Publisher: Pearl Games
Designer: Nicolas robert
Year: 2015
The Bloody Inn is
a 1-4 player serial murder simulator... which I’ll be honest isn’t the most relatable
theming, you play as an innkeeper who conspires to murder their guests, rob
them of everything they own and then unceremoniously dump their bodies under
the floorboards. You have to carefully choose who to bribe, who to hire to
build buildings (to dump more bodies under) and who to kill in order to make
money and avoid arrest.
Each day an inn gets filled up with guests, some of these
guest go in player-owned rooms, and should they remain in them, and also remain
alive, then you’ll get a little money for that. However if you want to be the
richest innkeeper in town you’ll need to find an alternate source of income.
Each turn players get to take 2 actions, one at a time in player order. Most actions
are done by discarding cards in your hand, but as you hire certain people you’ll
find that using them for related actions doesn’t discard them. A police man
under your pay is very good at getting away at murder and so you don’t discard
him, you just reveal him.
You can bribe guest to work for you (add them to your hand)
build annexes to bury people under (annexes also give you ongoing bonuses) kill
guest, bury corpses or launder your money. What a cheerful selection of
actions! But with only 2 a day you have to be careful, if any police are
staying in the inn (and haven’t been bribed or killed) they end up doing an
investigation, and police officers do tend to notice unburied corpses just
laying around... You can avoid arrest by paying the village gravedigger, but
then you don’t have the time to rob the deceased, so it’s a double financial
blow!
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| A game set up ready to start, each player has a couple of peasants to help them, the peasants never leave then inn and you can hire them back for free, so they'll be very useful in the early game. |
The bloody Inn has
a lot of strategic depth and encourages hard choices in the face of adversary,
you have 1 action, a corpse and a police man in your room, do you bury the corpse,
despite not being able to carry all the money (there is a limit, you have to
launder money to get past 40 francs), do you bribe the police man but then have
to pay him, or do you kill him off and hope that more police don’t come
tomorrow? The feeling of progression over the course of the game is also really
nice, annexes often have powers that allow you to spend less cards to do an
action, which in turn equates to more actions over time, some of the powerful
ones even allow you to perform the same action multiple times, so you could end
up slaughtering a whole inn as one action! Admittedly that would require a lot
of planning and probably be a terrible (in more than one way) thing to do!
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| A selection of game cards, even the player aid card is useful, it's an annex you can bury someone under. The cards are numbered according to how many cards you need to interact with them, turns out it's harder to kill important people without being spotted! |
I do begrudge the theme a little, it can be hard to
encourage people to play a game about being a serial killer. But behind that
there is a very solid game, there are some balance questions, some of the
characters feel particularly weak, like the ones that get you a new room (woo a
massive 1 franc a night, except that usually people kill/hire the people in
your rooms anyway). But you can’t say that the game isn’t unique, the risk
reward gameplay really shines, and unusually for risk/reward situations doesn’t
feel too overburdened by luck. The gothic art is also a lovely touch, though
frankly you could hardly make this game with cutesy cards! Unfortunately the
game is just too hard to get to the table, especially as you really need a
first game to get the feel of how the game works, bad actions are penalised so
heavily that it can be near impossible to do well on your first game!
7/10
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