Dragon Quest (TSR)

For the 1986 videogame, see Dragon Quest. For the novel by Anne McCaffrey, see Dragonquest. For other uses, see Dragonquest (disambiguation).

Dragon Quest

Designers	William W. Connors, Walter E. Johnston, IV, David Wise
Illustrators	Gerald Brom Clyde Caldwell Jeff Easley Larry Elmore Fred Fields Gaye Goldsberry Carol Heyer David S. LaForce Roger Loveless Keith Parkinson Robin Raab
Publishers	TSR, Inc.
Years active	1992
Players	2–6
Playing time	60 minutes
Chance	Dice rolling

Dragon Quest, is an adventure board game created by TSR, inc. in 1992 that was designed as a children's introduction to fantasy role-playing, using a simplified form of the Basic rules for Dungeons & Dragons. It was conceived as a commercial competitor for the popular fantasy board game HeroQuest.

Description

Dragon Quest is a board game that uses a simplified set of rules for D&D. One player acts as a Dungeons Master and runs the game. The other players either use pregenerated player characters or create their own using blank character sheets in order to participate in prepared dungeon crawls.

Components

The game comes with

• a large fold-out mounted square grid board representing a castle.
• A rulebook and a book of prepared adventures.
• Six plastic miniatures representing characters
• The same six miniatures cast in metal
• sheets of monsters, characters, and doors, designed to be cut apart and folded so that they stand on their own.
• a deck of cards of encounters

Gameplay

The player characters start in one area of the castle. As they move, the Dungeon Master reveals pre-planned encounters, or random encounters, both of whom the players must defeat in order to move to the next room. When the adventurers come to the end of the adventure, their characters gain one level.

Publication history

In 1989, Milton Bradley, in conjunction with the British game company Games Workshop, released a fantasy adventure board game, HeroQuest, which proved to be very popular. Three years later, TSR tried to emulate this success by releasing their own adventure board game, Dragon Quest, designed by William W. Connors, Walter E. Johnston IV, and David Wise, with art by Gerald Brom, Clyde Caldwell, Jeff Easley, Larry Elmore, Fred Fields, Gaye Goldsberry, Carol Heyer, David S. LaForce, Roger Loveless, Keith Parkinson and Robin Raab.

Other similarly-named games

In 1980, the bottom fell out of the market for board wargames, and wargame publisher Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI), looking to diversify, entered the burgeoning fantasy role-playing game market with DragonQuest.

In 1986, Japanese companies Chunsoft and Enix had released an unrelated videogame in Japan called Dragon Quest. When the videogame was released in North America in 1989, Chunsoft changed the name to Dragon Warrior to avoid trademark issues.

In 1982, SPI was unexpectedly taken over by TSR, owners of the most popular role-playing game, D&D. Rather than disconintuning SPI's rival RPG Dragonquest, TSR continued to release products for it. In 1992, TSR then released their adventure board game with the confusingly similar title Dragon Quest.

When TSR itself was taken over by Wizards of the Coast in 1997, the new owners showed no interest in either DragonQuest the role-playing game or Dragon Quest the adventure board game, and in the early 2000s, allowed the trademark on both to lapse.

This allowed Square Enix, owners of the Dragon Warrior videogame franchise, to register the Dragon Quest trademark in North America. Subsequently Dragon Warrior products were released as Dragon Quest.