Wyrmspan: Dragon Academy review

Dragon Academy is the first expansion to 2024’s darling board game, Wyrmspan. Created by Connie Vogelmann and published by Stonemaier Games, this expansion is one of the best examples of an expansion. Everything here is awesome! Some new mechanics, some twists on the old mechanics, and even a few things that smooth out the original’s experience.

So what’s in the box? To start with, 80 brand new dragon cards! That’s almost half again as many dragons as in the base set! This includes dragons at a new stage of growth: fledglings. This gets added to hatchlings, small, medium, and large dragons. These fledglings are definitely the core of this set, with more than half of these new dragons being fledglings and a goodly portion of the rest supporting fledglings with synergies and other effects.

Fledgling dragons all share a few specific mechanics. The most important thing is that a fledgling does basically nothing on its own. You have to train your dragon to get anything out of it. Each time you explore through a cave containing a fledgling dragon, you have the option to pay a specific resource to train that dragon, placing a brown cube on it. Once all of its training slots are filled (in order), then it will begin to impact your engine. Because it takes a lot of resources and time to bring fledglings online, those abilities are often quite powerful, while placing them in your caves is relatively inexpensive (sometimes even free!)

The other important mechanic they share is their scoring. In addition to their training effect, each fledgling, trained or not, gives endgame points equal to the total number of fledglings you own. This makes the total points fledglings offer exponential! If you manage to get 12 fledglings in your tableau by the end of the game, you could get a total of 144 points! Of course, the reality is that the value of each fledgling will probably wind up being around 4-6 points, even if you choose to pick up as many as you can.

Fledglings are nifty, but I do have a pain point with the name. One of the other dragon types in the game is hatchlings. These names are similar enough that every time I’ve introduced people to the new expansion, someone at the table made the understandable mistake of thinking one was the other in relation to scoring or other interactions. Since the dragon art shows these dragons basically being, well, teenagers, I feel like they should have been called adolescent dragons instead.

The other new dragons, as mentioned before, either offer synergies with fledglings, like helping them train, or operate on interesting one-off mechanics not explored in the base game. For example, there are some dragons that are free to play if you meet certain criteria, like having 2 dragons in a certain cavern already. Another new theme is working with adjacencies in interesting ways, such as giving extra points based on what is directly above and below it. 5 dragons got errata cards in the expansion. These mildly increase points for dragons that work off of having sets of certain types of dragons, which is understandable, after all the sets are now harder to complete with a whole new dragon type in the deck.

Also included in Dragon Academy are 25 new cavern cards. Unlike the dragons, there’s not too much to say about these. There are a few that offer interesting trade-offs, like spending silver coins (AKA actions) for a bundle of goodies or placing a dragon for free on the space you just excavated. I think the new cavern cards might be a part of an overall push in this expansion for shorter play times by making silver coins something you spend more often, and receive less often. For example, only 2 of the new cards give guild movement, and 2 of the errata cavern cards remove guild movement from 2 others. This means that while it’s offering players a new way to spend silver coins, it’s also slowing down one of the easier ways to get new silver coins, which is going all the way around the guild track.

Dragon Academy also includes 5 new guild tiles.  The previous guilds were fine, I suppose, but the new guilds are much more exciting. Each one has its own interesting theme. The Guild of Merchants, for example, incentivizes playing dragons with silver coin costs, as well as paying for powerful abilities with silver coins. To help counter the acceleration of the game, it’s also the best guild for gaining coins, allowing you to gain 2 silver coins for a measly 2 eggs. Expect that space to go very quickly.

The Veterinary Guild interacts with hatchlings and fledglings directly, allowing training, caching of resources, and tucking of cards. The Gambler’s Guild likes drawing stuff from the deck blindly and using that to decide your fate, from drawing 3 caverns and picking one to play for free, to drawing 4 dragons at the end of the game and scoring the end game points on 2 of them. The Guild of Magicians allows swapping shenanigans, either swapping two dragons already on your board or swapping a dragon from your hand to the board, ignoring their cave preference in either case. The scoring gimmick for this guild wants to see dragons outside of their comfort zone, giving points for each dragon that isn’t in a preferred cavern.

The Kings Guild is the last new guild, and it offers powerful benefits in exchange for paying a tithe to your king. A tithe, in this case, is anything besides coins (resources, eggs, or cards). Doing so when you cross the guild tile gives you powerful benefits, like getting a dragon into your tableau from either your hand or the display, or gaining a whopping 11 points. Paying taxes is expensive, but worthwhile in this case. However, since you often don’t control when you cross the guild space on the track, you might not be prepared to handle the king’s demands. You might have to settle for a measly 3 points.

These guilds are one of my favorite things about the expansion. They add so much flavor both to the game and the world of Wyrmspan, creating the idea of mad wizards teleporting dragons out of their homes or greedy merchants and kings. But they’re not my favorite part of the game. My favorite is the new round tracker. It’s a little thing, but the new expanded round tracker no longer offers a default 6 coins and 1 egg to each player. Instead, when a player passes after they run out of stuff to do in a round, they put their adventurer on the new round tracker. There is a section for rounds 2 and 3, and round 4 gets its own buffed options. These determine what you get for the next round. The trick is that only one player will get 6 coins (and no egg). The rest have to settle for 5 coins and some other resource. This means that there is an actual benefit to spending your actions faster than other players, and less of a penalty for not finding ways to gain more silver coins during gameplay. Of course, if you want to be greedy, you could pass early and get more coins, but then you might have the last pick on the all-important 4th round choice. The 4th round choice offers up juicy resources and eggs to push you through your final round, in addition to two 6-coin options. This is another one of those choices that makes the game shorter, with an average of 1 less action per round for most players. This isn’t a bad thing for a game that often rolls into 3-hour play times.

There are a few other goodies in the expansion. 7 new objective tiles (double-sided, so 14 total objectives), which add a few things that the original objectives didn’t have, as well as more meta options, like counting how many times you explored or how many dragons you enticed this round. Finally, it comes with a card tray. It’s nice to have and seals shut for storage, but there is no way you’re going to fit all of your dragon cards into it. Since we’re at over 220 dragon cards now, it’s maybe unreasonable to expect the tray to fit all the cards available, but it’s still a bitter disappointment to have a separate baggy for 30% of your cards while the rest are sitting securely in the card tray.

Wyrmspan: Dragon Academy is a great expansion for people who love the game. I’ve always held that there are basically 3 types of good expansions: Ones that fix a broken game, ones that add a mechanic that is hard to do without, and one that just adds a bunch of good stuff. Dragon Academy is mostly in that third category. Nothing in the new content is going to make you wish you had it when you’re playing a copy without it, but there is definitely enough that I’d recommend any Wyrmspan fan to get themselves a copy.