Pros

Quickly mount your friends into battle with how darn accessible Dragon and Rider is. Just deal a couple of cards to each player, then plop down your HP markers, that’s it.

While actually playing, this game slightly beyond the blind ‘rock-paper-scissors’ dynamic through a ‘Dragon’ stance for every turn. This will be preference for a round. Then, the rider will discard a card that he cannot be using. This really helps players narrow down each other’s choices.

But part of the simple charm is: look, you have absolutely no way to guarantee what your teammate is going to play. Or what your enemy is going to play, because they are a team of their own! See, since cards have speeds, they will be overriding each other if two types for one team get played at the same time. Charge is the fastest, and just overrides everything with its speed of 3, if you play it next to the other 2, you ignore the slower Ranged Attack, overriding them to now do a charge, whether for better or worse.

So yes, this all leads into how reading the table is very essence of the game, so, this does an amazing job of being an in-person card game. For a team game, you truly feel like you’re locked into this interdependent struggle with your two headed fighting.

Cons & Nitpicks

Admittedly, this ‘brain reading exercise’ can lead to some high DOUBTS on just choosing 1 of 2 cards, because of some new angle you found… that starts to make the game length possibly run past the printed 30 minutes to a longer 45 minutes, where we start getting concerned.

To add onto that, Dragon and Rider has no guaranteed end point to keep comebacks possible, but that can actually lead to drawn out games when you factor in that some outcomes of card flippage aren’t that strong, and both teams can heal. This sounds exciting, where you don’t know who will win, right? But in practice, the turn-to-turn gameplay is still just playing the same 3 combat cards, which can get tedious.

We would have wanted some type of way for the game to tell players to ‘hurry up’, like a final countdown of sorts. Of course, this would hurt comeback potential, but when we look at the cards in this simple gameplay loop, we want a shorter game.

Also, we found it VERY odd how Dragon and Rider bans you from talking AT ALL. Uhh, yeah for a bluffing game past 30 minutes, forcing people to 100% shut up on gameplay matters is generally not fun. Luckily, the rulebook includes a variant where it has exactly what we recommend: you can say anything you want as long as anyone can hear it. That way you don’t have a forcefully quiet game.

We also would not recommend a 1v1, where the game is functional, but throws out the mechanic of guessing your teammates’ cards, which is practically half the fun. The core gameplay being the same doesn’t hold up too pretty there.

Final Thoughts

For a game that is fundamentally “Cards + Rock-Paper-Scissors”, with teams, with freaking 3 cards, the brain bendiness that comes up is impressive. With the clean one card signaling for each player, you are just locked in to this wild second-guessing extravaganza on what every other person’s tendencies are.

We here at Shelfside haven’t seen anything that tackles this 2v2 non-party niche where both players are SO reliant on each other, and is able to be learned in minutes. Mechanics are literally just playing 2 cards, with 3 cards in your hand!

Dragon and Rider is exactly what it looks like, a well done rock paper scissors with dragon + rider teams. Each team has the same cards. There’s no special phases or abilities. And so, you should 100% go into this game with a casual mindset overall. Even if you play the right card, there’s still your freaking teammate! I played a charge, and then that idiot decided to play freaking green instead of going all in!