The dragons are going back to school, the bell just rang, and the new syllabus promises faster turns, fewer dead ends, and way more cardboard firepower. If Wyrmspan ever left you egg-starved or sitting while someone ran four more coins through their combo machine, today’s reveal is the patch note you’ve been waiting for.
Stonemaier has unveiled Wyrmspan: Dragon Academy, the first expansion designed by Connie Vogelmann with art by Clémentine Campardou, and it slides into the base game like it was always meant to be there. No bloat, no rewrite, no gatekeeping the teach. You shuffle in the new content and play. That content is chunky: eighty fresh dragon cards, twenty-five new cave cards, five brand-new dragon guild tiles, and seven objective tokens. The headline twist is an updated round tracker that gives you an income choice when you pass, and that small timing lever is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Quick rewind. After Wyrmspan exploded out of the gate, Connie started collecting two recurring gripes from the table. First, the egg economy could be punishing. No direct “get eggs” button means the unprepared could spend half a round playing Twister with their engine trying to scrape together a clutch. Second, at higher player counts the game could run long. Sequential turns plus coin-fueled extra actions meant some rounds felt like waiting out a dragon’s tax season. The design challenge wasn’t “flip a switch and make it easier.” It was “keep the crunchy, nonlinear puzzle people love while easing the choke points and shaving a sliver off the runtime.”
Enter the new round tracker. When you pass for the round, you park your adventurer on one of several income spaces. At the start of the next round, you collect exactly what that space promises. First to pass gets first pick. It’s elegant table economics: a gentle catch-up valve for whoever bows out early and a personal “unstick” option tailored to whatever your engine is starving for. Maybe that’s the second egg you couldn’t quite hatch, maybe it’s a dragon or cave card to keep the flow moving, maybe it’s a specific resource that turns next round’s opener into a mic drop. The tracker also quietly tightens pacing. Many guild spaces now yield five coins instead of six but toss in extra resources, which means you’re still accomplishing just as much with one fewer action tax. Translation for the meta: fewer stalled turns, more actual engine expression.
But let’s talk toys, because Dragon Academy isn’t just a speed tune-up—it’s also a bag of new tricks. The star students are a brand-new dragon type called fledglings. Think of them as the hatchlings’ scrappier cousins. They’re quicker to get into your cave so you can start leveraging cave mat bonuses, but their true strength unlocks over time. Each time you pass over a fledgling in your activation path, you can pay a resource to “train” it. Do that the required number of times—sometimes once, sometimes up to four—and it graduates with a purple-highlighted power that can be downright nasty. The push-your-engine feel is delicious: you’re incentivized to route activations to keep training on schedule without kneecapping your broader plan. And because this is Wyrmspan, there are plenty of ways to cheat the syllabus and skip a few homework assignments. Fledglings also score one point per fledgling you own at game end, so you’ll face a fork: build around a couple of standout prodigies, or run a full dormitory and ride the synergy.
Connie even teased favorites like a Stripling that costs nothing to play and can slide into multiple cave types, but demands heavy late-semester training to unlock the big payoff. That’s exactly the kind of card that will split the player base—tempo monsters will rush it early and accelerate, combo enjoyers will sculpt the whole round order around those training clicks, and opportunists will find the degenerate line that flips the cost on its head.
The expansion also broadens one of the base game’s best knobs: the dragon guilds. Five new guild tiles drop into the rotation, and a couple of them get weird in the best way. The King’s Guild asks you to tithe to the crown to claim its benefits—yes, the monarch is stingy, no, we don’t love taxes—but the payout includes a fat 11-point target. From a strategy perspective, it introduces a clean sink for excess cave cards, letting you specialize instead of hoard. Then there’s the Guild of Magicians, a delightful enabler for the mad scientists at your table. It opens lines that let you stack hatchlings into the crimson cavern and sling wild combos if you can sprint the track. These guilds don’t add rules heft; they add replay spice. Every setup just nudges the meta in a new direction.
New cave cards round things out, with artwork that stays gloriously weird and on theme. Mechanically, some caves hook directly into fledgling training or play patterns the round tracker encourages. Practically, a larger cave deck means fewer midgame reshuffles, which keeps the momentum rolling and the camera on the action.
A few housekeeping notes for the rules lawyers and power users. The starting asymmetry remains what made Wyrmspan sing in the first place: your opening hand. No two dragons are the same, so the creativity is front-loaded and the lines diverge immediately. The expansion is colorblind-friendly and component-compatible, and it fits in the core box if you like your shelves tidy. Teaching new players doesn’t get harder because nothing requires an off-book module; you can even use the replacement round tracker with the base game alone if you want the pacing buff without shuffling in the new cards yet.
Timing and money talk. Price lands September 10 on the Stonemaier webstore, and you can expect it to be in the neighborhood of a Wingspan expansion. Orders on September 10 kick off the party, and we’ll all be comparing favorite fledglings later in the month once the mail dragons have done their thing. If you’re a budget hawk, this is exactly the kind of expansion that respects your table time and your wallet: more variety, smoother flow, minimal rules overhead.
So what does this mean for the meta? If you bounced off Wyrmspan because of brutal egg scarcity or sluggish higher-player rounds, Dragon Academy is a targeted fix that keeps the free-market puzzle intact while greasing the gears. If you’re already in love with the base game’s crunchy tableau building, it’s more of what you love—new lines to discover, new engines to jam, and a subtle incentive layer that rewards smart passing and round planning. No heavy-handed rubber bands, no design nannying, just better incentives and cleaner tempo.
