Best Dragon Arcade Games

A dragon is the most useful creature in fantasy game design and the most frequently wasted. It arrives carrying meaning a player already has - enormous, dangerous, not to be fought head-on - and most games throw that away by making it a boss with a health bar. These five use it for something.

What a dragon is actually good for

Three roles, and they are mechanically distinct.

As a vehicle, a dragon gives a designer a reason for the player to be airborne with momentum, which unlocks a whole class of movement that a walking character cannot have. Dragon Dash and Dragon Rider both use it this way.

As a hazard, a dragon is a thing that is unambiguously more powerful than you. That is difficult to establish with an invented creature and free with a dragon, because the player brought the assumption with them.

As a schedule, a dragon can be something you read rather than something you fight. Dragon Treasure takes this to its conclusion by giving the dragon no health bar at all - it is a hazard with a timetable, and the game is about learning the timetable.

The role a dragon is worst at is the one it is used for most often: a large enemy you whittle down. A dragon with a health bar is a wall with wings, and it throws away everything the creature brought with it.

Dragon Dash - one button, and a centre line

The simplest of the five and the one most worth learning first. You fly a dragon through stone gates carved into the spires of Emberspire, and the only control is a flap.

The important design decision is that a flap sets your vertical speed rather than adding to it. In most one-button flyers a press adds velocity, which means the height a press buys depends on how fast you were already falling - the same input produces different results, and players cannot learn a rule that changes. Here the arc after one press is identical every time.

What keeps it from being a survival game is the centring score. A gate passed dead centre is worth 200 points plus a bonus; one scraped at the edge is worth 40. The centre of each gap is drawn as a dashed white line, so two players who both cleared thirty gates can finish four thousand points apart.

From gate twenty-five the fire jets arrive - a jet from the spire wall on a four-second cycle with a visible half-second wind-up. The nozzle is always drawn, so a jet can be planned around rather than reacted to.

Dragon Rider - a tunnel instead of gates

The same creature, a completely different feel. Instead of discrete gates with clear gaps, this is one continuous cave tunnel generated column by column from a smoothed random walk.

Control is direct rather than impulsive - hold up to climb, hold down to dive - which makes it a game about holding a line rather than timing a press, and considerably easier on a phone.

The mechanic that makes it worth playing is grazing. Passing within twenty-six pixels of rock without touching it scores continuously, about six times a second, and feeds a multiplier that decays after 2.2 seconds without one. Flying down the exact middle of a wide tunnel is completely safe and pays almost nothing.

The tunnel is clamped so it never narrows below 132 pixels, which is about four times the rider's height. An unclamped random walk closes a passage completely within a few hundred columns, and the player has no way to know the section was never survivable.

Dragon Coin Rush - the dragon as a lane vehicle

Five lanes, snap movement between them, and blocks of coins arriving as a unit. Because a lane change is instant rather than steered, there is no movement skill to hide behind: the whole game is reading a layout and committing.

Coins arrive in runs of four to nine in a single lane, and taking a whole run without leaving the lane pays a bonus that grows with the square of the run length. A nine-coin run is worth considerably more than two runs of four or five, which is what makes hopping between lanes for the nearest coin reliably worse than committing.

The gold lane pays double and, about a third of the time, has the block's hazard at the far end. The hazard sits 320 to 520 pixels past the start of the run, far enough that it is not visible when the coins first appear. Reading whether the gold run is clean all the way through is the whole skill.

Dragon Treasure - the dragon as a schedule

This is the one that uses the creature properly. The dragon cannot be killed. It has no health bar because it does not need one - it is a hazard with four attacks, each announced by name and telegraphed in gold for at least 0.55 seconds.

You are not fighting it. You are robbing a hoard while it objects, and the treasure is densest in the middle, which is where the dragon is looking.

The greed loop is what turns a pattern into a game. Every item you carry slows you by up to forty per cent with a full load, the banking bonus grows faster than linearly with how much you carried at once, and being hit scatters everything across the floor. One dangerous trip beats three safe ones, until it does not.

Banking is also the only healing in the game, which makes the loop deliberately greedy: you are always one trip away from being healthier and always tempted to make that trip bigger.

The detail worth noticing is that attacks unlock on banking rather than on time. A cautious player meets the fourth attack later than a greedy one, which is exactly the right way round.

Fantasy Arcade Ultimate - the dragon at the end of the journey

The flagship's fifth leg is a compressed version of Dragon Treasure: forty-five seconds against a dragon with a rotation of telegraphed attacks, with treasure dropping throughout so that dodging perfectly and doing nothing is not a strategy.

The difference is that you arrive at it with whatever health you have left from four earlier legs played in four different ways. That continuity is the point of the game, and it is why the dragon leg is the one that most often ends a run even though it is not the hardest leg in isolation.

It also gives you two attacks from the first lap rather than introducing them one at a time, which is why the honest preparation is to play Dragon Treasure first.

Which one to play, by what you want

If you want something in five seconds on a phone: Dragon Dash. One thumb, a tap anywhere, and a score that rewards precision rather than endurance.

If you want to hold a line rather than time a press: Dragon Rider. It is the hardest of the three flying games and the most satisfying when a long sweep goes well.

If you want to read layouts and commit: Dragon Coin Rush. It is the purest decision game of the five.

If you want a boss that is actually interesting: Dragon Treasure. It is also the best demonstration on the site of a boss designed as a schedule rather than as a health bar.

And if you want all of it: Fantasy Arcade Ultimate, once you have played the others.

• Dragon Dash - one button, centring score, best on a phone.
• Dragon Rider - continuous tunnel, graze scoring, hardest flying.
• Dragon Coin Rush - five lanes, run bonuses, pure reading.
• Dragon Treasure - unkillable boss, greed loop, best boss design here.
• Fantasy Arcade Ultimate - the dragon as the last leg of a journey.

A note on how the dragons are drawn

Every dragon on this site is drawn at runtime from arcs and paths - a tapering tail, an elliptical body, a membrane wing over three finger bones, a neck, a head and a horn. There is no sprite sheet anywhere in the library.

That is partly a performance decision and partly a provenance one. A creature drawn from computed geometry cannot have come from anyone else's artwork, which matters for a site that puts dragons on thirty pages.

It also means the same dragon can appear at any size without being resampled, which is why the creature in Dragon Treasure is two and a half times the size of the one in Dragon Dash and neither of them looks wrong.

Frequently asked questions