Two New Allies, One Sweet Deal
Look, I’m sure anything of value in here would have been sturdy
enough to survive the vault door blowing in instead of out.
-Nitrel the Sapper
SlugFest Games is excited to announce the upcoming release of The Red Dragon Inn: Allies – Keet and Nitrel, a two-character expansion to The Red Dragon Inn! Meet the goblin siblings Keet and Nitrel, both winners from the 2014 Character design contest (read more here) where their clever designs and exciting mechanics earned them a seat in the tavern. We are also excited to share a brand new format for our Allies line of expansions. This is the first Ally double pack, giving you two brand new characters at one great price. On top of that, the set features Character Trove compatible components!
Goblins who adventure together party together!
Keet’s illustrious career of tomb raiding has uncovered fantastic artifacts of both magical and cultural significance. It’s a shame that few of them ever end up in a museum! Digging up the past in his homeland has led him to Greyport, where tales of ancient dwarven ruins (and a particularly exciting inn) have peaked his pointy green ears. With his sister in tow, no dungeon vault will be safe from his enthusiastic looting – er – research!
Keet has a very unique mechanic that sets him apart from all other characters, and has the potential to turn gold theft and the gambling meta-game on its head: instead of Gold, Keet has Artifacts.
Keet doesn’t start the game with Gold like other characters do. Instead he is dealt an appropriate number of random cards from his Artifact Deck. Each Artifact counts as a Gold for all card effects, and at the start of the game none of them are revealed. These special cards have a wide variety of powers, some of them good for the owner while others are bad. Sometimes they will give you a great way to make a player lose a LOT of Fortitude. Other times you’ll find yourself stuck with an Artifact that will slowly whittle away at your defenses. Not even Keet knows the significance of his starting pile of Artifacts, so it’s anyone’s guess whether or not it’s safe to steal or gamble with them.
Artifacts don’t stay face down forever, though! Playing Keet will require a lot of clever risk management. One of the safer ways to reveal your Artifacts is to gamble with them. Each time a face down Artifact is used to pay the ante, Keet gets to peek at it, letting him and only him know whether or not he should try to win it or let someone else get stuck with a boogie.
Other players will definitely be paying attention to how Keet plays during a Round of Gambling when an Artifact is on the line. If the Keet player is aggressively trying to win, they can bet on that Artifact being a really good card… unless he was bluffing the whole time!
To add just another wrinkle to gambling, many of Keet’s Artifacts can be used to hold the pot for ransom. If Keet antes a face up Cursed Idol of Doom, for example, how many folks are going to want to keep trying to win the pot? In this way, Keet can sometimes just win a round of gambling without even playing additional cards!
Keet can also slowly reveal Artifacts by using his character cards. The upside is that most of Keet’s character cards guarantee that he keeps the freshly revealed Artifact. This is great, especially if he reveals something like the dreaded Scorpion Brooch. The downside is that most of Keet’s character cards guarantee that he keeps the freshly revealed Artifacts! This is bad, especially if he reveals a Gleaming Gem of Inebriation. Clever players will have ways to get rid of their own negative Artifacts though – such as paying with it to buy additional drinks!
Either way you decide to go about revealing artifacts, keep in mind that it’s a good idea to get some actual Gold in your Stash. Whenever someone with questionable definitions of ownership comes by *cough* Gerki *cough*, you can bet they’ll be looking forward to stealing your Artifacts.
Like many goblins, Nitrel is an obsessive pointy-eared little fireball. She loves things that go boom! So whether that’s setting off dungeon-busting charges or “perfectly safe” fireworks, you can bet you will find her holding the matches. Fortunately, adventurers usually need someone who can cleverly deconstruct obstacles or blow stubborn doors off their hinges, so Nitrel and her talents seem to be in high demand.
As an added bonus, working with the Party has hooked her up with Phrenk, a very reliable source of regeneration potions – all the better to keep her fingers!
Nitrel adds a new shared deck to the table, the Bomb Deck. As far as this goblin is concerned, there’s no better way to celebrate a successful day’s dungeon delving than by setting off mild explosives in a tavern, and it appears that the rest of the Party is in for a bit of (extremely dangerous) fun!
Many of Nitrel’s cards tell players when they get a bomb. Usually bombs do what you’d expect them to – explode violently and cause a little Fortitude loss. Other times, however, you’ll find them causing all sorts of extra mayhem. You may find yourself pointing the business end of a Goblin Candle at another player or the whole party could be literally burning up their Gold to avoid a massive Pot of Boom!
It’s all fun and games until someone is lit on fire! Then it’s a party!
The key to playing Nitrel well is to always be exploding. While many of her bombs don’t care who is setting them off, her years of experience has made her immune to a fair number of her own explosives. So, even though she may have to deal with suffering a little bit of damage from a wayward bomb, she doesn’t have to deal with them exploding in her face as nearly as often as you’d expect.
She can also be a very punishing gambler, with many specialty cards that let her pay with Bombs instead of Gold. It takes some serious grit to play games of chance with a demolitions expert like Nitrel!
The Red Dragon Inn: Allies – Keet and Nitrel is coming this Summer 2016 and will be available for just $24.95. With RDI5-style player mats and deck dividers, they are set to be a great new addition to your Character Trove, and with their ability to turn the game on its head, you’ll be playing Red Dragon Inn in a whole new way.
