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