The Breakdown:
Title: The Red Dragon Inn
Maker: Slugfest Games
Number of Players: 2 to 4
Length of average game: 30 to 60 minutes
Box Contents:
4 unique 40 card Player Decks
One 30 card Drink Deck
4 Player Templates
4 Fortitude Markers
4 Alcohol Content Markers
50 Gold Coin Tokens
The Premise:
You and your fellow players are members of a D&D style adventuring party. After a hard day adventuring in a local dungeon and killing monsters, you've all come back into town with pockets full of gold and a desire to celebrate your victory. After much needed shower you and your friends meet back up in the local tavern, The Red Dragon Inn, to drink and be merry. As the evening progresses, drinking contests start and rounds of gambling games abound. Who will be the last adventurer still partying the night away? Who will pass out first, and who will lose all their gold and be forced to spend the night out in the stables?
Gameplay:
The Red Dragon Inn is a fantasy themed, card-based drinking game. No, not a real drinking game. It's just a card game. Although, you could probably turn it into a real drinking game pretty easily, if you were so inclined.
You will assume the roll of one of four adventurers:
Gerki The Sneak - He's an expert thief who is highly skilled at gambling. He's also not above "accidentally" backstabbing other players to get ahead.
Fiona The Volatile - A warrior through and through. Fiona has fighting skills beyond compare and the fortitude of an ox.
Diedre The Priestess - A faithful follower of her goddess, Deidre is an adept healer. She is also known to use her charms to get her way.
Zot The Wizard (and his familiar Pooky) - A powerful, if slightly absentminded wizard. His spells are both clever and dangerous, but not as dangerous as Pooky. Zot's faithful bunny companion should be watched at all times.
Game setup is simple. Every player is given a Player Template, which has the meter which will measure your fortitude and alcohol content throughout the game. The template also holds your player deck, your discarded cards and your drink deck. See below:
At the start of the game, each player shuffles their character deck and places it face down on their template. Fortitudes are set at 20 and alcohol content is set at 0. Everyone gets 10 gold pieces to start with. The drink deck is also shuffled and turned face down. Each player then draws 7 cards into their hand. Turns consist of four phases; discard, action, buy drinks and drink.
1. In the discard phase, you may discard as many cards from your current hand as you wish and then draw back up to seven cards.
2. During the action phase you can play one action card on another player. Action cards do many things like forcing characters to take extra drinks or healing yourself or starting a round of gambling. If you play a card on another player they can respond with appropriate defence cards they may have in their hand. These defense cards come as one of two types, sometimes cards and anytime cards.
Sometimes cards have specific instances in which they can be played. For example, a player uses an action card that forces you to take a drink. You can then play a sometimes card (if you have one in your hand) that specifically replies to that card and forces a different player to drink your drink for you.
Anytimes cards can be played...well...anytime. There aren't really any restrictions here. Anytimes cards do things like force other players to pay a gold to tip the waitress or force them to drink a drink with you.
3. During the buy drinks phase you take the top card from the drink deck and place it face down on any other player's template. They now have that drink (whatever it may be) added to their drink pile.
4. Laastly, you yourself must take a drink. Flip over the top card in your personal drink pile on your template and take it's effects immediately. Drinks, depending on which one you get, can do a couple of things. Most of them either lower your fortitude amount or raise your alcohol content. The really nasty ones do both. But if you're lucky you'll get something like coffee or water that heal your fortitude or lower your alcohol content a bit. Some examples of drink cards are:
Another thing to be wary of are drink cards with the word "Chaser" on it. Anything with that means you must take the effects of the first drink and then drink the next drink on top of your drink pile. Chasers are bad, bad things. You don't want them. And yes, it is possible to get multiple drinks in a row with chaser written on them, thus forcing you to drink 3 or 4 or more drinks straight.
Once a players turn is over, play goes to the left and the same four phases are completed, and so on and so on.
Victory Conditions:
The game can be won in one of two ways. Either you are the last person left conscious, or you are the last person left with any money. In the first condition, players are eliminated from the game the moment their fortitude and their alcohol content are on the same number. If that happens the player passes out from drunkenness. In the second condition, players are eliminated from the game the moment they run out of gold coins. If that happens the waitress kicks you out of the bar and you are forced to sleep in the stables with the horses.
Any combination of player eliminations can happen to cause someone to win the game. The key is to be the only person left still sober(ish) and with cash in your pockets.
The Review:
Likes:
What I liked most about this game is how fun and light hearted. Yes, there is definitely a large element of screwing over the other players (which I always enjoy in a game), but it's done in a really light sort of way. Much in the same way you'd jokingly tease a friend at a bar you will play cards forcing your friends to drink more drinks in this game, thus causing them to retaliate, and before you know it both of your characters are drunk and you're out of the game.
The game is very well paced too, with turns flowing quickly but not too quickly. The game moves along at a decent pace without much slowdown during players turns. I also really loved the art design of the entire game. The artwork on the box and the cards all add to the cartoony fun feeling of the game. The artwork on the cards alone are enough to make you laugh at times (especially when seeing Pookey the bunny chugging a pint of ale.) The player templayes.
Having each of the character's have different strengths and weaknesses too is good because it makes the game fun to play multiple times as you try out different characters and learn how to play each of them differently.
Dislikes:
The gambling, while being fun, doesn't really come in as often as I thought it would. I would have like to seen this expanded a bit with more cards included in the decks that handled the gambling situations.
The drink deck could have been a little bigger as well, with some slightly more varying drinks. As it is, the drink deck is fine, but it could have standed being a little larger and having some more variation to it. In the games I've played we tend to run through the drink deck at least twice and had to keep reshuffling it.
Having only four characters, you are definitely limited to the number of players this game can have. And I can't imagine the game being much fun with only two people playing, so ideally you want 3 or 4 people to play it. Having more players would be even better, but only having 4 characters totally limits that. However, this problem will be remedied soon when Slugfest Games releases the sequel game, Red Dragon Inn II.
The new game is supposed to have 4 new characters and will be totally interchangeable with the existing game, thus creating the possibility of up to 8 people playing at once. Now that sounds like a lot of fun.
Final Verdict:
The Red Dragon Inn is a fun and quick game that is best played with 3 or 4 people. If you're looking for something both fun and funny for your group to play, this is definitely a good choice. The game is easy to learn and can lead to amusing stories later of how you managed to stay sober while everyone else was either passed out drunk or broke and kicked out of the bar. It's worth picking up and playing, especially if you're a fan of D&D or fantasy games in general.
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