The Red Dragon Inn

by Douglas

(Yamagata, Japan)

The Red Dragon Inn
Board game manufacturer:
Slugfest Games
Players:
2-4
Time:
30-60 min
Ages:
13 and up

It’s been a long hard slog down the dungeon but you and your party have returned to the village inn unscathed and ready for a drink.

While the heroic tales seem to amplify after every telling, especially your part in the proceedings, you and your party attempt to drink each other under the table and rid each other of your hard earned gold.

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You don’t exactly steal the gold from your ‘friends’ but gamble it in a fair game of chance while trying to turn the odds into your favour!

In The Red Dragon Inn, players choose to act as one of the party members:
Deirdre the Priestess who has a goddess on her side but a weak tolerance to alcohol!
Fiona the Volatile who is the medieval equivalent of a female hockey player!
Gerki the Sneak who is so good at cheating you almost feel like giving him all your gold!
Zot the Wizard whose rabbit familiar seems to drink booze before breakfast!

Each player gets a drinking mat with spaces for their own individual deck of action cards and discards, with an additional space for drinks to be drunk. Each drink has an alcoholic content and the constant drinking increases this level until your surpass (or equal) your fortitude and pass out under that table.

On your turn you draw some cards, play an action card to help you or impede your fellow players, then buy a drink for someone, and then finally have a drink yourself. You play until one player is left remaining. You go out of the game if you lose all your gold or if you pass out!

One important action that can be taken is to commence a gambling game which every player has to join unless they have a good excuse (which funnily enough they sometimes do!). This can be a great money earner or loser depending on the cards you hold.

You can pass or try and control the round and thus win the money but then you could open yourself up to losing more money as the gambling continues. Some players can easily go out of the game early if they too involved in this gambling aspect of the game.

Pros and cons

Red Dragon Inn board game is a fairly quick and enjoyable card-based game, full of originality and fun.

Having an original deck for each player shows a lot of thought, and work has gone into the making and designing of the game. Although many of the cards actually have similar actions to the other players, there are a few unique cards for each character class to make this game very re-playable.

Each player has a weakness that needs to be exploited if you want to win, otherwise the game could drag a bit, leaving any players who went out early feeling tempted to increase their real alcoholic levels closer to their own fortitude levels!

The verdict

Red Dragon Inn is not only a rare topic — drinking in a fantasy pub! — but a rare GAME, too. There’s none (of the first edition) anywhere, though you can get the new print from Amazon.

References

RPGs on iPad

The death of dice RPGs

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