“All my eye and Betty Martin! Sir, you can’t be batting on a full wicket!” An exclamation you rarely hear when playing tabletop games unless you are playing Dastardly Dirigibles where these sayings and insults are encouraged.
Overview
Dastardly Dirigibles is a game designed by Justin De Witt and published by Fireside Games in 2016. You take on the role as airship builders trying to win the favour of Professor Phineas Edmund Hornswoggle by building the best possible airship all the while sabotaging the opposition. The game is designed for 2 to 5 players with a suggested playing time of 1 hour. It holds a ranking of 4367 on boardgamegeek.
The Components
The main component is the tarot-sized and glossy cards that represent various dirigible parts or event cards you can play. The game also includes glossy paper sheets representing the blueprint of your ship with details on your various action options and doubles as the work space for your construction. The artwork is by Jeff Porter and the airships themselves look pretty cool. The game comes with 8 designs of complete airships but the cards also fit well together with the other sets making for some truly wacky designs.
I’m a bit annoyed with the slightly cumbersome card size when shuffling and the glossy paper sheets that are pretty uneven the first few times playing (making the cards slip around quite a bit).
The rulebook describes the game but also include a mini-handbook of Victorian insults that only adds to the steampunk-theme and keep the game clearly in the more light-hearted spectre.
Set-up and Gameplay
The set-up is quick, giving each player a blueprint sheet, dealing out a starting hand of 5 cards to each player and creating a Emporium (a number of open cards depending on the number of players that are placed face-up in the middle of the table).
The game is played over three complete dirigibles build and a build ends when one player has 7 parts on their blueprint sheet. You score points after each build is complete and the player with the highest score wins and gets to be the professors favourite.
Each round you perform 3 actions. You can choose from total of 5 different actions and can perform same action multiple times; either play a card, discard a card, swap a card from the Emporium form, replace the cards from the Emporium with new card or pass your turn.
The key element is to build a complete airship that will also score you the most points but also to sabotage the other players. One way and a key concept to the game is that when the active player plays a dirigible part the other players must play a similar card if they have it in their hand. This can both be exploited to get your ship done fast (by basically getting free actions on the other players turns) but also force players to discard and replace parts with cards that net them less points when scoring. You also get event cards that can give you various effects, like forcing players to discard certain parts, stealing part-cards for yourself or draw more cards.
It’s not the most complex game but it’s pretty interactive with minimum downtime as you can play cards on other players turn and need to keep an eye on what the others are doing.
Replay Value
I find that Dastardly Dirigibles isn’t the kind of game you will feel the need to play all evening. It’s not fast enough (unless you house-rule down the number of builds) to work as the typical filler-game but a decent fast game to start or end a typical game night and then break out in a couple of weeks or so. The way the cards fit together to make a complete airship might seem nostalgic to many as it’s similar to children’s toys where you can switch various animal/body parts around to make different pictures
Final Verdict
Dastardly Dirigibles is what I call a decent game. It’s different and complex enough to be interesting, but not something that you’ll want to play constantly. It has somewhat of an awkward play-length of 1 hour that works well if you’re planning a full day of playing (to break the typical complex game or short filler rhythm) but might be tricky getting playtime on a typical game night on weekdays where you basically get 1 long game and a couple of fillers or two medium-length games.
| Price | Mid-ranged |
| # of players | 2-5 |
| Time | 40-60 min |
| Quality of components | Glossy tarot-sized cards, a bit flimsy playersheet |
| Rules | Easy |
| Set-up time | Fast |
| Gameplay | Moderately fast |
| Player interaction | Medium to high |
| Replay value | OK but not great |
| Final Verdict | Fun theme that’s pretty fair overall |
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