Review of Wyrmlings, a game of dragons, adventures, and friendship!
Note: This post may contain affiliate links. At no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission from purchases made using them. TTRPGkids uses this to keep the site going. Read full disclosure here.
Jump to:
Wyrmlings is a system and game made for all ages!
Wyrmlings facilitates the adventures of young dragons going to school and taking on challenges together as friends! The premade stories that come with the game are set up similar to TV shows like My Little Pony or She-Ra and are geared at younger audiences.
The mechanics are easy to follow and my kid (4yo) was able to track them on his own. Some counting up to 6 and addition up to 9 is required, but the math and stat tracking was accessible to my kid, so we were able to play without modifications. It’s great for kids and new players to pick up and be able to learn the full rules within the first session, and it promotes collaborative play!
Wyrmlings is set in a land of dragons!
Wyrmlings takes place in Dragonsdale, a land where dragons live, play, and go to school! Your characters are members of the Dragon Brigade and are young dragons learning to be kind, helpful, resourceful, and brave as they do their best to solve whatever problems may arise.
In the first adventure, your dragon characters sneak out to save their friend who has been captured for their magic! They face traps, living statues, and more, but, following one of the core themes in this land, they prevail through teamwork!
Your character in Wyrmlings
Your character in Wyrmlings is a young dragon who is in training and still learning to use their abilities, but that doesn’t mean they can’t accomplish great things. You’ll work together with your friends to help save the day!
Characters have six skills that define what they can do and a struggle that gives them something to work around or with and may be a great opportunity to facilitate getting help from a friend. Creating a character was very easy; there’s a spread of numbers to assign to the six stats and one struggle to choose, some description to add about your character, and that’s all! It takes a couple minutes to create a character, and there’s also premade characters with some fun personalities to either play as, use as sidekicks, or draw inspiration from.
Rules lite and collaborative mechanics in Wyrmlings
Rolling for actions
When it’s time to use an action, you roll a small dice pool of d6’s and see how many are higher than the challenge number your Great Dragon (the game guide) sets for the difficulty. The number of successful dice in the dice pool determines if you succeed or fail and to what extent.
You also get to add dice to your dice pool if you get help from your friends! This is determined by your friend rolling for their friendship score and their ability to help you.
I like that this uses a dice pool with friendship bonuses because it allows for a lot of strategizing on what abilities to use and when and how to help without making the math super complicated and having to add up a bunch of scores to a big total. You’re still working with small numbers (adding a modifier to a d6) but you still get to increase your odds and extent of success significantly. It also leads to some great collaboration moments.
The importance of collaboration
One thing that is very strongly themed through the game is teamwork, and the game works way better when everyone is chipping in. Because each character has a flaw, other players need to help cover them so it’s possible for everyone to move on together. Each wyrmling is going to be better at certain things and need to take the lead while others are helping out with that bonus die (and getting to roll for friendship and their skills instead of just having the leader roll extra dice all the time, so… everyone still gets to participate).
When I played the premade adventure with my kid, we had a sidekick character to simulate another player at the table. In challenges where my kid wanted to go it alone (like tackling the vine traps), he didn’t do so well because he only had two dice to roll for his pool. Adding that third die from a helper made so much difference later, especially when you only need one die to get a “success but…” kind of result. The game is geared towards success, especially if everyone is working together, and that’s a really valuable concept to help kids with. It also means that everyone is participating even if every challenge isn’t their strong suit; they can still help out in some way.
Advanced mechanics
Wyrmlings also comes with an option for advanced rules so you can add a little more nuance and difficulty to the game, if your players want it and are ready. The advanced rules include mechanics for bonus tokens, advancement tracks, cool new powers (there’s fun variety in the dragon breath options), friendship based skills, and more. There’s also a mechanic for handling failure as the difficulty increases and it might not always be so clear if our heroes will succeed every time.
Having options to advance the mechanics is great for both keeping things interesting after the initial mechanics are figured out by the players and for engaging multiple player skill levels – if your players are familiar with TTRPGs already, you might be able to jump right to some advanced rules, but there’s also no pressure to do so. It’s flexible and sets you in a position to freely decide how complicated you want things to be.
What did my kid think about Wyrmlings?
I asked my kid (4yo) what his favorite part was about Wyrmlings, and he said, “I really liked my dragon! She was really cool! And I liked Averjoy too – he helped me a lot.”
I think he really liked the idea of playing AS a dragon and had a lot of fun with it. Once he got into the idea of working together, he also really liked the sidekick dragon that I was playing and started RP’ing being friends unprompted (yay character growth)!
Overall thoughts on Wyrmlings
This was a very fun, easy to learn, and cute system and premade story that both my kid and I had fun with. As the Great Dragon, I had everything I needed to run a great adventure for my kid, and the mechanics were clear and accessible enough that my kid was able to manage his rolls and math with little help. This game was a lot of fun, and I highly recommend checking it out!
Find a copy of Wyrmlings
Wyrmlings can be found here in the Lone Colossus store (and you can get 10% using LCG10-TTRPGKIDS10 at check out through the link)!
If you liked this post, make sure to subscribe to the TTRPGkids monthly newsletter to stay up to date on the latest reviews, tips and tricks, game and podcast list updates, and more! Thank you for playing tabletop RPGs with your kids and sharing this awesome hobby with the next generation!