Neil Robinson hm. Okay.

The goal is to run up your Power (victory points) before the game runs out (either by exploring to the “end” of the wilderness or by putting a number of Goals into play).

You’re acquiring new Dragons — those tiles with the white/red dots on them above — and those do two things. One, they provide anytime powers, which you typically use to juice up other effects. Like, if you get meat then you cash in that dot and get more meat or whatever.

The other thing the dragon collecting does is play into the Goals, most of which are sets of dragons. Player with the most total red, green and gold dragons gets 16 Power, second gets 8, third gets 4, stuff like that.

Every turn you MUST either place a vassal (spear guy or dragon lord) somewhere in a WP spot, OR recover some/all of your vassals. If you leave a Wilderness spot with no workers, the tile gets discarded into that countdown. So you kind of are stuck, or you manipulate other players into getting stuck.

Then you also MAY add and populate a new Wilderness location, and advance a vassal down these special locations you play called Exploration: they’re a chain of events, and you have to pay for every step, but as you do you’re getting more and better goodies.

I don’t know that the dragons feel especially dragon-y. I mean they’re basically just packages of abilities. You don’t fly them around or attack each other with them. They’re Pokemon.

I heard Simurgh is actually a lot like Lords of Waterdeep with some different WP tricks, actually.