Check out the Sea Event Deck!
Well that was fast!
It is a great pleasure to meet newcomers, and welcome back old SlugFans! Thank you so much for rocketing the campaign through our funding goal in less than 24 hours. That is a HUGE accomplishment and makes us very proud of our game and overwhelmed by the support of our fans.
Now, with our sails at full mast we’re going to be dead set on getting to our first Stretch Goal: The Sea Event Deck.
The Sea Event Deck
The Sea Event Deck provides you with a new way to play The Red Dragon Inn. Instead of carousing in the relative safety of The Red Dragon Inn, you are partying in the Captain’s Cabin aboard The Crimson Drake. Because you are out on adventure, the party runs the risk of being interrupted by random encounters. Some of the encounters are relatively safe, while others are very dangerous!
The following graphics and text are subject to change. The mechanics and contents of the Sea Event Deck as you see them here are going through playtesting with our SlugCrew all across the country, so this preview will give you a great look at some of the card effects and basic mechanics. We were actually planning on doing this update next week, but you guys are so darn eager, we just had to put this out, final art and text or not.
How to Play with the Sea Event Deck
At the start of the game, you shuffle the Sea Event Deck and place it in the middle of the table with two Progress Counters on it. You then play RDI like normal. However, at the end of each player’s turn, that player removes a Progress Counter from the Sea Event Deck. When you remove the last Progress Counter, reveal the top card and an Event takes place!
A Sea Event is a lot like a Drink Event. When you reveal the Sea Event, follow the instructions in the text box (4). After an Event has resolved, place a number of Progress Counters (3) equal to the Encounter Level (2) onto the Sea Event Deck, then play proceeds as normal. The next time a player removes the last Progress Counter at the end of their turn, they reveal the next Sea Event!
There are a wide range of different Sea Events in the deck, and while many of them are detrimental, others can be beneficial to one or more players. You’ll have to stay on your toes each time the Progress Counters start to dwindle!
How does this change the game?
The Sea Event Deck adds a new level of complexity to the base game. Not only will you need to protect yourself from the other players, as well as the Drink Deck, but you may find yourself forced to defend against a Sea Event! You could even end up working alongside other players to get a bonus from the various Events you’ll see throughout a game. There are 12 unique Sea Events in the 20-card deck, and most 4-player games will see about a third of the Sea Event Deck over the course of the game.
It will also be big! The cards will be portrait-style 3.5”x5” cards with full color art!
How do we get it?
We are very excited about the Sea Event Deck and want to include it in every copy of The Red Dragon Inn: 4. That means we need to raise at least $20,000. You can help us out by spreading the word. Like the campaign, tweet about it, and post and comment on your favorite blogs, subreddits, and forums.
Support RDI 4 on Kickstarter!
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our Kickstarter project for The Red Dragon Inn 4!
The Red Dragon Inn 4 is a new base set with four nautically-themed characters. These characters are the crew of the Crimson Drake, a sturdy sailing vessel that our heroes use when their adventures take them to sea. Of course, it can be combined with any previous Red Dragon Inn sets to allow for larger games and new match-ups!
The four new characters are:
And if we meet our stretch goals, more stuff gets printed! The first stretch goal is for the Sea Events Deck. With this deck, instead of partying in the relative safety of The Red Dragon Inn, you are in the captain’s cabin aboard the Crimson Drake. But watch out! While visits from merfolk can be good fun and games, encounters with sea monsters are anything but!
The second and third stretch goals are new characters for the RDI: Allies series! These will be offered as low-priced add-ons for anyone who gets a copy of RDI4 via Kickstarter.
So, what are you waiting for? Head over to the Kickstarter, where you can find a whole lot more information about the game. If you like what you see, support us!
-Jeff
First SlugCrew Member Earns Ozrik!
A color test for Ozrik. Artwork is subject to change. You can check out more of Royce Southerland’s artwork here.
Congratulations to Erik Wintz of Southern California, our first SlugCrew member to earn 150 points by demoing our games! Erik will soon be receiving Ozrik the Adept, our SlugCrew-exclusive RDI character!
In addition, Erik will receive a copy of The Red Dragon Inn 4.
[ZOMG! Did he just say RDI4??!!??]
Yup. Stay tuned for a big announcement tomorrow!
Anyway, Erik: from all of us here at SlugFest Games, thank you! We really appreciate the work you’re doing for us.
-Jeff
First SlugCrew rewards sent out!
Hey, everyone. Guess what went out in today’s mail?
That’s right! The SlugCrew promo drink cards went out!
Congratulations to the first five SlugCrew members to get to 30 points: Erik Wintz, Larry Capasso, Logan Knight, Mike Smith, and Shannon Khosravi. Thanks very much for supporting us, guys! If you don’t receive your cards in the next week or so, please let us know.
In fact, Mr. Wintz is getting within striking range of 150 points, which would make him the first SlugCrew member to earn Ozrik the Adept, our SlugCrew-exclusive Red Dragon Inn character. Want to read about how you can earn these rewards yourself? Head to this previous blog post!
Speaking of Ozrik: we have an artist (Royce Southerland, aka FooRay) lined up for him, and things are underway. Here’s a preliminary sketch!
So, everyone go out and earn 150 SlugCrew points!
-Jeff
SlugCrew-Exclusive Drink Cards!
Hey there, SlugFans! It’s been a while since our last blog post. Sorry for that, but we’ve been working like crazy on our Kickstarter-backed RPG project, The Red Dragon Inn Guide to Inns and Taverns. That project is taking a bit longer than we had hoped, but we’re really coming down the home stretch now.
In our last post, I introduced the SlugCrew Rewards Program, whereby you can earn points by doing demos of our games at stores and conventions. To recap: a two-hour store demo is worth about 10 points. At 30 points, you will earn the current year’s Minor Reward, and at 150 points, you will earn the Major Reward.
For 2013, the Major Reward will be Ozrik the Adept, a SlugCrew-exclusive RDI character. We’re working on him now, and he’s turning out to be really fun to play (and his power level isn’t quite as crazy high as it was the last time I wrote about him).
Also in our last post, I described the 2013 Minor Reward, but I described it only as “an exclusive RDI drink card that’s much zanier than anything we’d normally print.” Well, we decided to up the ante a bit. We’re not doing one new drink card–we’re doing three, and I’m writing to show you two of them. Want to see the third? (It’s the zaniest.) You’ll just have to earn 30 SlugCrew points! So, without further ado:
We expect to ship these out sometime in March. Any SlugCrew member who has earned 30 or more points will receive all three of the new drinks!
So, to all of you out there running events: thank you! And to those of you still on the fence, hopefully these SlugCrew-exclusives will bribe persuade you into action!
-Jeff
Introducing the SlugCrew Rewards Program!
Hi, everyone! Today we’re excited to announce some big changes to SlugCrew!
First, if you visit our new SlugCrew page, you will see a description of SlugCrew and a form to sign up. (We ask that any existing SlugCrew members sign up again via this form so that we can get everyone into the new system.) Once you log in, you will see some useful resources, including a form which you can use to inform us of the events you run at stores or game conventions.
This is all well and good, but the big new change to SlugCrew comes in the form of the new SlugCrew Rewards Program. Starting today, you can earn SlugCrew points by running events. As you accumulate points, you will be eligible for SlugCrew-exclusive rewards. Each calendar year, we will come up with a minor reward and a major reward. When you earn 30 points, you will receive that year’s minor reward. When you earn 150 points, you will earn the major reward.
So, how do you earn points? By running demos of our games, of course! After you enter an event report via our web form, we will confirm the event (by contacting the game store or convention staff) and award you some number of points. The rule of thumb we will use is that 2-3 hours of demo time at a store will earn you 10 points. Point awards for different activities will be scaled using that rule. And points earned starting today will count toward 2013 rewards, so you can all get a head start by running some holiday season demos!
So, without further ado: the 2013 rewards!
2013 Minor Reward: an exclusive RDI drink card that’s much zanier than anything we’d normally print!
2013 Major Reward: Ozrik the Adept, a SlugCrew-exclusive new RDI character!
Ozrik is a powerful elementalist who can beef up some of his cards by discarding other “element cards” when playing them. We’ve playtested him a bunch so far, and he’s super interesting and fun to play. (OK, he’s a bit too powerful right now, but we know how to fix that…)
Yes, that’s right: you can be the first on your block to play a brand-new RDI character. We do plan to eventually print Ozrik as part of the RDI: Allies series, but to keep him exclusive to SlugCrew, we promise not to make him available to the general public until May 2014 at the earliest.
We expect the 2013 rewards to start shipping sometime in April. So start earning points now!
If you have any questions or comments, please post them here or contact us at slugcrewcoordinator@gmail.com.
Thanks, everyone! We hope you’re as excited about this new program as we are!
-Jeff
RulesFest: Templating and Why it’s Useful
Hey, SlugFans!
I’d like to talk a bit about how we template our cards and why it matters. I’ll also talk about an important example from The Red Dragon Inn.
So, what is “templating”? Well, in most card games that have text on the cards, the designers make some efforts toward consistency when wording the cards. Specifically, if two cards are meant to function the same way, they are worded the same way.
The converse of this is where consistent templating can be very helpful: if two cards are worded differently, it is because the game designers intend for the cards to function differently.
A quick sidenote: OK, we’ll admit it. We weren’t as careful about this in the early days as we are now. For example, in first and second editions of RDI 1, there are examples of cards that are worded differently that are actually meant to function identically to each other. So, when following along with this blog post, please imagine that your RDI cards use the updated wording that we started using with the 3rd edition of RDI 1, the 2nd edition of RDI 2, or any edition of RDI 3.
Here’s an example where templating helped us clarify a source of potential confusion in the RDI rules. There are two particular types of Sometimes cards which can respond to you getting hit by another player: those that affect the damage before it happens, and those that let you hit the player back after it happens.
We decided to use templating to our advantage for these cards. The key difference is in the phrases would and immediately after.
would: a card has been played, but has not yet resolved, which will make some event happen.
immediately after: a card has just resolved and made some event happen.
Our intent here is to communicate to players that if you want to reduce damage, you have to do so before the damage resolves. If you want to hit someone back, you must wait until after the damage happens. More specifically, we wanted to make it clear that you can’t weasel out of damage AND hit someone back.
Expect to see more of our good friends “would” and “immediately after” in future editions of RDI. Until next time, SlugFest rules!
-Jeff
Got a question about this or any other aspect of SlugFest’s rules? Leave a comment here, or email us!
What Happened to The Red Dragon Inn?
If you tried to purchase The Red Dragon Inn or The Red Dragon Inn 3 in the last few months you may have been pretty disappointed. We are very sorry about that. The good news is that as of last week we are shipping these products from our warehouse, fulfilling the pre-orders we have received from Origins, Gencon, and Kickstarter! They are also finally getting out to distribution and will be appearing in your local game stores just in time for the holiday season.
What took so long?
Those of you who have been following us in the past have probably read our blog post back in August, but for the benefit of the folks who hadn’t heard yet, our restock of The Red Dragon Inn and The Red Dragon Inn 3 were stolen along with their shipping container and truck back in July.
Fortunately, we did not have to pay for reprinting the stolen goods. We also have some of the best fans in the world, who were more than happy to pre-order our games at Gen Con and support our new project on Kickstarter which really helped with cashflow! Plus, we were able to crank them through the reprint very quickly since nothing had changed and the printer was able to just print more copies. We were pretty excited to announcing that we had gotten the games through US Customs in a September blog post!
But, then why didn’t they ship in September?
Stolen copies of our games started showing up for sale online. A handful of vigilant SlugFans contacted us, letting us know about our games showing up on online stores. We followed up with some of the sellers, and were able to find one seller willing to cooperate with us and confirm that that seller had a stolen copy of The Red Dragon Inn 3. With this information in hand we were able to contact the Illinois Police Department, and that sparked a flurry of new investigations that are still ongoing.
The problem was that our legitimate copies of the game look exactly like the stolen copies, and if we shipped our copies out, it would be impossible to tell the difference between the two! We had to make a hard decision. That is, to not ship games that were in our warehouse and ready to go… but what made it worse, was that we could not even tell our fans why there was a delay or we would risk the thieves finding out as well. We were in this holding pattern for over a month, but the time has come. We feel strongly that we need to fulfill our obligations – and to be honest we need the income – so even though the investigation is still ongoing we have started to ship games.
What about the jerks who stole all those games?
While the police have been able to acquire individual copies of our stolen games and have identified suspects, they have not been able to recover the bulk of the stolen shipment yet. We are hopeful that they have sufficient evidence to track down the stolen games at this point and that delaying shipping the reprints will not impede their progress. That being said, if anyone has information that might seem relevant please contact us through our website.
I ordered one of these games and it’s not here yet!
If you have not received your copy of The Red Dragon Inn or The Red Dragon Inn 3 yet, give it a few more days (we had quite a backlog to dig though). If you have not received your order by Monday, please drop us an email through our website and we will track down the problem.
I ordered a different game and I don’t have it yet.
If you ordered either of the Red Dragon Inn Allies (Pooky or Erin) you should be getting these with your copy of The Red Dragon Inn or The Red Dragon Inn 3 – if ordered them individually or if you do not receive them with your order please drop us an email through our website and we will track down the problem.
If you have ordered The Red Dragon Inn 2 or The Red Dragon Inn: Gambling? I’m In! You’ll need to wait a little longer. These have just printed and are on the boat now. We expect to be able to ship them the last week of November.
If you have any other questions please let us know. Thank you to everyone for being patient with us through this process – it’s been, um, interesting. We are especially happy to be able to put this issue behind us so we can focus all of our energies on finishing up The Guide to Inns and Taverns! More on that later.
Cliff Bohm
SlugFest Games President
New Gambling? I’m In! Proofs!
Check out the new layout for Gambling? I’m In!
Notice the difference? The new card layout addresses a bunch of feedback we’ve recieved from our fans. We’ve dropped the Rogues and Warriors scale to clean up the layout a bit, and mirrored the symbols so you can fan the cards any way you like! Also, to make the cards easier to read for color-blind players, we’ve dropped the square and dot system of identifying the colors in favor of a unique symbols. Blue cards are circles, green cards are squares, and red cards are starbursts.
“But how can I play Rogues and Warriors if I don’t have the list of pairings?” Well that’s where the new cheat card comes into play:
The game will come with 10 (!) cheat cards that give you all the information in the game on one card. On the top you have all the ranks and their die value. On the bottom you have all of the animals set with their colors. And on the left you have the Rogues and Warriors pairings that let you do this:
Swanky!
Expect to see Gambling? I’m in! back in stock by December!
Ending Your Turn for Fun and Profit!
Hi there, everyone! I’m writing this blog post to make sure everyone understands a mechanic that was added relatively recently to The Red Dragon Inn: ending your turn via a card effect.
There are currently three cards that can do this: Kaylin’s “I need some Private Pixie Time”, Wizgille’s gear card “Uh oh! I’d better fix that right now,” and Erin’s Tree form.
So, what does it mean to end your turn? Well, Erin’s rules summarize this idea nicely. When your turn ends at a time when it normally wouldn’t:
- Players may not play any more cards this turn.
- Any cards that have been played but have not yet resolved are discarded and do not take effect.
- The current Phase ends and all future Phases in your turn are skipped. (This means you can skip drinking if you end your turn before your Drink Phase!)
- If a Round of Gambling is underway, the anted Gold goes to the Inn.
That second bullet is worth discussing further. It basically means that ending your turn at an opportune time can cancel one or more other cards. Here’s an example: Erin reveals Wine as her drink for the turn. Gerki spikes it with “Slip a mickey”, then in response, just to twist the dagger a bit, Fiona plays “Tip the Wench” on Erin. Erin plays “Wildshape” and turns into a tree. This ends her turn, which makes all the other cards go away! Pretty handy, right?
Here’s an important thing to remember, though: any card, even one that would end the turn, can be responded to before it resolves! This can cause the turn to continue, since the effect that would end the turn never happens.
Example 1: Kaylin plays “I need some Private Pixie Time” to attempt to end her turn. In response, Wizgille plays “I didn’t activate my temporal dilation field. It’s just deja vu,” and reveals “Wow! That actually did what I expected it to.” as her gear (so it resolves normally). Since Wizgille’s card Negates Kaylin’s card, Kaylin’s turn does not end.
Example 2: Wizgille reveals Elven Wine with a chaser of Dragon’s Breath Ale as her drink for the turn. Since this would knock her out, she plays “This device can turn alcohol into gold! Watch!” to attempt to Ignore the drink and gain 3 gold. For her gear, she reveals “Uh oh! I’d better fix that right now.” She’s still pretty happy with this outcome, since her drink will just go away. However, in response to her geared-up “alcohol into gold,” Dimli plays “I don’t think so!” Since a device card and its associated gear card count as one big card effect, Dimli’s “I don’t think so!” Negates the entire thing–including the part that would end Wizgille’s turn! Wizgille will have to take her drink normally and will pass out if she doesn’t have some other way to deal with it.
So, that’s how this recent new mechanic works. I hope this post was helpful for you all. Remember, ending your turn can be a very powerful and useful effect if you can time it properly, but a card that ends your turn can potentially be Negated just like any other.
Until next time, SlugFest Rules!
-Jeff