Kingdomino is one of our favorite games to play with the family. And we’re not alone! Winner of the game of the year, Spiel des Jahres award in 2017, Kingdomino has since spawned expansions, a roll and write spin off, and can be found nearly everywhere board games are sold. 

Perfect for kids as well as adults, Blue Orange Games is taking the family fun of Kingdomino and making a “My First Kingdomino” version! 

Dragomino takes everything you love about Kingdomino and perfectly distills the rules so that kids as young as 4 and 5 can begin to learn to play.

How Do You Play Dragomino?

In Dragomino your goal is to find as many baby dragons as you can in the different landscapes of your island. 

On your turn, you’ll choose one of the domino tiles from the center to add to your island to explore. When you connect different landscapes, nothing happens, but when you connect the same landscapes together, you get to take an egg token from the corresponding landscape. 

Each landscape has 7 baby dragons amongst the eggs. The rest are already hatched and merely egg shells. The number of egg shells available in each terrain is directly related to the percentage that type of terrain is present on the dominoes. So, if it’s more common, there are more eggs, and thus, less of a chance to find a baby dragon.

If you place a domino that matches several regions, you can collect an egg for each match you made. If you place a domino, make a match and only find egg shells, you get to take the Mommy dragon token. This means that you get to be the first player next round. 

After all the dominoes have been placed, the players win 1 point for every baby dragon they have found, and a bonus point is awarded to whomever has the mommy dragon. The player with the most points is the winner.

What Do We Think?

I am completely impressed by this game. 

I won’t lie, I was a little skeptical about how they’d be able to take Kingdomino and make it even easier for kids. Overall, Kingdomino is one of our biggest recommendations to families looking for games their whole family can play. And while it is possible to play Kingdomino with your younger kids, (we have played it with our 5 year olds pretty well,) there are a few areas that Dragomino takes the original and makes it more accessible for the younger audience.

Most notably, this comes in the form of simplified scoring. Rather than having crowns to score regions, you merely score the number of dragons you collected in your kingdom. This means there’s no crazy math at the end, just count of the dragons to find your end score. 

We also really like that there isn’t a grid system that kids have to follow. No 5×5 constraints here, kids can build their kingdoms whichever directions they’d like, all while still following the general placement rules found in Kingdomino. I find this to be much easier for my younger players, even my 6 year old. Trying to visualize and plan for your tile placements in the 5×5 grid space can be really hard, especially since you don’t have a board or anything to help guide you. Eliminating this element for Dragomino means that kids can place their tiles without having to be told “oh, that’s not a legal placement, bud, sorry,” throughout the game. 

Learning About Probability

One of the coolest things that this game does for kids, and it’s why I have been using it as a homeschool game for my youngest lately, is that it introduces the concept of probability assessment. 

Each region has a specific number of eggs, the more tiles there are with a region type, the more eggs of that region there will be. But each region only has 7 dragons that you can place into your kingdom. Smaller regions aren’t as common to find on tiles, but if you can create a pair in your kingdom, you have a higher chance of choosing an egg with a dragon, thus scoring points. 

The kids totally get this! When playing their first few games, our boys (4 and 6) immediately began trying to draft tiles that had more rare regions so they could increase their odds of drawing a dragon from the eggs. The volcano terrain, the most rare and thus most likely to earn you a dragon, is always highly sought after. 

This kind of problem solving is great to include in a game like Dragomino. Without realizing it, kids are calculating which tiles are best for them, perhaps foregoing an easy match to draft a tile that has a better chance of getting them a dragon in the end, or, alternatively, choosing not to chase the rare tiles and instead make as many terrain matches as they can. 

Since each terrain type only has 7 possible dragons to find on the egg tokens, players will also be able to look around and decide if they really want to draft a tile like sand or snow, when they can already see several of the dragons have been found. 

No matter what they decide, kids are having to make these choices all throughout the game, not only from what to draft, but where to place it, all the while learning how to set themselves up for future matches. And when one of their choices doesn’t result in the outcomes they were looking for, they have to rethink their approach and strategy. 

Do I Need This If I Already Have Kingdomino?

Because Kingdomino is such a great family game that can easily be played by kids in that 5 and 6 age category that Dragomino is targeted to, this is a harder call. Here’s where I ultimately side:

If you have mostly older children, or your youngest is already 5 or 6, you might age out of Dragomino sooner than you’d like. However, if you’re a family like ours with a few kids old enough to play and a couple others waiting in the queue about to age into it, I say that this is a great one to have even if you already own Kingdomino. 

While geared towards younger kids, it’s still fun for families. We have all enjoyed playing this game together in our home. It’s fast, most games taking around 10-15 minutes. So even if your strategy doesn’t pan out, it’s quick to reset, and try again. And as a parent, I love that even my youngest kids can play pretty much independently and don’t have a need to be on a parent’s team or require help for point scoring.

Summary

Dragomino is an excellent game to play with kids! Whether or not you’ve played Kingdomino, this game not only engages children in exciting play, but it challenges them as they must make choices for the type of kingdom they want to build with the aim of forming enough terrain matches to get the most dragons. 

Not only fun, Dragomino is a great choice for parents looking for games with educational elements. Matching, problem solving, probability assessment, and simple math skills will all be exercised during play! Even if your children don’t quite understand these concepts in theory, they’ll get first hand experience with them as they learn to play this game.

We highly recommend Dragomino for families with younger kids!

A special thank you to our friends at Blue Orange Games for sending us a copy of Dragomino for review. As always our thoughts and opinions are our own. 

To bring home a copy of Dragomino for your family, click here.
For families looking for the full Kingdomino experience, click here.

Find this and all our favorite games on our Amazon Storefront!

Game Info:
Title: Dragomino
2-4 players Ages 5+
Designer: Bruno Cathala, Marie Fort, Wilfried Fort
Artist: Maëva da Silva, Christine Deschamps
Publisher: Blue Orange Games

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