The Red Dragon Inn 8 Review

What happens after a hard day of adventuring? Drinking, fighting, and gambling of course.

The Red Dragon Inn 8 is my first foray into the RDI universe. It's a series that I'd seen plenty of times before but I knew very little about. If you've never played one before, each player has a fortitude level and a drinks level. As the game progresses, these numbers will change. As soon as these two levels meet, you are out of the game. This happens by playing cards that can force you to drink more or lose fortitude but you have cards that can also counter these actions to either take away an effect completely or mitigate the damage.

What makes RDI 8 different from the rest of the series? The introduction of the Pub Crawl and other variants. In the pub crawl variant, you will be moving from bar to bar throughout the night. Any time that you reveal a drink with a chaser, which is essentially an additional drink that adds to your drink level you will move on to another tavern. Each tavern gives a specific bonus or ability. There are several other ways to play the game and each character has its own special abilities and any other version of the game can be played with this one or vise versa.

The Good: There's a lot of take that in this game. The whole focus is to deplete your opponents fortitude and increase their alcohol so it only makes sense that it would be the case. I'm not always a big fan of games like this but when you know what you're walking in to it can be a really fun mechanic. The game does a nice job of balancing the take that with the counters to it.

The Okay: There is a surprising amount of game packed into this box. I unfortunately do not think I would play any of the other variants outside of the pub crawl. I think that the main game is done well enough and the additional bits may not be super necessary.

The Not So Good: If you don't really play with higher player counts the game can get a bit stale. Because I primarily play at 2, it's no real secret who's going to be going after whom.

Overall: 6/10

I don't think that the RDI is a bad game at all. The core gameplay is very strong and I like the overall theme of the game. Unfortunately I was only able to play this at two players so it just didn't stick the way that I'd hoped it would. I'm not opposed to playing this at a higher count by any means though. The series is a really good concept and the appeal is there to have as many characters and expansions as it has.

Thanks to Slugfest Games for sending me a copy to review.