This is another great game from Slugfest, you play one of 4 characters each of which has their own themed hand of cards.
Dimli the Dwarf
Eve the Illusionist
Fleck the Bard
Gog the Half-Ogre
The rules are very easy to pick up as they consist of only two pages
Each players turn consists of several phases
Discard and Draw Discard any unwanted cards and draw back up to a hand of 7 cards.
Play Action Card The player gets a chance to play one action card if they want to.
Buy Drinks You pick up the top card from the drinks deck and place it on the Drink Me! pile of another player.
Drink You have to drink the top drink from your Drink Me! pile.
There other cards in the players decks:
Anytime which can be played as it suggests anytime.
Sometimes which can only be played when the conditions on the card have been met.
Both of these cards allow you to do a variety of actions that either help you or effect other players
When you take a drink you follow the effects on the card, which usually increase your alcohol track or sometimes reduce your fortitude track or both. There are Sometimes and Anytime cards that can help you. If you do not have a drink on your Drink Me! pile you get to reduce your alcohol track by 1.
Another aspect of the game is gambling, during the action phase you can play the "Gambling I'm In" card to start a round. At the start every player has to pay 1 gold ante, Unless they can play a card that lets them avoid playing. Each player in turn then gets to play a gambling card:
"Gambling I'm In" Which can be played during gambling as well and beats all gambling and cheating cards except "Winning Hand"
"I raise!" Which takes control of the gambling round and also requires all players (including the player who played the card) to ante up another gold.
"Winning Hand" which can only be beaten by another winning hand
There are also various cheat cards which allow you to use inn money to pay for Ante, or allow you to leave the round of gambling etc.
The gambling round continues round till either everyone has passed or left leaving the current controlling player to nab the loot.
As you play if you run out of Gold or if you Fortitude and Alcohol tracks are equal or cross then you are out of the game. If the latter case occurs your gold is split equally amongst the remaining players and any remainder goes to the inn. You win by being the last person standing
This is a 2-4 player game, I have not played it as a 2 player game but I can see that it would suffer somewhat with only having two players and the interaction would be less. I would recommend playing with at least 3 as this makes it much more cut-throat
This set can be combined with the original to make a game capable of handling 8 players. The drink decks have different coloured borders to make it easy to separate back out when finished. The combo game is very good and just adds a little more mayhem to the mix.
A nice game that I enjoyed and perfect as a short game (first game lasted about and hour).
So all in all a great game that is well worth playing a great addition to anyone's game library.
