DRINKING WITH DRAGONS

Two-Gun Pixie Presents:

LEGENDARY

GAMING

015 – Drinking with

Dragons

Hail thee well, fellow travelers and adventurers! Welcome to Legendary Gaming, Two-Gun Pixie’s official tabletop game review page.

In this installment we look at the after-math of an epic dungeon delve bards all over the lands will sing about; crits have been rolled and fumbles have cost lives. Just because the dungeons have been explored and the dragons dispatched doesn’t mean the fun has to end!

BIG Johnny G! & the Twenty-Sided Warriors sit down for a drink, a meal, and a little gambling. I mean all those gold pieces aren’t going to spend themselves, right?

The First round is on Delia so pull up a stool and join us at...

The Red Dragon Inn

The review for this game is based on Red Dragon Inn and Red Dragon Inn 2.

There is no change in the rules or game play between these two games.

The only difference between them are the playable character decks, each unique in both games.

Designers: Cliff Bohm, Geoff Bottone, Cold Fuzion Studios, Colleem Skadl Artists: Kennon James, Doug Kovacs, Rhonda Libbey, Beth Trott

Publisher: SlugFest Games, Pegasus Spiele, Redbox Year Published: 2007

Manufacturer Suggested Player Age: 13+ Number of Players: 2 – 4 (More with expansions) (Best with 4 or 6) Average Play Time: 45 minutes Game Mechanics: Variable Player Powers, Hand Management, Player Elimination, All vs All MSRP: $37.95 Weight: 1.66 pounds Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 10.5 x 2 inches Integrates With: Red Dragon Inn 2, Red Dragon Inn 3, Red Dragon In 4: the Crimson Drake, Red Dragon Inn 5: Character Trove, The Red Dragon Inn: Gambling? I’m In!

The Box

The boxes for The Red Dragon Inn games (the original and the sequels 2, 3, & 4) are all uniformly the same when it comes to size, shape, and weight. The beautifully illustrated art on each box cover helps to put your mind into the thematic setting of the game. The inside of the box is designed well enough for each game in this series. What I mean is there will be no room for the other big box expansions (2, 3, &4) to fit in comfortably. Each box contains its own tray inset that holds the exact contents of that game nicely. There are several single-character mini-expansions available called “Allies”. You may be able to cram them in the box but it’s not designed to hold more than its sold with and will show this if you try. If you plan on buying expansion sets from the original just remember how much room they will all take up on your shelf…

Unless, of course, you invest in The Red Dragon Inn 5: The Treasure Trove.

This massive box contains enough room to fit its own components, all 4 previously released boxes AND ALL the single-character mini-expansion “Allies” all together. There is even room for additional, yet-to-be-released expansions!

Slugfest Games has delivered a good sturdy box on all editions of this game with great art.

The Components

Each of the boxes comes with 4 Identical Player mats, 4 sets of unique Fixed Character Decks (one for each adventurer depicted on each of the game boxes), 4 clear plastic alcohol marker beads, 4 clear/red fortitude marker beads, 1 Drink Deck, and many durable cardboard punch-out gold pieces.

The player mats and character decks are all produced from high quality stock material that shouldn’t bend on you. The marker beads are no different than ones you might buy in a craft store.

The Fixed Character Decks are also high quality and can take many games before being damaged, faded, or dog-eared. If you use card sleeves you might want to invest in some for these just in case, you can never be too careful.

And that’s it for components. No, really. Just 4 small decks, some player mats and beads, and some cardboard gold coins.

After investing so much time in the huge, epic board games with tons of tokens, cards, and trackers that you need to use you’ll find this game is rather refreshing. This also makes the setup time for the game extremely fast, open the box, grab a mat and deck, place your two tracker beads and shuffle your chosen character deck.

Hey, you’re ready to game.

Game Play

The premise for this game is rather simple, just be the last character standing, um sitting... well, just be the last character conscious AND YOU WIN! But don’t lose all your gold either or the Red Dragon Inn will kick you out!

As you might expect from so few game components this game plays rather fast; especially after you have a couple of drinks under your belt, er... I mean, a couple of games under your belt.

After setting up the player mats and trackers choose your specific character deck and shuffle it then draw the top 7 cards, this is your starting hand. Draw a drink card from the top of the previously shuffled Drink Deck and place it face down on the space on your player mat that says “Drink Me!” without looking at it.

Each player then receives 10 gold coins to start with.

Choose a starting player and proceed left after that player’s turn is over.

We choose determined by who had a drink last, ties are settled by who drank more.

Each round has four phases, which MUST be played in this order...

1) Discard and Draw – You can discard any number of cards from your hand and then redraw from your own character deck until you are holding seven cards. You MAY NOT Play any cards or effects until you have finished drawing all your cards. If, at any time, you find your character deck depleted then pick up your discard deck, reshuffle, and you’re ready to continue.

2) Action – You may play ONE Action Card from your hand. Read the title of the card out loud, give other players a chance to respond to the card, then follow any instructions on it and discard it to the Discard space on your player mat. IF you play a “Gambling? I’m in!” card , you start a round of gambling (more on gambling a little further down the review, nerd). If you cannot or do not want to play an Action Card you may skip this phase.

3) Buy Drinks – Take the top card from the Drink Deck and place it face down, without looking at it, on top of ANY player’s Drink Me! Pile. You Do NOT Have to pay gold when you buy drinks in this way. The Inn keeps a tab and you will pay for these drinks later.

4) Drink – Reveal the top card from your Drink Me! Pile and follow the instructions on the card and place it in the Drink Deck discard pile. The game uses icons/symbols for most of the card effects. A Flagon with a number on it means that is how much your Alcohol Content goes up. A “Plus” sign on the Flagon indicates the drink comes with a chaser! When this appears you simply draw a second card from the top of the Drink Deck and add that to what you have to drink this turn. The other symbol/icon used is a Heart with a plus or minus number. This indicates how much Fortitude you either gain or lose from the drink.

If/When the Drink Deck runs out everyone THEN pays up one gold piece and the Drink Deck is shuffled and re-set face down to be drawn from again as needed. If you can’t pay the gold piece then the Inn tosses you out and you’re out of the game.

After that your turn has ended and play continues to the left.

That’s it... mostly.

The game has an interesting mechanic to it, a sort of game-within-a-game aspect... metagaming, so to speak. This is the gambling aspect.

As you might have caught from my above comments concerning the Phase 2 Action, some action cards you can play are “Gambling? I’m in!” cards. Playing these cards starts a round of gambling.

When a round of gambling begins each player must ante up 1 gold coin. The player who started the round of gambling is considered to be in control, or winning. Play proceeds clockwise starting with the player to the left of the person who started the gambling round. On your turn you may either play a “Gambling” or “Cheating” card OR you may pass.

IF you play a gambling or cheating card you seize control of the gambling round. Make sure you read you’re gambling and cheating cards carefully as they may have effects other than just taking control of the gambling round.

IF you passed the gambling round, even if you are holding cards you could play, you are Still In The Game and will be affected by cards your opponents play, such as cards that up the ante.

Once everyone in a round have ALL passed instead of playing a card the gambling ends. The player who is in control of the round of gambling at this point collects the gold coins anted during the gambling.

Then the player who started the round of gambling continues with their Buy Drinks phase.

The Character Decks have several different types of cards besides just gambling and cheating.

Actually ALL the characters pretty much have the same cards, or at least the same/similar effects, as everybody else with some small exceptions or at least a degree of difference in the card count of certain card type effects in your deck versus the amount of the same card type effects in the other player’s decks. The difference in artistic deliverance of the cards’ effects and their quotes and card titles are hilarious and make each character’s decks feel different and fun in their own way.

“Sometimes” cards can be played, as their name describes, sometimes. Basically this means as a

reaction to a card played by another player. Example, Zot plays “Oh, no! Not again! Pooky’s on a drunken rampage!” which would cause each other player to lose 1 Fortitude. However, in response, the player running Deirdre counters with a sometime card in her hand, “Stop being silly,” which allows her to ignore Zot’s card’s effect.

The game ends when only one of the players is in control of a conscious character. You see, each time you drink you are gaining Alcohol content and most times you may also lose fortitude. Whenever your Alcohol tracker and Fortitude tracker meet (or pass each other) your character passes out. At this point the red Dragon Inn claims half of your gold and the remaining, conscious, players divide the rest up between themselves as evenly as possible – aren’t friends grand! LOL!

Last player conscious wins!

Final Thought

This rules-friendly take-that game is simple and easy-to-learn. It’s also fast-paced and fun. The fixed decks make set up time fast since you are not taking time to build your own deck. If you love deck-builders I urge you to play this game before you buy it as it might not meet your expectations in that manner.

You have to expect a fun, silly game when you sit down to play this. If you don’t like a bit of jackassery at your gaming table then this game will be an annoyance to you. However, if you enjoy light-hearted games this may very well need a spot on your game shelf (OR two or three spots as you’ll probably end up getting expansion boxes and Allies).

Each of the game boxes is completely independent of each other but also meld together seamlessly. You can buy, and use any edition by itself or add it with other editions to increase your choice of characters and add more interesting drinks to your Drink Deck.

REMEMBER, the Ally expansion decks Cannot be used independently from the box games, so keep this in mind when you purchase this game.

Each box edition of this game comes with a good mix of characters giving this whole game series a great level of male/female diversity. Overall, taking the 5 boxes of four characters each and the 9 (or 10 at this time) single-character Ally expansion packs currently published I think it might be an even split down the middle If not one or two in favor of the female characters. That is something you don’t see in most games.

Honestly, I had this game sitting on my shelf for over a year before breaking it out. Why? Mainly because I was a little afraid it would seem too simple and silly compared to the massive amounts of hours myself and the Twenty-Sided Warriors put into large scale epic board games which contain a titanic amount of rules and tokens and rules and dice, did I mention all the rules? Many even with a separate, SECOND Rules Index Book!

Not long ago I finally decided to take it off the shelf and see what we all thought of it. Several games later the Twenty-Sided Warriors didn’t want to stop playing.

Besides being written fun and consisting of some very easy-to-learn rules this game just begs to be played “in character”, optionally speaking of course. When you read the cards in character voices and/or attitudes the game seems to level up and it takes Red Dragon Inn to even greater heights of hilarity. I highly suggest that if you play this game you should try it in character voices or at least attitudes - you might not be good at or feel comfortable doing a voice then at least put inflections and tone in reading the cards, it’ll be worth it… trust me. Hey, get dressed up if you want but that’s on you, I’m not asking for that level of commitment to enjoy this game but you may like it.

Keep in mind that although this game relies heavily on the levels of silliness the cards, characters, and players provide it does have a certain level of strategy involved if you want to win. You should know your opponents’ character - Don’t necessarily try to engage Gerki in a round of gambling if you’re playing Gog or you’ll likely lose your purse, however Fiona might be a wise choice to try to gamble against if you’re playing Zot.

You know...

Just thinking out loud here.

If everyone playing the game is of legal drinking age…

Well, I think that you see where I’m going with this, don’t you?