Game
Review: The Red Dragon Inn
So what
does every adventurer do after raiding the dungeon? They go down the tavern and make the best use
of all the treasure they’ve looted by drinking and gambling it all away.
Little
bit 1980?
Maybe...
However,
it is the subject of a game from Slugfest, wherein every player takes the part
of an adventurer that’s just returned from the dungeon in a race to see which
one of them runs out of gold or passes out first...
Highbrow
entertainment this is not J
In the game we played, there are four adventurers, Dimli the Dwarf, Gog the Half Ogre, Eve
the Illusionist, and Fleck the Bard.
BardFleck!
Not hard
to see which character I picked.
There are
two stones on the character board, a red one that indicates fortitude, a white
one that indicates alcohol content, if the two ever meet, you’ve passed out and
lose, if you run out of gold, the tavern wench throws you out and you lose.
The game
mechanics are simple, draw till you have seven cards at the beginning of the
turn, play an action, buy someone else a drink and then drink your drink (if
you have one). Actions include starting
off a round of gambling, taking things from other players, ordering more
drinks, and so on, there’s not much variant in the different cards, most of
them do simple things like cause the other players to lose fortitude or gain
alcohol content. There are interrupt
cards that allow you to redirect fortitude loss and alcohol gain, and cards
that allow you to ignore them completely.
When you’re
gambling, whoever controls the round gets the pot when it gets back around to
them, but the other players can play raises, winning hands, or cheat their way
to victory, there’s even a card that allows a losing player to make the game a
hollow victory by having the tavern wench steal all the gold in the pot as a
tip.
The game
plays well, there aren’t enough rules to get in the way of things and those
things that have a conflict on them are suitably easily worded enough to allow
players to make a reasonable decision on them, the production values are good
although the cards aren’t laminated (which, given the subject matter, you’d
think they would have been), and it’s possible to play a game from new within
half an hour. I suspect that the game
will work better for those who’ve had rowdy nights out and been the archetypal adventurers
in the bar, but the game mechanics are sound and there’s enough variance in the
cards that it doesn’t seem like you’re playing the same hand every turn.
As of
this time, there’s a total of four different expansions for the game and the
rules for each of them can be found here http://slugfestgames.com/games/rdi/
There are
also rules for Allies, including amongst others the rabbit from Monty Pythons
holy grail and the barbarian from Runequest and expansions that indicate how to
include taverns and such in your games of Pathfinder.
It’s not
politically correct, and it’s not for everyone, but considering that our group is one teetotal, one party animal, one beerproof tank, and one "Drunk by sniffing it", we all found it fun to play.
Just as long as you don't swap the drink cards for actual drinks....
