If you’re one of the younger Gen Xers or older Millennials whose minds were blown by Dragon Ball Z when it hit western TV in the late 90s, and you also happen to be a massive board game nerd – quite a big overlap, honestly – we’ve got some good news. The co-operative Dragon Ball Z Board Game Saga is on Kickstarter right now, six years after it was announced and five years after it was lost in development hell.
Dragon Ball Z: The Board Game Saga was originally going to be published by IDW Games in 2021 – unfortunately, that was the same year that IDW Games closed its doors for good. I’ve not tested the game, so I don’t know if the designers at Lynnvander Studios have spent the five years since then polishing it into the best board game they could, or merely struggling to reclaim the rights – but I think this really is a game close to their hearts.
The rulebook is available to download from the game’s Kickstarter page, and I fully believe the claim that the team making it is full of “lifelong fans” of the show.
The game is divided up into twelve ‘episodes’, self contained scenarios which can be played in a campaign and which follow the Dragonball Z saga from Goku’s first fight with his brother Raditz to the battle against Super Buu. Only about half of the game is given over to fighting – the combat phase, specifically. Every episode features unique villains with distinctive moves, and every player has a limited budget of actions with which to fight back.
But before you get to the fight, you might also spend some of your turn zooming around to different locations from the show doing all the other Dragon Ball Z activities – recruiting allies, collecting Dragon Balls, learning new techniques, training to improve them, that kind of thing. In a great touch, the currency for upgrading your heroes is the stress you suffer from taking damage in fights – so just like in the show, a character who’s been pummelled into the ground has just been given the incentive they need to unlock their most powerful techniques.
And if you do get knocked flat in a battle, your hero isn’t out of the game. There’s a whole zone representing the afterlife, and if the players can gather all seven of the Dragon Balls they can use a wish to resurrect all the dead heroes. Just make sure you’re not all knocked out, and that there’s always someone on the battlefield to fight the villain at the start of the combat phase, or it’s game over.
It seems like the designers really are trying to represent all the different aspects of Dragon Ball Z as faithfully as they can. A less careful licensed game wouldn’t bother with rules for fusing characters together – you could just add Gotenks of Vegito as separate characters – but this one does. Does that make for good gameplay? I haven’t tested it so I don’t know. But I believe the designers when they say that they genuinely care.
If you want to get involved, pledges for the game cost $105 (minus a $20 early bird discount at the time of writing), and Lynnvander Studios and co-publisher Pop Art Games predict US backers will receive their pledges in December. Its well past its initial funding goal, which I suspect the creators set at just $9,000 so they could say “It’s over 9,000!” when they passed it.
If you’ve got a favorite arc of Dragon Ball Z, or you’ve played any truly great fighting board games that remind you of the classic battler, let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
