players about when to use the abilities. Of course you could also dicuss whether or not to use a personal ability, but if the abilities are shared, you have to. For me one of the core joys of playing coop games is discussing options and asking my kids if they think we should do a given thing like, for instance, use a scroll to defeat a pesky dragon.

A New Theme

HABA suggested making the game a part of the world introduced in King of the Dice and I happily agreed. As a relatively new designer, being able to piggyback on an established game is a great opportunity. And when I saw all the dragons that would make up the enemies, it became even better.


Render of the final cards. One of the village cards has been flipped to the burning side, so if two more dragons attack, the game is lost. And with dragons at the bottom of all three lanes and no dice placed, it looks pretty bleak.
From there on out it was a lot of back and forth on minor tweaks. Maybe spawns should happen on 5-6 instead of 4-6, maybe the order should be first spawn and then move, and so on. And since it was a co-op game, I could test a lot of the stuff concerning balance and game feel myself in my kitchen and then involve testers to make sure.

Finally HABA had an idea for a campaign, so the final step was to fine tune it. In the campaign you have to defeat the master dragons in a set order with each victory unlocking scrolls for the next fight. We had to make sure the bosses were in the right order, and that it was actually winnable. The campaign is very simple, but it adds a puzzly aspect to the game and just a hint of an evolving story which I’m quite happy with. And yes, I have won it, eventually.

I started designing Dragon's Roll more than three years ago, and I’ve played it regularly ever since - both alone and with lots of other players. I’m still looking forward to rolling dice in my next game, and I hope you’ll like it as much as I do.