Published by Outset Media and Cheatwell Games, Dragon Dash is an easy-to-play maze game. It's a children's game but all the family can play it happily together. And, unlike the majority of children's games, you are indeed playing together because Dragon Dash is fully cooperative.
The game is played on a board which is essentially a 6 x 8 grid. It comes with two chunky wooden six-sided dice, one numbered 1-6 and the other A-F, and these are rolled to generate grid references for the inner 6 x 6 rows. The aim is to lay a path between the square below A6 to the square above F1. There's a large pool of face-down tiles and on your turn you pick one up and place it on the board. If it's a path tile, you just need to connect it to a path tile already in place or to one of the two end points. If it's a dragon tile, you roll the dice to determine where the tile is placed on the grid. You can't take your path through squares occupied by dragons...
Tho' Dragon Dash is intuitively easy to play, it can be quite challenging and not a little frustrating: there are 21 path tiles and 16 dragon tiles, and of course the more path tiles you have out, the more likelihood that the tile you draw will be a dragon. As the board fills it's also all the more likely that a dragon tile gets placed on the path you've laid. That's not necessarily game over tho' because there will be three Knight's Gear tokens randomly placed out at set up, and if you pick any of these up by taking your path through their location you can use them to repel a dragon. Players soon discover that it's worth a small detour early in the game to collect a couple of these tokens to hold in reserve to protect the path as it nears completion.
You can make Dragon Dash easier by taking out a couple of dragon tiles and, conversely, you can further increase the difficulty by removing a couple of path tiles. In our plays of Dragon Dash at Board's Eye View, both with and without children, we've not yet felt the need to take out any path tiles! And tho' Cheatwell and Outset Media indicate on the box that this is a game for 2-6 players, it works equally well as a solo/solitaire challenge.