Pyramid Review
The Red Dragon Inn
Published by Slugfest Games Designed by Geoff Bottone, Colleen Skadl, & Cliff Bohm Art, direction, & layout by Cliff Bohm, Kennon James, Cold FuZion Studios, & Beth Trott
Full-color boxed set with 160 character cards (four decks, 40 cards each), four player mats, 30 drink cards, 50 gold piece counters, eight tokens (four fortitude & four alcohol content), plastic tray, rule sheet; $34.95
As the new year approaches, game groups are on the lookout for new games to play at parties, something to herald the onset of . . . never mind. If anyone's looking for a good drinking game -- literally -- they could do worse than Slugfest Games' latest, The Red Dragon Inn.
The object of the game is to be the last character standing at the end of a hard evening of carousing.
It's an accepted fact that most adventuring parties get their start meeting at a tavern, so it's only fitting the survivors end up there to spend their hard-won gains. Here, two to four dungeon crawlers gather at the pub and gamble. And drink. And fight.
Each of these heroes gets his own deck of cards, a playing mat, and a pair of tokens to track fortitude and alcohol content. On his turn, a player may play an action card. These have many effects, like starting a round of gambling, causing harm to a fellow adventurer (purely by accident, of course), or getting a recount on the gold, among other things. He can only play one action per turn, but the other . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: December 28, 2007
Copyright © 2007 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.