https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sweet-lemon/dragon-canyon
Intro
The Harvest Festival is ready to begin! Take you best warriors to gather material and beware the fire breathing beast. Dragon Canyon is a resource gathering game with tactics and a bit of bluffing.
2-5 Players – Ages 10+ – 30 Mins
Published by Sharp Press Point
Overview

The goal for Dragon Canyon is to earn the most points by constructing buildings with the material you gather and to fight off your foes.

Each player starts with an identical deck of character cards. The character have the own special powers, such as fighting formidable opponents and controlling the area. The board of the game is a 4 by 4 modular set-up that changes from game to game. Two special areas of the board, the fortified town and the dragons cave have specially effects. The fortified town give a bonus on attacks and the dragon cave sends the dragon to stomp down characters preventing them from taking any resource and discarding a card from the opponent’s hand. However, the dragon can be stomped out by the Dragon Slayer.

Each turn, the current player selects a character card from their hand and places it face down on the board. Then they may flip up to either use their ability or attack. They also may simple pass to the gathering phase. Character abilities like the Primal Canine can reveal other character, preventing them to gather resources, or the Tribal Mage can move opponent’s characters to other spots on the board.

If attacking, you pick an adjacent character to reveal. Both you and your opponent roll a die and adds the result to their character’s power. Some characters are good at fighting others, so it’s good to note what you’re up against. The Ancient wood Assassin, for example, can easily win against the dragon Slayer. The defeated player sends their card to the discard pile, while the winner gains the resource from the supply for which character was defeated. If you win and you’re also the attacker you gain loot cards worth 3 points and a bonus 10 whoever collected the most.

Before going into the gather phase, a Harvest event might trigger. When there’s a line of four cards, either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, the Harvest Festival is here. Each player collects the recourses their character cards are on, then all of those characters are discarded.

Then on to the gather phase, each of your character collect resources on any character that is face-down. On the note of collecting resources, each resources that is collected will go to the caravan of your player card. In this game, resources are not readily available at first, but will be at the beginning of your turn as the resources from your caravan is moved to the stockpile. So in the claim phase, you are able to spend any number of goods from your stockpile to obtain buildings. After the claim phase is over, it’s the next player’s turn until one of the building decks have been depleted. If that’s the case, then it time to trigger the end of the round and everyone gets one more turn.

Buildings increase in value with the number you have. Some buildings will make opponents discard characters from their hand when they are built. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins the game.
Impressions
Let’s Build it!
The main point of Dragon Canyon is placing your guys, gathering material, and build as much as you can. The overall game has a two-part structure. First is where you place your characters to help you gather material then second you spend that material to earn building with which is your points. However, planning is important and that is because your material can’t be used immediately. What I like about that is that no one player can jump right a head and make a quick turnaround. Also building what buildings is important to whether you get the most points as possible, and to make buildings that effect you in a beneficial way.
Play or Stay
The heart of the game is playing your characters and take their powers to your advantage to get the materials you need to build. Card are placed face down and the player will decide at that time whether to do combat or to keep it so they can gather.
First Strike
I believe the main decision point for each player is either attacking or gathering. Gathering, while easy enough to take the material can be barred from an aggressive player. It also helps that player who is attacking may have a shot of getting the loot card, the reward that is collected to player who wins the initiated attack. Not only that, but you can get rescores dropped from the defeated character. Going deeper to all this is that once a character is revealed, it a matter of time that another player will take the opportunity to counter it and even collect its resource.
Let’s go the Harvest Festival
I like that the board’s state is fluid and that character cards never stay too long. Triggering a Harvest Festival can work in different ways. One is characters return (but through the discard pile) but also gather your resources. The other is breaking off gathering points from your opponents. It will not only stop an opponent from gathering that spot, it will remove them from the board and make more room.
You revealed my character card!
Since players are playing cards facedown, it will lead to the question of if there’s any bluffing in the game? From my plays of the game, I believe that most of the decision are strategic ones and not something you can put something down and strike fear in the opponents. I’m never putting some down so that other players won’t go there and most of the time it will be the case of trying to gather. I also think that attacking is on the advantage from the player of initiates it since there’s points to be earned.
And the dragons
With the name Dragon Canyon, the game itself has very little to do with Dragons and there’s only one dragon in the game. In my plays, it’s not used much since is merely a way to slow down other players.
Final Impressions
Dragon Canyon soars overs by taking resource gathering to a new level. The gameplay has surprises and keeps it’s interesting by having strategic decisions each turn. Fun for all gamers. An excellent game and has my crowdfunding recommendation award.
