Dewan Review – Got an umbrella? It’s about terrain

I borrowed Dewan from the game library at Roll The Dice Cornwall. You should be able to buy it from their shop right now.

Dewan made some big ripples when it landed in the board game pond recently, like a hefty duck coming in for a landing. Its combination of beautiful artwork, high-quality components, and lightweight ruleset meant it was onto a winner before it even hatched. But we all know that just because the feathers are fine, it doesn’t mean the duck can quack. Luckily, Dewan has a strong voice to go with its plumage.

I’m not sure where the duck analogy came from… I’m sorry about that. What I’m trying to say is that Dewan is both nice to look at and fun to play. I probably should have led with that.

Tribal behaviour

The game of Dewan pits you, the players, as leaders of tribes. Your tribes are eager to strike out, explore the surrounding lands, gather the natural resources, and make your mark on the world. Trouble is, other tribes are trying to do the same.

The main board is an arrangement of hexes on tiles, with each hex having a different landscape type, and if you’re lucky, access to some resources too.

You move around the board by playing cards with different landscape types on them. So let’s say you want to cross a mountain, a desert, and a forest to get to where you want to go. Then you need to discard cards with a mountain, a desert, and – you guessed it – a forest on them. Once you do that, you can place one of your little camp markers on that hex and claim it, forevermore, in the name of Adamvania! Or, y’know, whatever your tribe might be called in your head. Shut up.

Placing a camp does two things for you, so you want to do it as often as you can. Firstly, it unlocks new spots on your player board. Sometimes it’s a space to tuck a card for a permanent landscape type, and sometimes it lets you take a new story tile from the display, giving you more points to chase during the game.

The other thing it does is block your opponents from camping there. This bit is super important, because there are a limited number of each kind of resource and landscape available in each game, and everyone wants a piece of the action in order to fulfil their story cards.

Story time

The dual-layer player boards in Dewan are really nice. They have little recesses for your camp markers to sit in, card slots at the bottom, and these obscenely nice story tile slots cut into them. During the game, you acquire new story tiles, and every time you do, they go into the next card slot.

Stories are a basic contract fulfilment thing. If you have camps on all the things shown on a story tile – Bingo! – you’ve completed it. In some games, that would just be a normal card which you could flip or something to show it’s completed, but the designers of Dewan were just a little bit extra here. When you complete a story, you slide its tile up in its slot, and the little notch on the board slides perfectly into the little slot on the tile, and it’s just glorious.

Unnecessary, slightly too sensual, but glorious all the same.

---

Enjoying this article? Consider supporting me.

---

Let’s all push our glasses up the bridge of our noses for a moment and get serious. Dewan isn’t a complicated game. It’s not even massively original. There are touches of The Guild of Merchant Explorers (read my review here) in there, a smattering of The Quest for El Dorado (read my review of that one here too), and lots of other games too.

So when you bring a game like this to market, it has to have a little something to make it appeal to people. You could make it super cheap. You could fill it with plastic minis that nobody wanted. Or, you could do what Space Cowboys have done, and add some gorgeous little touches that make basic things feel special.

It didn’t need dual-layer boards. It didn’t need oddly shaped, screenprinted wooden pieces. It didn’t even need the curvy edges on the tiles. It’s got all of those things, though, and it’s a nicer game for all of them.

Final thoughts

This review doesn’t need dragging out. Dewan is simple to learn and very rewarding. The components are top-notch, and there’s even a decent insert in the box. All of this for a game that costs about £30? It’s a bit of a bargain.

It’s best at three or four players for sure. The map scales with player count, but it all feels simultaneously a bit narrow and anaemic with two players. The whole point of exploration is to feel like you’re stepping out into the unknown, not wandering down to the local Spar shop for some cheese and a bottle of wine.

Dewan plays out pretty quickly, it’s good fun while it lasts, and the different included scenarios and extra bits and pieces mean it should have bit of life in it too. If you’ve got a premium account over at Board Game Arena, you can even go and try it out right now. It’s a really nice game, really well-made, and would be a hit with most families and lighter groups.

Remember, you can pick Dewan and other games up over at Roll The Dice Cornwall right now.

Pros & Cons