Inferno – Retail Edition

Hell is Other Players!

Inferno takes its inspiration from the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, exploring Dante’s descent through the nine circles of hell. Players play powerful families in Florence as they embark on a mission to cast sinners’ souls to their corresponding layer of hell, all while Dante makes his way to the deepest recess of the underworld.

Each player’s turn in Inferno begins with moving a soul by either paying a drachma to ferry it across the river Styx to hell’s first layer or by guiding a soul through the various layers to its designated color-coded destination. This first decision is the most important as whatever space the soul ends up on with dictate the action space available to you that turn. Each soul can only move one space, jumping over any others in the way, and if it ever makes its way to its matching colour, then must stop giving the player that moved it, an instant reward. The neatness of this design means that as the circles of hell fill up, the decision making gets tighter and tighter with fewer options as the game goes on. Money is also tight in this game and with this action being compulsory it means that managing your drachmas is vital! If you ever find yourself without a coin then you must take a loan which will cause points to be deducted at the end of the game depending on how many you have taken. This is such a great start to turn, simple but offers a really interesting tension.

Hell is Empty and all the Devils are Here!

So once you have moved your soul then you can access one of Florence’s main actions. The city is divided into four quarters, each housing two buildings. Players venture into the quarter that mirrors their soul’s final stop in hell and then can choose between the two buildings. One will always be free whereas the second will come with a cost. The nice thing about these options is that the locations are randomised during setup and offers a subtle but impactful difference for replayability. Your free actions include a ‘roll in the hay’ which will give you a young worker who can sneak into your pay-for locations for free, additional layers to your tower (which I will come back to), to rearrange your house and good old fashioned money. However the bigger actions include playing Fraud cards which have instant benefits as well as end game points and getting guests. Now guests play an important part later in the game and importantly you will need to have space in your tower to hold them along with any goods you have managed to steal from the market tile. This is where building your tower (I told you I would come back to it) and rearranging it become really important.

The other option if you have run out of workers, or chose to recall early for whatever reason, is to accuse a sinner!!

J’accuse!

Accusing a sinner comes in a number of parts. First of all you choose a location where you have a worker and return that specific worker to your tower. When a worker is in your tower it is locked and cannot be used to activate a location until you release using a specific action. You then retrieve all of your other workers and get to go move your token up on the sinner track. What is the sinner track I hear you scream…well this is where end game scoring comes into play. At the end of the game you will score for every circle of hell you have a token on. You will also move Dante deeper and deeper into hell itself which works as a timer to the game. There are also lots of other little powers and tricks sprinkled throughout including the river Styx as well as moving beasts such as Medusa around in order to get in thee way of other players. In fact I might argue that there are a few too many additional pieces to the already complex puzzle.

The Inferno artwork by David Benzal and Cristian Casado Otazu is moody and very evocative of the imagery of Dante but the board does look very busy and the graphic design feels a little messy and not very cohesive with the art style.

Overall, the great theme does a lot of the heavy lifting here. The world in which you inhabit is pretty unique, especially in the world of euro gaming and the mechanisms are interesting, it just feels like there are a little too many niggly things that slow down the gameplay rather than add to the experience. The beasts all feel very different to each other and the starting resources give a nice little change to set up from game to game. I definitely feel that after a few plays of Inferno, you will be fine but unlike other similarly complex titles, Inferno doesn’t quite click with the theme as much as is needed to learn the heavy rule set. It doesn’t help that the rulebook isn’t very good. That said, the player aids are great!

Would I recommend a trip into Hell? Yes, I would actually, but it may not be as comfortable as this sinner would have hoped!