TSR's DragonStrike in 1993

DragonStrike Instruction Booklet

Recently, I read mention of DragonStrike, describing it as a flaming disaster. No doubt, financially, it probably was just that; we're talking about early-1990's TSR, Inc., here. That corporation no longer stands and memories of it mingle with controversy.

I loved DragonStrike as a 12-year-old child in 1993 and so did my friends. DragonStrike, along with HeroQuest ('89), is what got me into table-top role-playing games. Here I am, 27 years later, still running games—an open-table Stonehell using B/X, currently!

As a card-carrying member of the target age group for that product during the time it was released, I thought DragonStrike was awesome. Wonderful. Amazing. And, I'll be happy to objectively defend it as a great product.

It's anecdotal, of course, but it did a far better job at getting my young friends and I to play D&D than the Black Box ('91) or Rules Cyclopedia ('93) edition. The AD&D 2nd Ed. Players Handbook ('89), Dungeon Master Guide ('91), and Monstrous Manual ('93) were also on the shelves. Dragon Mountain ('93) looked so cool!

But I digress.

DragonStrike was a fantasy board game and a 100% complete role-playing system.

That's right, DragonStrike was  a role-playing system. It was a good one, too.

However, before discussing DragonStrike, one must first recognize its predecessor, the far more successful and popular HeroQuest fantasy board game. If it weren't for HeroQuest, there would be no DragonStrike. DragonStrike, like DragonQuest ('92), were both attempts to cash in on HeroQuest's success in 1990 and '91.

My God, I loved HeroQuest. Those miniatures! The little dungeon furniture! The pure and simple, almost platonic experience of a dungeon delve! It was very similar to a Rogue-like video game in board-game form.

HeroQuest was a fantasy boardgame, like DragonStrike, but it was not a role-playing game. One picked a character (Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf, Wizard) and chose a name, but the player wasn't making anything but tactical decisions. If HeroQuest is an RPG, then so is the video game Gauntlet ('85).

DragonStrike Instruction Booklet, pp. 20-21

The DragonStike rule book told players to imagine the fantasy world of around their characters, represented by playing pieces on the board, and to interact with it. That included speaking in-character with monsters and non-player characters. That's where I draw the the thin, fine line between "RPG" and "not-RPG."

Furthermore, players were told to try anything they wanted to solve problems: swim the river; swing across the pit; push the burning candelabra onto the table and hope it catches fire.

This is the heart of OSR to me: don't let the rules constrain your imagination. On paper, the rules are very simple, but they work just fine in actual game play. We had fun playing!

We were doing all the OSR stuff in all the OSR places. DragonStrike had four colorful, well-made game boards: a castle; a cave; a city; and an outdoors map that included a rocky high place, a forested area, a plains area, and a river with a bridge crossing it.

The castle could be used for any standard dungeon delve area, like a tomb or whatever. I even used it as a sewer. The city board was wonderful! We played out many town-based sessions in it, even including ones with no combat—pure role-playing. Tons of escort missions, fetch quests, and seek-and-destroy missions in the wilderness. All that said, we probably used the cave board the most.

Yes, there was a cheesy, campy VHS video packaged in the box with the game. It's mocked decades later by people who never played the game and weren't the target market audience anyway, I'll wager.

I recognized it as childish and comical at age 12, but (thankfully) the video was a completely separate part packaged with the game, not at all required to play. DragonStrike is not at all a VCR board game like, say, Nightmare ('91).

I never showed it to my friends, partly because it was so silly, but more because I just wanted to get right to playing the game, and play it we did! We all had a blast!