Heroes Welcome: Merchants of Dragon Reach Review

Pencil First Games was generous enough to provide me with a copy of Heroes Welcome to play and give my thoughts. In Heroes Welcome, you play as a merchant that is trying to peddle wares and craft different goods using the supplies that the heroes retrieve from the dungeon. Here's the kicker, though; you are playing both sides of the field. You are buying from the heroes and crafting weapons and armor for the monsters in the dungeon. The winner is whoever has the most Vorpal pieces after the deck of monsters has cycled through.

The Good: I really liked the pseudo-worker-placement aspect of traveling the board and putting up closed signs to block off the other player(s). It created a nice sense of urgency but the scam cards allowed you to bypass some of these roadblocks if you were lucky enough to pull one. The dungeon crawl phase to trigger the end of the round was really unique. When you think of a game with a dungeon crawl, you think that's going to be the game but it's a small, albeit significant part of the game.

The Okay: A lot of the actions on the board felt very similar. I would have liked to see more variety of building types. Because the board was constantly evolving it felt like a blocked opportunity never truly felt like I was truly stopped from taking the action that I wanted to take.

The Not So Good: I was constantly having to check the rulebook to follow some of the iconography. The rulebook did a good job of giving examples of the different spaces but I felt that it left some to be desired.

Final Score: 6.5/10 shifty goblins

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Heroes Welcome. I do however feel that I'm the only one in my group that would be able to enjoy the game. The core gameplay loop is very solid and I liked some of the humor that the designers used when creating the game. If you like the idea of playing on the other side of the dungeon crawl then you should absolutely give this one a go.

If you want to check this one out for yourself, click here.