Adventures in the land of the Red Dragon Inn

Tales from the Red Dragon Inn is a 1-4 players cooperative dungeon crawler set in the Red Dragon Inn universe. You will battle heaps of monsters through a narrative-driven campaign in which each scenario is played on a specific map. The game will be live on Kickstarter on September 30 and the preview page is already up.

Image source: BGG

The scenarios come in a dedicated book and are played on various map boards (there are 20 map boards in total). Each scenario has its own victory and loss conditions. You start by picking two heroes out of the six available. Note, however, that all heroes advance at the end of each scenario, so you can freely switch heroes between scenarios without losing your progression. You will also gain new abilities that may be used once per scenario to help you at the most critical moment.

Each game round is divided into three phases: Ready, Combat, and Objective phase. In the Ready phase, you remove cooldown tokens from the abilities that require it, and roll dice to see the behavior of the enemies in that round. You also prepare the initiative bag by putting in tokens corresponding to each hero and each type of enemy (all enemies of a given type activate at the same time). In solo, you also put an extra bonus initiative token for each of your heroes, granting them an extra, shorter turn.

In the Combat phase, you draw initiative tokens one at a time. If the token is one of your heroes, you activate that hero by taking, at most, two actions and one Shenanigan (minor abilities to heal or move). Actions are described on your hero mat, your equipment cards, and your hero cards. Actions include movement, leap (to move through allies or enemies), melee, range and area attacks, etc. When attacking, you roll dice (as indicated on the specific action you are taking). Dice faces show hits, critical hits (exploding dice, adds one hit and allows you to reroll the die), and inspire symbols, adding dice to the Epic pool. Heroes can use dice from the Epic pool to strengthen their attacks. Some attacks don’t require a dice roll but deal a fixed amount of hits. If the hits you inflict on a foe equal their fortitude (HP), they are defeated. If enemy tokens are drawn from the initiative bag, all matching enemies will activate in turn, following the behavior specified on their enemy card according to the result of the purple die you rolled in the previous phase.

Image source: BGG

Lastly, in the Objective phase, you check whether you have fulfilled the victory conditions for the scenario; if not, another round begins. If you win the scenario, you get rewards to improve your team! Each hero unlocks Hero cards (with new actions to choose from), new items (or upgrades of existing items), and progress along the Power Tree. The Power Tree allows you to get Power tokens before each scenario which you may use to get a temporary bonus (a shield, a counter-attack opportunity, etc.). Each scenario specifies the number of spots of the Power Tree you can claim, with each claimed spot granting you the corresponding tokens.

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