Here Be Dragons

Well even on easy I'm stuck, while still in the tutorial phase (Introduction to Ink bottles), and can't move on. Honestly that's just stupid and should get fixed.

Overall, this was a fun, short dice strategy game with some interesting ideas. The story is funny and the scenarios are challenging. My main gripes were being railroaded into specific strategies to solve a scenario (if you take each scenario as a puzzle to solve then I think the game is more enjoyable) and the dice glitches/bugs. Several times I would be one or two hit points away from winning and the game would crash or glitch out and I'd have to start again. This was especially annoying on the long battles where I was whittling down many monsters. In another instance, I ended up in a case where there were no dice that the AI could assign so got stuck without being able to move on or forfeit the turn -- a case that wasn't coded in as a possible scenario so I had to start the scenario again. Luckily, this game is quite short and absorbing enough to make it to the end without feeling like a grind.

[h1]Combat-oriented puzzle game with sea stories in between. Oh, and dices - but worry not, 'tis done right, matey![/h1] Combat is core and [b]I liked it a lot[/b]. Even though it's dice-based I didn't find randomness game-breaking. Each time I did lose a battle it was due to me not foreseeing the consequences of my decisions or not being fully aware of the situation on the field. There were of course more or less lucky turns but generally, they didn't decide whether I lose or not. Though simple at the core - it requires thinking due to new mechanics being introduced every now and then: getting to know both skills of enemies and yours, calculating ahead of time to minimize/maximize damage, being aware of environmental hazards or extra rules for the fight, deciding whether it's actually good to start round first, etc. [b]Do not feel overwhelmed though, each fight is a nice puzzle on its own[/b]. In case of difficulties - there's also a system to make encounters easier. Each sea expedition is preceded by a small bit of story which I found intriguing due to the characters being... well, different to say the least. As confusing as it may seem at times, it's nice to have some background behind the events. Together with really fitting artwork both create a fun world to be a part of. [b]tl;dr[/b] Do not expect grand adventure with sailing, pillaging, managing your crew, and so on. [b]Here Be Dragons[/b] is a fun combat-oriented puzzle game that is great to be picked up on the go. Fights are short, fun, tense, and even with some randomness in play - feels fair.

Excelente juego de estrategia, con una estética muy cuidada, y buenos toques de humor! Te dejo mi video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjeXdnjx8EI

Ultimately I think this game is mostly fine, but nothing good about it stands out, and playing it is a little annoying. For me, this is worse than being a bad game with a few good elements,but everyone engages with games differently, so you might not feel the same. Here Be Dragons' core concept is that it's a dice placement board game simulating naval battles. Placing higher dice has more aggressive effects, but placing a high sum of dice causes you to act second in the initiative order. If you don't place dice, you take damage. This creates kind of a neat push-and-pull in theory, where you're going for slow high damage on some turns and fast defenses on others, but the balance on the game isn't loose enough to let you play around. It's built more like a puzzle game, but a puzzle game where you routinely need to get certain combinations of dice. Which means one of the strongest moves you can make is just to restart a level and get a different initial roll. There are some *very* light rpg elements, where you can upgrade your ships between maps, but only during certain short strings of levels. After the string is done, the upgrades reset. Moreover, you switch between characters and abilities after every string, and a lot of the characters don't feel great to use. It's not *too* hard, but sometimes the rng just hands you a garbage starting roll, or it serves the enemy exactly the dice they need on a round where they have the initiative and they instantly focus down one of your ships, and there's no incentive not to immediately restart the level. The art is solid, and the creatures look fun and detailed and menacing, but the writing did not land with me. It's a picaresque about bad people plundering and murdering and starting wars with the ocean, but it uses this setup to... quote Monty Python jokes. Hey, man. Do you remember the Knights Who Say Ni? Yeah, that's SO funny. I'm gonna randomly say Ni and you're gonna laugh and we're all gonna laugh. Over and over and over again. It feels stale and uninspired in a way that the rest of the game isn't. I think as a board game, where you're physically interacting with the dice and paging through the rulebook and maybe there's pvp, this would be fun. As-is, it felt more frustrating than enjoyable. If you like dice placement games and puzzle games and want to turn your brain off a bit, it's probably not a bad pick on sale. But if you were hoping for a more robust strategy rpg like I was, this ain't that.

Great game. Simple but difficult! Basically a perfect game as it does what it wants and is perfect for some quick but difficult fun!

Finally, where are the dragons?

Nie jestem wyjadaczem tego typu gier, jednak spodobała się mi i wciągnęła na te 8h do ukończenia. Rozgrywka i mechanika ciekawa, choć mocno musiałem polegać na RNG kości w niektórych przypadkach. Fabuła pomijalna, a dialogi nie w moim typie poczucia humoru. Mimo wszystko na plus!

You won't find dragons nor the Americas, but a ton of dice and bad translations are waiting for you! This is a strategy game where you place dice to cast your ships' (fighters by another name) skills, or to improve their stats for the fight. The whole combat is rather interesting, what with a initiative system that favors using lower rolls (which often but not always can only be used on weaker or more defensive abilities), sharing the pool of dice with your enemies, having special modifiers for some fights, and ink, a special mana-like resource that can be used for roll tweaks, healing, free skills and ultimately reviving your ships. It's all well and good that Here be dragons can stand on the premise of its combat system, because everything else ranges from mediocre to plain bad. Randomness is a major factor, to the point that by the end of the game I would routinely restart a mission if the starting roll wasn't good -- the luck of the draw is somewhat manageable after a couple of rounds, but it is not at the beginning of the scuffle. The AI is bad at playing the game (which is just as well, because it serves to mitigate the effects of randomness) and there are bugs (which is just as well, because it serves to mitigate the effects of randomness). The missions are structured around episodes of (mostly) three battles, with some minor stat improvement between missions -- with no information that would do for proper strategizing, though. There is zero build-up between episodes and you begin each new expedition with a new set of ships (which is kinda nice, as you have to adapt your strategies, but making do with the new set for the episode sometimes feels like a pain). Despite having a wide variety of enemies and the nonexistence of persistent upgrades between episodes, the game cannot escape the power creep, both on your fresh new ships for each episode and on the enemies. Expect to see some of the earlier enemies in at least three different power levels, differentiated only by the size of the sprite. The story (something barely comprehensible about an alchemist with a strong liking for explosives manipulating the chancellor of a fictional court of Europe (Europe as a country, apparently) to eliminate the many mythological menaces of the Atlantic and then the beast slayers themselves so that [spoiler]his son Christopher Columbus can discover the Americas without competition or being unalived by monsters[/spoiler]) is poor and very poorly translated, with very bad humor that translates poorly from Polish and/or to the written word (plenty of references to popular songs, apparently; I was only able to recognize one). You start caring little for each character and by the end you will care even less, as the poor dialogues and narrative texts give zero development, and as you will meet most of them in only one or two episodes. During the tutorial there is some "comedy" done at the expense of tribal natives (nothing particularly racist, mind you) that won't appear again, which I ended up missing for some drama or whatever. The graphics are nice, with bold lines that are used both to enhance the game's comic feel and to evoke the maps and drawings of the past. The sound is alright but completely forgettable. The interface is serviceable but a bit wonky when selecting skills and targets. Expect very few options in the settings panel, mostly geared to skip the most annoying stuff like having to roll the die by "blowing" a cherub, and activating "easy" mode (which doesn't seem so different, as apparently only doubles your ink/mana available). The achievements are mostly unlocked by playing the campaign, except for two that you will accidentally unlock just by normal play anyway. There's zero replayability. All in all, a pretty poor game saved by the fresh combat system. Verdict: C

It's just cool