Booze it Up at the Red Dragon Inn
You’re a mighty adventurer in a land of sorcery and steel. A legendary wizard. A powerful warrior. A deadly rogue. You spend your days slaying dragons and crawling through dungeons, accumulating treasure and renown. Theoretically, at any rate. Because none of that stuff happens in The Red Dragon Inn.
The Red Dragon Inn is a game about sitting around the tavern with your adventuring buddies afterward, drinking your ass off.
This fantasy themed card game is easy to pick up and quick to play — you’ll choose one of four pre-selected decks, each representing a different character type (the Priestess deck includes a lot of cards that shield you from harm, while the Rogue deck favors those that let you cheat, etc.). Each player takes a turn playing an action card, buying a drink for another player, and then having a drink himself. A spirited round of gambling will occasionally break out. You’re out of the game when you pass out, or run out of gold.
And in case you haven’t figured it out yet, this makes for the greatest drinking game ever.
To add alcohol to the party, you don’t even have to alter any rules: you drink when your character drinks (beer, realistically, since you’ll be drinking almost every turn, and often two or three times). Your opponents play cards that force you to drink faster, and you try to bounce those effects back at them, while others around the table can throw down their own cards to effect the outcome one way or the other. It gets pretty raucous. The cards themselves are fairly amusing, too, and of course it’s obligatory that you read the effects of each one in your best drunken wizard or belligerent orc voice. I suppose you could play with real money as well, which would spice up the gambling rounds quite a bit.
The Red Dragon Inn is for 2-4 players, but you can double the seats at the table by picking up The Red Dragon Inn 2 (it adds 4 new player decks). Which you’ll probably want to do, because the more the merrier for this one.
Just make sure you have enough floor space for your guests to crash, or save some gold for cab fare.
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I played this game at PAX last year — super fun! I lost pretty spectacularly, though. With actual booze, I think I would have been HAMMERED (which probably would have lead to some uncomfortable moments in line to meet Wil Wheaton later, come to think of it…)
We used Werther’s Caramels for “gold” – they come in fancy gold wrappers! Good times.
We should play this for Judy Christmas!