Unfortunately, moving is not the only thing a monster does. There are different monster abilities that hinder dwarves in the same zone, for example a monster might steal from the resources of a dwarf, or even sends the dwarf from the board back to the player's board. But what can the dwarves do against these threats? First of all, a dwarf has to be on the board to do something useful. Each round a player can perform up to five actions, and one of them is to place a new dwarf from the player board to one section of the board. Of course, you can also move your dwarves. And if they are strong enough (most threats demand more than one dwarf in a zone), they can fight monsters.

If one of the zones (forest, mine and field) is hit by a disaster, the industrious guys can no longer obtain the necessary resources (wood, food and stone) in the affected areas. However, these are urgently needed to avert a disaster or to fight the monsters. So let's see how this works: we already start with a few resources, but these will be spent soon. To get new resources, we have to play music, and for that, we must use our hand cards. We start with comparable weak cards, but new cards can be obtained as an action in our turn. Each card has a music symbol that is matching a specific landscape type.

If you play a music card, all of your dwarves in the matching landscape are joining in. As a result, you get the reward from every matching zone with at least one of your dwarves. But dwarves of the other players can also join in and will get a reward for their played music too (depending on different hero cards). This allows various agreements between players in order to obtain - as a group - as many resources as possible. After all, it's not that easy to defeat the monsters and overcome the disasters. Good cooperation is needed as more and more threats appear on the map as the game progresses. A player with his seven dwarves cannot be everywhere at once and solve all problems. Especially if you consider that in case of a successful fight or disaster solution all envolved dwarves come back on the player boards and must all be brought back to the board with an action to continue the fighting. It is of course a question of dwarf honor whether the agreements are all kept. As I said, the game is only semi-cooperative.

I must confess that I had some problems to find a good strategy. The hope that a clever move of the dwarves and the execution of a suitable music action would bring in as many resources as possible was not really confirmed. Likewise, acquiring of the stronger hand cards did not always take full effect. On the other hand the artwork of the game is funny and the amount of miniatures on the table and the great graphics really make a difference. Although the allocation of the illustrations was sometimes a little bit confusing, because for example the resources needed to defeat catastrophes and monsters can be found in different places on the respective cards, the game is basically easy to learn. Funny or not, to win the game you must carefully choose new hand cards, and that's hard indeed in your first game. And the threats and monsters are moving forward quickly. Anyway, a castle has to be defended. Let's go on, dwarves.