Review of The Bloody Inn

Blurb from the publisher: 'France 1831: In a remote corner of Ardèche, the little village of Peyrebeille sees numerous travelers pass through... A family of greedy rural farmers is determined to make its fortune, and has devised a diabolical stratagem to achieve this goal: invest in an inn so they can rob travelling guests, getting rich without arousing the suspicions of the police! Whether or not their plan will work out, one thing is certain:

None of their guests will return.'

What you get: Your EUR 24,00 or equivalent will buy you The Bloody Inn, a one to four player engine-building card game that lasts around an hour, and which has started The Bloody Inn game line. The game is called L'Auberge Sanglante in its original French-speaking version, and is inspired by the actual story of the so-called Auberge Rouge, a real inn in real Ardèche, where a number of murders, disappearances and robberies where alleged to have taken place.

In addition to the 8-page English rulebook that can be found in the publisher's website free of charge, the game also contains the following: 78 Guest cards (70 Travelers, 8 Peasants), 4 Player Aid cards, one Inn game board, one First Player card, 30 10F (ten franc) tokens, 32 Key/Room Service tokens in the four player colours (8 red, 8 green, 8 blue, 8 yellow), 4 white Key tokens, and 4 wooden disks in the four player colours.

Gameplay: Just because all the players are murderous innkeepers doesn't mean that they are on the same team. On the contrary; the objective is to have the most money a round after the Entrance Stack becomes empty for a second time.

Guests are still alive when they first enter the inn. Each has a number of characteristics. There are six types of them: merchants, artisans, the police, religious, nobles and peasants. Each has an affinity for a particular action, a rank from 0 to 3, some money on his person, as well as an annex that it allows the innkeeper to build.

There are eight rooms at the inn. Each room accommodates one Key and one Room Service. The Key states the ownership of the room. The Entrance Stack is just outside the Inn, and contains all the guests to come. Depending on the number of players and whether you wish for a short or a long game, a number of cards will be removed from the deck. Each room is designated as belonging to a player (or not).

Each player starts with two peasants in hand, as well as 10 francs.

There are two seasons in the game with a variable number of rounds. During the first season, travelers will not only arrive at the inn, but some will be also fortunate to leave, forming the Entrance Stack for the second season. There are three phases in each round.

The Evening is the first phase travelers are welcome in the inn. The starting player chooses which unoccupied room each Travelers enters. During the Night (the second phase) players get to act. Each player has two actions, executed one at a time. All the players will finish their first action before the starting player plays his second. There are five different actions. The first four require a Guest card to be chosen, irrespective of whether it is on a player's hand, the play area, or the inn. Secondly, a number of cards equal to the chosen Guest rank is played. Then, any cards with an affinity towards the action that is performed are taken back in hand. It is only then that the action takes place.

Bribing a guest means turning him from guest to an accomplice of your gruesome deeds. This guest leaves the inn and comes to your hand. Building an Annex allows you to benefit from an accomplices effect, as well as have a place to bury the corpses that will start emerging later on. Killing a Guest is the honourable thing to do; only a low-life would rob a living victim. Finally, Burying a Corpse means disposing it into an annex of your choice, irrespective of whom it belongs to. Only after the burial will the killer and the owner of the annex share the money that the now deceased Guest had in his pockets. The fifth action is Money Laundering. This allows a player either to move money from the board to 10 franc checks or vice versa.

The third phase, or the Morning, starts with a police investigation, if there is a policeman alive at the inn by this time. You'd better not have unburied corpses; it will cost you dearly. Each player with a still occupied room will earn one franc. All living Guests clear the inn, and the player pays one franc for each of his accomplices, i.e. for each of the cards in his hand.

The next round then starts, with a new player as the starting player.

When the game ends, each player tallies the money on his wealth track (40 francs maximum per player), his checks, as well as the rank-3 annexes that he built and which gain money at the end of the game.

The rulebook offers three variants. Unlimited Wealth eliminates the Money Laundering action. All the money remains in the track, and the ten franc checks are just additional wealth indicators. First Come, First Served is a beginner variant which randomizes where each guest goes. Namely, they now go in rooms according to their order of arrival: the first guest goes to room one, the second to room two etc. The third variant allows the game to be played solo. The game will be lost if a Police Investigation or the end of the game find the player with an unburied corpse. The objective is to gain the most money possible. Below 110 francs you are practically a nobody. Gain more than 170 francs however, and you have truly become a demonic innkeeper.

The strong points: What a delightfully dark-themed game! The real crimes in real-life Ardèche might or might not have happened (the history behind the trials reeks of politics and a brand of justice based on rumours), here however you have to kill in order to fill your coffers. The art is glorious and extremely appropriate, disturbing in a surreal, as opposed to a gory, manner.

The gameplay is that of a typical limited action euro game. You can always do less than you want. If I didn't know and somebody told me that this is a Reiner Knizia game, I would have believed it. What one is trying to do is build his engine while taking actions through multi-purpose cards. What soon becomes apparent however is that building an engine takes second place to actively participating in the gruesome acts that opportunistically earn you money. Money is what one is after, yet actions cost cards, not money. Keeping cards in your hand is what costs actual money, at the end of each turn. Thus, the need for optimization of every single move is relentless, while not building an overly expensive machine. In a clever choice, the designer separated a player's two actions from one another, with the actions of everybody else intervening in-between. This allows the game to breathe, and to create a framework for valid tactics; the first one or two players in each round would have had an enormous advantage otherwise. There are different variations on the course to victory, which involve creating annexes for others to have grounds to bury their victims, using nobles which give end-game money bonuses etc.

I always like it when games bother to introduce a solo version. The solo version here is not that hard to complete successfully; you are really not paying attention if there are policemen at the inn while your bodies are lying around. Scoring very high scores on the other hand is not obvious and takes some practice. I like that.

I appreciated the variants. The most obvious to use is Unlimited Wealth. It takes out a rather passive action and sort of simplifies the management of one of the game's assets. Depending on your style of gaming, you will either try it at the beginning and dump it later, or keep it permanently to concentrate on murdering innocents.

When it comes to learning and teaching The Bloody Inn, both are extremely smooth affairs. Expect no more than 15 minutes for the former and less than 10 for the latter. The player aids are useful too. Fun fact: each player aid is a rank-1 annex at the beginning of the game, meaning that you already have space for one corpse. I don't know who thought of it, but it is as dark as it is funny.

The Bloody Inn includes a generous amount of resealable bags to use for the tokens and cards. In fact, they are more than what the game needs. That's classy.

The game is supported. A small expansion, The Carnies, is already out.

The weak points: This is a game with purposefully bizarre art about killing innocent guests at an inn, or turning them into accomplices of hideous crimes. Some might find the theme risqué, or not approve it for family-based sessions. Don't say I didn't warn you.

On the other hand, and like most Knizia or Knizia-like designs, the game is abstract. Yes, the art can make you shiver. The process of playing however is as mechanical as one gets. There will be no screaming; all the tension arises from the need to manage your hand perfectly.

I don't need to warn you about the game's basic character: the limitation of actions through a strict regime of I-go-you-go. I feel the game actually executes this acceptably, even though at times options are truly limited. If you are negatively predisposed towards restrictive mechanics, you might want to avoid this.

Interaction is limited. One can use his opponents' graves, or maybe kill or bribe a guest that another player wanted to interact with immediately afterwards, that's however pretty much it. I'd compare the interaction levels to those of Agricola. If you feel that that great game feels often like a solo (and I do, no matter how much I like it), you are very likely to feel the same here.

There is a certain linearity and potential imbalance in the mechanics of the game. Putting the engine-building on the background instead of on the foreground perplexed me, namely because it made it less engaging than I feel it could have been. If you are coming from card-drafting games like Tyrants Of The Underdark expecting for such an experience, you are likely to be disappointed.

The game appears to fare better either solo or with four players. I will not suggest that it doesn't work with two or three, the experience however felt more subdued than I wanted it to be.

Conclusion: The Bloody Inn is a solid game that punches above its weight due to the fantastic theme and unsurpassable artwork. If you crave killing innocent people, I strongly recommend you play this instead of trying out the real thing.

For more info on The Bloody Inn, visit Pearl Games at https://pearlgames.be.

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