The Red Dragon Inn 8 - Pub Crawl!

All about Father Farai!
about 3 years ago – Tue, Mar 02, 2021 at 07:57:38 PM

Happy Farai-day! (OK, it's actually Monday, and that joke isn't very funny, but we're running with it!)

Father Farai runs the Harmonious Cup, which is attached to the Great Temple of Greyport. As a result of his brewing and bookkeeping acumen, he has risen in the ranks to become a member of the temple's illustrious holy council!

If you'd like to learn more about Farai's backstory, check out this brand-new story by Geoff Bottone!

And speaking of new content, we played with Father Farai on our Twitch stream on Thursday. If you missed the stream, the video is now on our YouTube channel!

Thematically, Farai is all about the brewing. Mechanically, he's about making tricky and interesting choices about which cards to play and which ones to hold back. (In fact, in that regard he has some play similarities to his boss, Ohava!)

Let's start with the basics. In addition to Farai's main deck, he has three other decks of four cards each. These are his Brews that he works on over the course of the game. He's always brewing on one beer, one wine and one spirit, represented by the revealed top card of each of those three side decks. However, he can only actively work on one of those brews at a time, so he has to make choices!

Many of the cards in Farai's deck have a symbol in the bottom left.

After such a card resolves, you do the following:

• If the symbol matches the brew deck that your token is at, add a progress counter to that brew.
• If the symbol doesn't match the brew deck your token is at, move your token to that brew deck (but do not add a progress counter).
• If the symbol is the green paddle "wild" symbol, you may either add a progress counter to your current brew or move to a different brew (without adding a progress counter).

Each Brew Card includes its icon and a number in the upper right:

When a Brew has a number of progress counters on it equal to the number in the upper right, that Brew is finished - play it immediately! It may be responded to as though it were an Action Card that you played from your hand. After playing the card, remove the progress counters from it, put it in the Brew discard pile, and reveal the next card in that Brew Deck. If there are no more cards in that Brew Deck, you may move your Farai token to a different Brew Deck. If you somehow managed to play all 12 Brews, congratulations, you're done brewing for the game (note: we've never seen this happen, but it's theoretically possible).

This mechanic makes for some interesting card play, because what are normally fairly "obvious" plays become not nearly so obvious! Should you start a Round of Gambling even though the cards may force you to inefficiently bounce around your Brews? Should you play a stronger Action Card or a weaker one that advances your current Brew? Questions and trade-offs like these are the fun and interesting part of playing as Farai.

Intrigued? Remember that RDI 8 is available to play right now on Tabletop Simulator. Check it out!

(And, of course, our usual disclaimer applies that things like art, card effects, etc are subject to change and may be different in the final version of the game.)

Thanks for reading! We'll talk to you again soon.

The Harmonious Cup - Drink Reveals Part 1
about 3 years ago – Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 10:31:23 PM

The Harmonious Cup is the fancy brewery and tasting room run by Father Farai. It's a part of The Great Temple of Greyport and provides both the sacramental wine and a useful funding source for the temple's other good works. Like all of the new taverns, it has six cards, and today we're revealing three of them!

If you'd like to see higher-res versions, click here or on the above image to go to the RDI 8 reveals page on our website. As we reveal more cards, they'll also appear there!

See you tomorrow!

Stretch Goals and Trying New Things
about 3 years ago – Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 12:19:22 AM

Hi, folks. We have a relatively short update for you today. You've probably noticed by now that this project includes stretch goals, and if you're a long-time SlugFan you know that this is a bit unusual for us. Why are we suddenly doing stretch goals? Does this mean that our policy  has changed and we're doing stretch goals forever now? Not necessarily. Does it mean that we're trying a one-time thing here and will soon go back into our "no stretch goals" cave? Again, not necessarily.

As you can see by checking our Kickstarter history, we made less revenue from Kickstarter in 2020 than we did in 2019. Some of that is just because 2020 was an... odd year. But that may not be the only explanation. And since Kickstarter doesn't represent a massive percentage of our revenue (as it does for some game companies), we have the luxury of being able to experiment more. So we're actually in the midst of a broader, multi-campaign experiment to try and find out how to get our existing customers excited about new products and also to figure out ways to find new customers.

Basically, we're trying to innovate. In addition to coming up with a new pub crawling mechanic to liven up a game of RDI, we're also trying to come up with new ways to get our products in front of people and new ways to try to get those people to get stoked about what we have to offer. Adding stretch goals to this project was an important aspect of this.

We decided fairly early on that if we were going to do stretch goals for this campaign, we wanted to do them right. We wanted some early successes with a big capstone at the end. Promo cards were great for the early goals, and we decided that something big, exciting and unprecedented like a fifth character would be the right choice for the capstone. It seemed like a good fit, and an experiment well worth trying.

As  Wizgille would be the first to point out, if you're not innovating, you're stagnating. And that goes for marketing and operations, not just for game design. Time will tell not only whether we hit the last stretch goal, but also whether we did a good job of choosing those stretch goals in the first place.

Thanks for reading. We'll talk to you again tomorrow.

130k Unlocked and Collector's Edition Reveals!
about 3 years ago – Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 09:03:49 PM

Hi again, backers! We were super stoked to hit the "Coins of the World" stretch goal this morning! So all four of the KS editions will include these awesome new coins in addition to the normal RDI coins. (And yes, we are still working with Campaign Coins on possible metal versions. In particular, we are looking for a way to make those two-tone elf coins that isn't cost-prohibitive. We'll keep you posted.)

As you've probably seen on the campaign page, there is still a bit of content that we've kept hidden for later reveals. The first of those reveals happens now! These two new drinks will be in the Collector's Edition:

Remember that cool drink that Eve-il is holding in her doppelganger card in Evil Pooky? We decided to make it into a drink. The image above includes art just chopped out of that existing card, but as you can see by the "art in progress" label, we plan to make it prettier.

If you saw our announcement about winners of last year's design contest, you'll know that Helmet Pong was one of the honorable mentions! We thought that this little "subgame" card was very clever and fun. We decided that we didn't want to put any dexterity elements into the core game, due to factors like limited table space and inclusion of differently-abled folks, but we thought that this card would make an amazing promo card. So here it is! If you have the right table and the right playgroup for this card, then let those gold pieces fly!

Thanks again for your amazing support, and we'll be back with another update tomorrow!

Join us on YouTube and Twitch!
about 3 years ago – Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 12:58:43 PM

Hi again, backers! Some of you already know this, but SlugFest Games streams on Thursdays, and - hey look at that - it's Thursday!

Join us at 4 PM Pacific time on our Twitch channel to see us playing some RDI and answering viewer questions. Today we'll be previewing Father Farai! (And to save you some math, 4 PM Pacific is midnight in London, 11 AM in Melbourne, 7 PM in New York and 2 PM in Honolulu.)

And if you want to see more Slugfestification, head to our YouTube channel! It's where our Twitch streams end up after we stream them, and there's lots of other great content, too, like intros to new products and "how to play" videos.

Head to our channels, and like/subscribe/follow/etc! We'll see you later today on Twitch!