Pickit: Dragons is a set collection card game from El-Jay Paulson, with colourful and fun illustrations from Michal Kozár. The game is published by Ludopolis.
Each of the 2–4 players receives a hand of five cards depicting different body portions of dragons. After a spell of card drafting (passing cards to other players), you take it in turns to draw a card from either the four face-up 'offer' cards or blind from the draw deck. Upon collecting enough cards to complete a single dragon, all the relevant cards are laid down and the corresponding points (depicted on the upper-leftmost dragon card) awarded. Finally, the player replenishes the face-up ‘offer’, and then restores their hand back to five cards. First to exceed 25 points (or 30 in a two-player game) activates the final round, after which most points wins,
Pickit: Dragons adds a couple more twists to the game to keep things lively. Each of the five dragon types require a different number of cards to complete (which neatly allows colour-blind players to know what dragon types they are collecting) and, once completed, each type activates its special ability for their player to use in every following turn. Additionally there are 'joker' cards that can act in place of some or all dragon cards and can be switched with other players' cards whether they want to or not!
The cards have fun illustrations on them with the images deliberately designed so that any one card only depicts a portion of a dragon – the full image isn’t revealed until the full set of relevant cards are collected and laid adjacent to each other. There is variation between repeated body parts, which brings character depth to each dragon, kids will have fun mixing & matching to create new personalities on the table.
This is a game with a high appeal to children. The rules are simple, the games are short and the dragons are colourful and fun to collect! The joker cards are child-friendly too, because, although they can be used to steal cards from other players, in doing so you will help their game as much as yours.
Strategywise, the depth is lacking; after a couple of games I figured out what order to complete the dragons for optimal play and even though there are eight optional 'mission cards' with additional scoring objectives to spice things up, they didn’t really affect my play (maybe I’m just too much of a stubborn old dragon myself!)
The quality of this game was not that great (the score tracker was entirely absent from our box) and the cards were thin, did not shuffle well and were already looking worn after a few games. That said, I would expect this game to get thoroughly trashed over the hundreds of plays the children will get out of it, so perhaps the dealing issue is no big deal…
Colourful, simple, fun – Pickit: Dragons is a good way to burn some time together.
(Review by Michael Harrowing)