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| Players | 2–6 |
| Playing time | 60 minutes |
| Chance | Dice rolling |
Dragon Quest, is an adventure board game created by TSR, inc. in 1992, designed as a children's introduction to fantasy role-playing, using a simplified form of the Basic rules for Dungeons & Dragons . It was conceived as a commercial competitor for the popular fantasy board game HeroQuest .
Dragon Quest is a board game that uses a simplified set of rules for D&D. One player acts as a Dungeon Master and runs the game. The other players either use pregenerated player characters or create their own using blank character sheets [1] in order to participate in prepared dungeon crawls.
The game comes with
The player characters start in one area of the castle. As they move, the Dungeon Master reveals pre-planned encounters, or random encounters, both of whom the players must defeat in order to move to the next room. When the adventurers come to the end of the adventure, their characters gain one level. [2]
In 1989, Milton Bradley, in conjunction with the British game company Games Workshop, released a fantasy adventure board game, HeroQuest, which proved to be very popular. Three years later, TSR tried to emulate this success by releasing their own adventure board game, Dragon Quest, designed by William W. Connors, Walter E. Johnston IV, and David Wise, with art by Gerald Brom, Clyde Caldwell, Jeff Easley, Larry Elmore, Fred Fields, Gaye Goldsberry, Carol Heyer, David S. LaForce, Roger Loveless, Keith Parkinson and Robin Raab. [3] Shannon Appelcline noted that by 1993 the Basic D&D line ended and was replaced by games such as Dragon Quest (1992) and DragonStrike (1993). [4] : 97
In the April 1993 issue of Games , Matt Costello commented, "if you're at all intrigued by fantasy roleplaying — if the idea of searching for fabulous treasures through dank dungeons where predatory monsters lurk around every corner makes your skin tingle just a little — you'll find Dragon Quest an exciting experience." Costello concluded, "It’s the perfect introduction to an exciting world that too many people know too little about." [5]
In Issue 72 of the French games magazine Casus Belli , André Foussat noted "Dragon Quest is the 'plateau' version of the first of the role-playing games: D&D. Everything is there, from the heroes ... to their alignment ... the six classic characteristics, THAC0, doors, monsters, wandering or fixed, and their treasures." Foussat was impressed by the amount of material included in the game box as well as its high quality but pointed out that although this game was a way to show non-gaming friends the basics of D&D, "You will still have to explain to them that the exploration of a basement cluttered with monsters and other more or less pleasant surprises is not the whole role-playing game, that there is a life for the characters other than between the walls of the dungeon." Toussat concluded, "TSR's tour de force also lies in the fact that this very full box is on sale (in the United States) at the ridiculous price of $22.95, which is nothing, considering its contents." [6]
Matt Sall, writing for Bell of Lost Souls, thought that Dragon Quest provided more content than its rival, Hero Quest, writing, "Dragon Quest has a ton of content with roleplay elements and does much more to engage the player in the fantasy world. The art is fantastic! Every item, monster, and character has an in-depth description. The sheer variety of monsters, items, and spells is fantastic, even by modern standards." Sall noted that the only thing that Hero Quest had that was missing in Dragon Quest was miniatures of furniture. [1]
In 1980, the bottom fell out of the market for board wargames, and wargame publisher Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI), looking to diversify, entered the burgeoning fantasy role-playing game market with their first role-playing game, DragonQuest . In 1982, SPI was unexpectedly taken over by TSR, owners of the most popular role-playing game, D&D. Rather than discontinuing SPI's rival RPG DragonQuest, TSR continued to release products for it.
In 1986, Japanese companies Chunsoft and Enix released an unrelated videogame in Japan called Dragon Quest . When the videogame was released in North America in 1989, Chunsoft changed the name to Dragon Warrior to avoid trademark issues with SPI's DragonQuest. [7] [8]
In 1992, TSR, owner of SPI's DragonQuest RPG, released their adventure board game with the confusingly similar title Dragon Quest.
When TSR itself was taken over by Wizards of the Coast in 1997, the new owners showed no interest in either DragonQuest the role-playing game or Dragon Quest the adventure board game, and in the early 2000s, allowed the trademark on both to lapse.
This allowed Square Enix, owners of the Dragon Warrior videogame franchise, to register the Dragon Quest trademark in North America. Subsequently Dragon Warrior products were released as Dragon Quest. [9] [10]
Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR). It has been published by Wizards of the Coast, later a subsidiary of Hasbro, since 1997. The game was derived from miniature wargames, with a variation of the 1971 game Chainmail serving as the initial rule system. D&D's publication is commonly recognized as the beginning of modern role-playing games and the role-playing game industry, and also deeply influenced video games, especially the role-playing video game genre.
Dragon is one of the two official magazines for source material for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game and associated products, along with Dungeon.
TSR, Inc. was an American game publishing company, best known as the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Its earliest incarnation, Tactical Studies Rules, was founded in October 1973 by Gary Gygax and Don Kaye. Gygax had been unable to find a publisher for D&D, a new type of game he and Dave Arneson were co-developing, so he founded the new company with Kaye to self-publish their products. Needing financing to bring their new game to market, Gygax and Kaye brought in Brian Blume in December as an equal partner. Dungeons & Dragons is generally considered the first tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG), and established the genre. When Kaye died suddenly in 1975, the Tactical Studies Rules partnership restructured into TSR Hobbies, Inc. and accepted investment from Blume's father Melvin. With the popular D&D as its main product, TSR Hobbies became a major force in the games industry by the late 1970s. Melvin Blume eventually transferred his shares to his other son Kevin, making the two Blume brothers the largest shareholders in TSR Hobbies.
DragonQuest is a fantasy role-playing game originally published by Simulations Publications (SPI) in 1980. Where first generation fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) restricted players to particular character classes, DragonQuest was one of the first games to utilize a system that emphasized skills, allowing more individual customization and a wider range of options.
Talisman: The Magical Quest Game is a fantasy-themed adventure board game for two to six players, originally designed and produced by Games Workshop. The game was first released in 1983 and has gone through three revisions. As of 2021, the fourth edition (2008) is the latest version. The board game sold over 800,000 units by 2000.
Dragon Quest, previously published as Dragon Warrior in North America until 2005, is a series of role-playing games created by Japanese game designer Yuji Horii, character designer Akira Toriyama, and composer Koichi Sugiyama and published by Square Enix. Since its inception, development of games in the series have been outsourced to a plethora of external companies until the tenth installment, with localized remakes and ports of later installments for the Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch being published by Nintendo outside of Japan. With its first game published in 1986, there are eleven main-series games, along with numerous spin-off games. In addition, there have been numerous manga, anime and novels published under the franchise, with nearly every game in the main series having a related adaptation.
HeroQuest, is an adventure board game created by Milton Bradley in conjunction with the British company Games Workshop in 1989, and re-released in 2021. The game is loosely based around archetypes of fantasy role-playing games: the game itself was actually a game system, allowing the gamemaster to create dungeons of their own design using the provided game board, tiles, furnishings and figures. The game manual describes Morcar/Zargon as a former apprentice of Mentor, and the parchment text is read aloud from Mentor's perspective. Several expansions have been released, each adding new tiles, traps, artifacts, and monsters to the core system.
Dragon Strike is a 1993 adventure board game from TSR, Inc. based on the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game. It was intended to be a pathway for beginners to start with, and for players to eventually play the full Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tabletop game after kindling their interest.
Warhammer Quest is a fantasy dungeon, role-playing adventure board game released by Games Workshop in 1995 as the successor to HeroQuest and Advanced HeroQuest, set in its fictional Warhammer Fantasy world. The game focuses upon a group of warriors who join to earn their fame and fortune in the darkest depths of the Old World.
An owlbear is a fictional creature originally created for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. An owlbear is depicted as a cross between a bear and an owl, which "hugs" like a bear and attacks with its beak. Inspired by a plastic toy made in Hong Kong, Gary Gygax created the owlbear and introduced the creature to the game in the 1975 Greyhawk supplement; the creature has since appeared in every subsequent edition of the game. Owlbears, or similar beasts, also appear in several other fantasy role-playing games, video games and other media.
Oriental Adventures is the title shared by two hardback rulebooks published for different versions of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy roleplaying game. Each version of Oriental Adventures provides rules for adapting its respective version of D&D for use in campaign settings based on the Far East, rather than the medieval European setting assumed by most D&D books. Both versions of Oriental Adventures include example campaign settings.
Wee Warriors Ltd. was a game company formed shortly after the birth of role-playing games (RPGs) in the mid-1970s to publish RPG accessories. It was notable for publishing the first stand-alone adventure for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, and for publishing the first character sheets for an RPG. The company thrived for several years while TSR distributed their unlicensed products. When TSR stopped distributing unlicensed materials, Wee Warriors tried diversifying, but ultimately ceased publication in 1978.
Grenadier Models Inc. of Springfield, Pennsylvania produced lead miniature figures for wargames and role-playing games with fantasy, science fiction and heroic themes between 1975 and 1996. Grenadier Models Inc. is best known for their figures for TSR, Inc.'s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game, collectible Dragon-of-the-Month and Giants Club figures, and their marketing of paint and miniature sets through traditional retail outlets.
Descent: Journeys in the Dark is a two to five player high fantasy dungeon crawl published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2005. Descent was designed and produced by Kevin Wilson. The game is based on an improved version of the mechanics of FFG's licensed Doom: The Boardgame. In Descent, players take the roles of adventurers who delve into underground complexes in search of treasure. One player takes the role of the Overlord, who controls the enemies and plays cards to hinder the hero players. Descent differs from other games in the genre in that the Overlord player's goal is to win by exhausting the other players of victory points, rather than merely to facilitate play. The Overlord's resources are limited by the rules of the game, which require them to hoard and expend "threat" points, which are generated in response to the hero players' actions, in order to hamper the other players and to bring out additional monsters to defeat them. This mechanism is very much reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings when playing with the Sauron optional expansion.
Dungeon! is an adventure board game designed by David R. Megarry and first released by TSR, Inc. in 1975. Additional contributions through multiple editions were made by Gary Gygax, Steve Winter, Jeff Grubb, Chris Dupuis and Michael Gray. Dungeon! simulates some aspects of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) role-playing game, which was released in 1974, although Megarry had a prototype of Dungeon! ready as early as 1972.
The Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game has been adapted into many related products, including magazines, films and video games.
James Michael Ward III was an American game designer and fantasy author who worked for TSR, Inc. for more than 20 years, most notably on the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. He wrote various books relating to Dungeons & Dragons, including guidebooks such as Deities & Demigods, and novels including Pool of Radiance, based on the computer game of the same name.
The original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson was published by TSR, Inc. in 1974. It included the original edition of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. Its product designation was TSR 2002.
Swords & Spells is a supplementary rulebook by Gary Gygax for the original edition of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. Its product designation is TSR 2007.
The Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set is a category of companion accessories across multiple editions of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. In general, the Starter Set is a boxed set that includes a set of instructions for basic play, a low level adventure module, pre-generated characters, and other tools to help new players get started.
Serial n. 78146654.
"Dragon Quest (BoardGameGeek)". BoardGameGeek.