Dorn

the box art

If there is one thing I don't like in board games, it's the amount of luck you need to have to succeed. Rolling five dices and failing in all 5 instances makes me rage like nothing else. The thing is that when you, as a board game designer, reduce the luck factor, the players' success depends purely on their skill and the game becomes more strategic and chess-like. Which is actually a very good way to describe Dorn, a fantasy themed turn-based RPG that is heavily based on mathematics.

The story of the game goes that there is a dungeon with an evil lord in it and there is a town which is in danger. A group of heroes appears and goes on a quest to kill the evil lord. The beautifully designed game plan contains several areas through which the heroes wander and defeat groups and groups of monsters summoned by the evil lord. Players play for both the heroes and the evil lord, they take turns in planning and performing their actions.
Every hero and every monster (and even the evil lord himself) has a number of stats like HPs, moves, # of attacks and special abilities that make them useful in certain situations. The heroes are a bunch of stereotypical characters - an elven princess, a physically weak but magically powerful wizard, a bowman, a werewolf, a cleric, etc. Practically they are split into 3 groups - tanks that are good for close combat, shooters that specialize in ranged combat, and supporters that boost the group and help in certain situations. The gameplay is a bit different from a hero to a hero, which does not apply for the evil lord. His job is to spawn hordes of monsters and kill the heroes or perform a ritual that ends the game in his favour. There are two kinds of monsters - brown "cannon fodder" monsters like dire rats, zombies and skeletons, and red tough ones like ghosts, vampires, mummies and medusas that usually have two HPs and can cause a great deal of trouble for the heroes.

the left hand is mine!

The RPG elements come in a form of levelling up - Heroes gain experience from the killed monsters and can level up to 3 level. Each level gives them new abilities they can use and may give them an extra move per turn, more HPs or an extra attack. The evil lord can level up too by hurting the heroes, taking their HPs and spending the blood drops to level himself up or to perform a lesser ritual that usually boosts his monsters or temporarily handicaps the heroes. Heroes have a similar concept in disposition - blessings that can help them out in certain situations but while one hero has only one blessing for the whole game, the evil lord draws randomly 6 evil rituals at the beginning of the game.

As there is no dice present, the game is based of maths. The board consists mostly of hexagons, squares in certain places, and moving on it is permitted until the maximum number of moves is exhausted. Combat is based on counting too as the heroes automatically block one attack, so to successfully hurt them, there must be at least two monsters present. But since the heroes tend to move in groups, even the monsters should move and attack in groups, otherwise they are an easy source of experience for the heroes. There of course is a small deal of luck present in the form of random treasure for the heroes or a randomly drawn/spawned red monster for the evil lord, but other than that, the game is mostly about counting and planning.

While it might not be the best entry-level game, I'm pretty sure that many skilled RPG fantasy fans will enjoy Dorn a lot. The game has an expansion too which introduces a new evil lord to play as (with a different play style), a couple of new heroes and some new monsters along with some new concepts. The only problem I have with Dorn is that playing with people of different skill levels may become frustrating for the less skilled players far more than any other game I've played. Other than that, Dorn is a great 2-3 hours long game of something like chess but with heroes and monsters.

the plan