‘Eve the Illusionist’ — “Red Dragon Inn” (Slugfest Games)

You are among a par­ty of hard-work­ing and hard-play­ing adven­tur­ers. Your par­ty just got back from a hard adven­ture delv­ing into ruins, fight­ing filthy crea­tures and find­ing lots of gold. You all got back to civ­i­liza­tion, and, after get­ting your armor and weapons fixed, replen­ish­ing your sup­plies and pay­ing off any old debts, its now time to par­ty.

Well, at least that’s the intent, and that’s the theme of the game “Red Drag­on Inn” by Slugfest Games. In it, play­ers select one of the adven­tur­ers and attempt to drink the oth­er char­ac­ters under the table or man­age to ‘acquire’ their gold dur­ing their stay in the pub­lic room of the Red Drag­on Inn. Nat­u­ral­ly, the oth­er char­ac­ters are try­ing to do the same thing. The cliché char­ac­ter types include such char­ac­ters as Fiona the Volatile, Dier­dre the Priest­ess, Zot the Wiz­ard (with Pooky, his psy­chot­ic rab­bit famil­iar), Ger­ki the Sneak and Dim­li the Dwarf. But the one that caught my atten­tion was Eve the Illu­sion­ist and one of the cards that the play­er can use dur­ing play.

Eve defies descrip­tion, most­ly because no one knows exact­ly what she real­ly looks like with­out her illu­sions. Her pow­ers have saved her fel­low adven­tur­ers count­less times from extreme­ly gullible monsters.

The Good: Eve is a very skilled Illusionist.

The Bad: She’s been known to use her skills on her fel­low par­ty mem­bers when she gets bored.

Sounds like my kind of character.

And the par­tic­u­lar card? It is this:

Eve the Illu­sion­ist is one of the char­ac­ters in the first expan­sion set (which has been updat­ed, as the orig­i­nal char­ac­ter set was under­pow­ered) to the orig­i­nal game, which now also has a sec­ond expan­sion set. Its a fast and fun game that takes sev­er­al amus­ing lib­er­ties with the whole dun­geoneer­ing trope and for that rea­son alone I plan on get­ting copies of all three at some time.