Shelter from the Storm (The Bloody Inn)
It’s a dark albeit not particularly stormy night. In fact, it’s unremarkable in every way. You stop at a cozy inn, tucked back off the roadway in a fine secluded area of rural France. A young peasant boy ushers you into your room, and weary from travel, you kick off your shoes and tuck in, soon find yourself lulled into a deep, restful sleep by the chirping of crickets outside.
Well, that’s the end of your story, because in The Bloody Inn your character is summarily murdered by two peasants and then stuffed under the barn by the Abbot, all for the money in your pockets. And by the end of round two, at that. Thanks for stopping by! Don’t forget to fill out a comment card on your way…
The Bloody Inn (2015)
Designed by Nicolas Robert
Art by Luis Francisco & Weberson Santiago
Published by Pearl Games
The Bloody Inn is a beautifully macabre card game about bringing guests into an inn in order to either kill them or bribe them to kill for you, all built around a single deck of multi-use cards. In addition to functioning as guests (or accomplices), cards also function as rooms/buildings you can add to your portion of the inn, as well as the in-game currency used to purchase other cards.
Lowdown (How to Play–in a Nutshell)
Gameplay is fairly simple. Phase one of every round involves welcoming travelers into the inn. Cards are drawn from the top of the single deck (variable depending on the player count) and laid out in your chosen order in the inn. Phase two of the game involves all players taking one action, and then all players taking a second action. Phase three involves a potential police investigation as the authorities look for dead people you’ve failed to stash, the surviving guests departing with their lives, and wages being paid to whatever accomplices you still have in hand.
The actions of Bloody Inn make up the meat of the game, and only being able to take two actions is simultaneously the most interesting and most frustrating part of Bloody Inn. On your turn, you have five possible actions. You can bribe a guest, or add a guest card to your hand from the inn; build an annex, or take a card from your hand and play it in front of you as a building/room; kill a guest, or take a guest from a room and place it in front of you coffin-side up; and finally bury a corpse, or put a corpse card from in front of you beneath one of your annex cards. The fifth and final action is the ever present euro action pass, which would be a huge waste if it didn’t allow you to essentially condense money from the limited money track and turn it into checks (money tokens). You don’t only murder in this game, but you launder money, too!
You’ve only got two actions, but you’ve got a lot to get done, and this game only lasts two trips through the draw deck. When the deck is exhausted for the second time, the game is over, and whoever has the most money wins.
Tea for Two (Scaling for Two Players)
The Bloody Inn’s method of scaling is very straightforward, and very much in-line with comparably sized card games. The deck size will vary based on player count. Two player games can have either 25 fewer cards for a “long game,” or 35 fewer cards for a “short game.” Honestly, I think that we usually remove 30 and the games feels just right. The number of guests revealed each round is also fewer. All in all, the experience doesn’t feel in anyway abbreviated or incomplete.
Dead Flowers (The Bad Stuff)
No game is perfect, and the Bloody Inn has a few drawbacks, minor though they may be. Typical flaws inherent in a smallbox card game are present here, like limited variability or the tendency to run the same strategy upon repeat plays, but I’m not going to talk about those. I’m really just going to talk about one thing: imbalance.
I alluded to end game bonuses earlier, and these bonuses are part of annexes you may build, like the Grocer, for example. The Grocer reads “At the end of the game, gain 4F per blue card in the Exit Stack,” meaning that if you build this card as an annex during the game, you will gain 4 points per blue card in the discard pile at the end of the game. There are only 5 cards like this in the whole deck, and they are all expensive to buy and build. The fact that all cards get wiped at the end of each round means that if one of these cards come out, you really need to buy it immediately, but because you’ll only have two actions per round, sometimes it’s just not possible. If your opponent[s] are able to buy one and build it, it’s basically curtains for you, pal. Kill as many people as you want, but you’re probably going to lose.
Yeahhh, this is a problem. These cards are very overpowered, and the limited number means you’re going to have very few opportunities to grab one. The fact that they also score based on the discard pile means that you have very limited control over how much they’ll actually score you. Maybe you were each lucky enough to get one, but unfortunately Player Two just had more cards of their color in the discard at the game’s end, so you lose anyway.
The argument can be made to take these out, there are only 5 after all, but I’m not a huge fan of having to house rule or rebalance a game. I’m not above doing it, of course, but I think it’s a problem here that warrants being pointed out.
Killing is My Business, and Business is Good (The Good Stuff)
Bloody Inn is a simple game, and it is really elevated by a number of clever twists on fairly standard card game tropes. All actions are paid for with cards from your hand, a nice and simple handbuilding mechanic. And while this method of paying is nice, it’s pretty tried and true (see Race of the Galaxy (2007), among many games). The nice twist in this case is that while each individual card can act as currency throughout the game to do any action, each card has its own specialty. For example, if you bribe a cop to help you (ie add it to your hand), cops are particularly good at killing people, whereas a craftsman like a gardener or mechanic are good at building annexes. Yeah, excellent, but what does this actually mean? Well, instead of discarding these cards to use as currency, you simply show them and they return to your hand if they are being used to perform their specialty. Again, this is another simple and clever twists that really lends itself to efficient planning. So if you’re planning on killing someone this turn, it would be quite nice to have a cop in hand to do the dirty work for you.
All right, but what do limited actions mean if there is no threat? What a game like this needs is some teeth, right? That is handily provided by the threat of a police investigation hanging over the game. If a police officer is present in the inn at the end of any round, all unburied corpses will cost each player 10 francs, or in this case: points. This addition means that all players have the same threat hanging over them each round, because you don’t have enough actions to bribe, kill, and bury on your turn (two actions only!). This means sometimes you need to talk to the other players to see if anyone is willing to knock that cop off for the good of the entire dirty lot of ya’ll. It’s not semi-coop, not by a long shot, but there are definitely shared interests in this game. Can’t have a cop busting everyone and stealing our points, now can we?
Ultimately, efficient planning is really the heart and soul of Bloody Inn. Actions are expensive, because the real big money cards, like say the Duke at 26 points, will cost you three cards to kill or bribe, and rare is it that you have a full hand of cards in Bloody Inn. Do you bribe to fill your hand so you can kill a priest to get all his cash money points? If so, he’ll take three more cards to bury, which means that he’s not getting buried this turn. But if you kill him and don’t get him buried, what about that cop that may still be in the inn? If no one else kills that cop, he’s going to investigate in the morning, find your corpse, and you are going to lose the priest’s corpse and 10 points on top of that. I love dilemmas in a game, and Bloody Inn is crammed full of them. Do I maximize points and run high risks? or do I simply kill and bury junk cards like a newsboy or cultivator for a piddly 8 points each?
I didn’t even talk about the fact that you’re jockeying to kill off the same high point cards as the other players. Once a card enters the inn, it’s a free-for-all to see who makes a move on the card first. You want to knock off the Brigadier Chief? Unfortunately, Player Two used the Grocer–specialy: bribery–to hire the Brigadier Chief out from under you and use him to kill the Priest, instead.
There are some other nice mechanics in here, like simply making money by not killing a guest in your own room, or the end game bonuses (more on this later), but I don’t want to spoil all of the Bloody Inn’s sinister surprises.
I’d be remiss, however, if I did not talk about the theme and artwork. The theme is dark, and I love it. I’ve not played any euro as overtly violent as this one. And the artwork and graphic design is fantastic. The fact that this game is available for less than $30 makes it a lock.
The End (Final Thoughts)
The Bloody Inn is a very strong smallbox card game that presents players with plenty of tough decisions. So much to do, so little time. There’s nice player interaction, it scales well for two, it has lots of different strategies, and the theme is excellent. Be aware there are some swingy scoring cards, but it’s hard to turn away from the remarkable and unique artwork. I know there’s an even smaller box expansion available, The Carnies, that should add some more variety (and perhaps fix that little scoring problem), but I’ve not played it. I put a pin in it for later, and I’ll probably pick it up at some point if it goes on sale.
All in all, it’s well worth getting your hands dirty for this little gem.
The Bloody Inn
by Nicolas Robert
Delightful cardplay underscores a pitch-black theme that may rub some the wrong way (not me though!). Love the art and theme, however grisly it may be, but I don’t love the swingyness of the endgame scoring cards, which has hampered my desire to return to The Bloody Inn.
That being said, this is an excellent game for the right sort, especially if you have patience to find a balance with those endgame scoring abilities.
Player One
Eric
