It’s less than two months until Christmas; isn’t that a terrifying thought? Well, if you are still needing to do some Christmas shopping for little ones, then I got to check out some of the new DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Questers toys to see if these should be popped under that tree. In short, I liked these a lot more than I expected.
So, what is the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Questers toyline?
So, this is a line of blind box toys, and before you cringe like I do when I hear that, let me say more, as this isn’t some cheap tat in a ball like all the Zuru crap filling The Warehouse shelves. You can buy these toys in one of three options. You can get a small dice with a mystery creature toy inside for $18, you can buy a castle tower with a larger adventurer toy inside for $30, or you can buy a large dragon egg with a bigger dragon toy in it for $50.
Each of them comes with a figure in it to build, a quest card, a story starter guide, a D20 die, and a sticker. The little addons here make a real difference. These toys are designed to be played with, and it guides you in a simple way to start playing Dungeons & Dragons with them. The simple guide allows you to pop the figures down on the carpet and start telling a story, which I did with the kids straight away. Kids also like stickers; that’s not related to the story. Kids like stickers.
So, what makes these not some cheap blind box figures?
I threw some shade before about certain brands blind boxes, so I should probably back up why it doesn’t apply here. These are well-built figures, but they come in parts to put together, and best of all, you can mix and match with them to make your own monsters and characters. Unfortunately, the figures are only compatible with other figures of the same size. So, the small blind box ones are compatible with each other, and the large dragons are compatible with each other. This unfortunately means you won’t be making a big dragon with a small Gazer eye for a head. This makes sense, as the weight of a dragon head would be too much for one of the small monsters, but it is worth noting that if you buy one of each, they won’t be interchangeable.
So that being said, if you want to get creative, you will just need to make sure you buy multiple toys from each sized toy line. So if you buy two dragons, two adventurers, or two creatures, then you can customize them to your hearts content. Adventurers come with weapons, and the Dragons have some articulating joints, making them that little step up and that, along with the size, justifies the price increase.
Cheaper and crappier blind boxes are usually solid figures that don’t wind up being played with for more than a day. The kids and I were sent one adventurer, one dragon, and three creature toys, and these ones have already had multiple days of play in many different ways.
There has to be some negatives, right?
There is only one minor thing that annoyed me, and it happened right at the start, and that is the amount of packaging. This is far from unique these days, but the toys came in long plastic bags that have separate compartments to obviously help them from bouncing around. But it did bother me how much plastic wound up in a pile. This is not unique to toys, especially ones like this, but it bothered me so I have mentioned it.
So, who would actually play with these?
By some fluke, the timing of this release couldn’t have been better for my whānau. My pre-teen has started playing Dungeons & Dragons with his after-school program, and my five-year-old likes toys. So we got a pretty wide-ranging experience. We were sent three creatures, which we got: a Xorn, a Green Dragon Wyrmling, and a Gazer; one adventurer, which gave us the Aarakocra Paladin; and a Red Dragon.
Once we put them together, immediately my 12-year-old wanted to take the role of dungeon master and tell a story for my five-year-old and I to play as we had to battle the three monsters before we fought the dragon on top of the tower. The next minute the kids were switching roles as dungeon master, and the monsters changed their appearances in between sessions. As well as the paladin and dragon, who were the good guy and who was the bad guy. It has led to a lot of fun already!
The other thing is for older kids, having some minis for Dungeons & Dragons campaigns can be enjoyed sometimes. So these may be a reasonably cost-effective way to slowly build out some figures. They are much bigger than minis normally used, so this may be age dependent.
Should you buy DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Questers?
Within a day, these toys were added to my five-year-olds Christmas list. Honestly, do you need more of an endorsement than that? They are fun, well-designed toys, offering heaps of creativity and storytelling. If you aren’t a Dungeons & Dragons player right now, don’t worry. I haven’t played it before, and there was enough inside the boxes to get us playing for the first time.
Oh god, I am about to lose an evening to Dungeons & Dragons now, aren’t I? I already spend too much time playing TCGs.
