“Red Dragon Inn” (2007) was designed by Cliff Bohne, Geoff Bottone, and Coleen Skadi, with art by Cold FuZion Studios, Kennon James, Doug Kovacs, Rhonda Libbey, and Beth Trott. It’s primarily published by Slugfest Games, and has also been published by Arclight Games, Buró, Hobby World, Pegasus Spiele, and Redbox Editora. It also has a lot of expansions. According to Board Game Geek, there are 79 different expansions, though this also includes things like promotional items that are fun but don’t expand the game itself; by my count, it has somewhere around 30 expansions, though for reasons I will explain in a moment, even this is still a bit misleading.
The base game has four playable characters: Diedre the Priestess, an elven healer; Gerki the Sneak, a halfling thief; Fiona the Volatile, a human fighter; and Zot the Wizard and Pooky, a human wizard and his psychotic homicidal binge-drinking rabbit familiar (yes, Pooky is one of the most popular characters in the game – in addition to appearances in Zot’s deck, he’s the only character to have two expansion packs). Each of these characters has a 40-card deck, all of which have some overlapping abilities, but each is still unique.
Each player starts with a character deck, a health/drunkenness tracker, and a starting amount of “gold” (cardboard tokens), dependent on the number of players. The tracker goes from zero to 20, with the health marker on 20 and the drunkenness tracker on zero. There’s also a 30-card drink deck, and every player starts with two face-down cards from this deck. Players take turns playing cards from their hands and distributing drinks. These cards can do things like starting barfights, stealing each other’s gold, drinking, buying each other drinks, healing, gambling, cheating in gambling, and other things that would happen in the most stereotypical medieval fantasy tavern imaginable. Each character also has a couple of custom cards that are unique to them, and the balance of the general cards shifts; Diedre, for instance, has more cards that negate the effects of alcohol, while Gerki has more cards that let him cheat in gambling. You lose if your drunkenness and health ever reach the same level (causing you to pass out drunk), or if you lose your gold (and the Red Dragon Inn throws you out).
Overall, other ratings I see for it I think are fairly accurate – it’s a mixed bag that leans slightly positive, and I think that’s reasonable. It’s an interesting game, but it has its flaws. It’s deceptively time consuming, based a bit too much on random chance (such as what cards you draw) to be meaningfully strategic, and leaves a lot of players without anything to do once they’re out of the game. That said, it also has some amazing worldbuilding, the mechanics are much easier to understand than most comparable games, and while it officially supports three to four people, I’ve played with groups that had up to 12, and it still plays well (provided you have enough expansion decks). For long-term fans of games like “Dungeons & Dragons,” it also meaningfully delivers a tabletop roleplaying game experience. I enjoyed it well enough, but I understand why someone wouldn’t.
My main commentary on this game comes from how it uses expansion packs, because that’s a rising trend in independent and smaller game creators and communities in general. And for the record, I’m not opposed to expansion packs in concept. There can be reasons for this – game production isn’t cheap and it can be more affordable for an independent company; it can lower costs for consumers, at least for long enough to encourage them to try a game they may not have been able to afford a full copy of, it allows customization so you can curate your preferred game experience; and it can create some much-needed variation to ensure a game doesn’t feel stale, it can be a way for game designers to share their new ideas, or to update or correct earlier issues. There are good reasons for this. I know that I’ve generally seen negative discussions of it, particularly within online board gaming circles, but I’m not inherently opposed.
That said, we need to talk about “Red Dragon Inn.”
So, I have the original base game for “Red Dragon Inn.” I also have “Red Dragon Inn 3,” “Erin the Ever-Changing,” “Witchdoctor Natyli,” “Piper vs Ripsnarl,” and “Keet and Nitrel,” and I have a list of a few others I’d like to get eventually. Most of these expansions are named after the characters in them, except for “Red Dragon Inn 3.” Why? Well, that’s an additional base game. To make this clear, “Red Dragon Inn” currently has 8 expansion packs that are complete base games, with a new one, “RDI: Adventure Is Nigh,” coming soon. And, as it happens, there’s also another pack called “RDI: Adventure Is Nigh Extras” planned. “Red Dragon Inn” is not only to the point where they are creating new base game expansion packs, but also to the point where these base game expansion packs have their own expansion packs. The only other game I can think of that is maybe on the same scale is “Cards Against Humanity,” but that’s mostly because they periodically update the base games to keep the references current.
To me, this is where expansions cross a line. This is getting into insanity. There is no reason where there should be eight base games that function as expansion packs regardless of what the base game is; the fact that they are co-advertising the two upcoming packs undercuts that this might be an attempt to do anything other than profit from splitting the games. And I don’t agree with this approach – especially because, quite frankly, the replay-ability of this game isn’t great without the variety provided by expansions.
This is why I struggle with whether I would recommend this game. I do legitimately enjoy it, provided you can get past the last-one-standing format (for those who find these types of games boring because they leave people out in the later game, I respect that decision). The mechanics are interesting, though they could maybe use some refinement to provide more strategy. The art and theming are very strong. But I don’t know if, in good conscience, I can recommend this game, knowing it’s a rabbit hole into insane expansion formatting.