8th Oct 2026 - Inferno
by R. Sun 11 Oct (Updated at Sun 11 Oct)I had both a literary and a gaming lesson this Thursday, having had a woefully poor knowledge of either the book or the game of Inferno. But the game was a lot of fun, and the book sounds like basically the whole inspiration for our modern Halloweeny notion of Hell. Sounds like heavy-duty reading, but based on the background I got from the game, I'm tempted to give the book a go.
The Inferno book in question is of course Dante's latest novel, part of the Divine Comedy trilogy. There are apparently 9 different floors of Hell, with the worst sinners going to the bottom, and the fair-weather sinners staying near the surface. If you're worried: the 9th-floor worst type of sin is treason, while genocide only gets you down to the 7th floor. And, in a schismatic time, the contemporary pope was apparently on the 8th floor.
So yes, the game was pure Hell, but in a good way. I had originally dismissed it as all spooks and zombies, so was very pleasantly surprised to find a fairly typical Eurogame, on a nice half-literary, half-religious theme. And unlike some of Eurogames' leading lights (Mr Feld, if you're listening?), this one was richly entwined with its theme. I learned a lot about Hell while playing this game, and enjoyed every non-eternal minute of it.
It's basically a worker placement game, with the normal choices of either "place a worker and do the action" or "recall workers and do some special action instead". The normal rule for these games is that "get more workers" is a good strategy, but when I saw Matthew and Claire going all-in on that early on, I rashly chose the more universal good Eurogame strategy of "do something different to everyone else" instead. I thought the "recall workers" special action was better than it actually was. Turns out (in this case at least) that more workers is good after all. Though I can see how the initial seeding might vary that.
So your turn consists of pushing a dead person ("soul") lower down the floors of Hell, and then doing a worker placement action upstairs in the city of Florence. The place you move the soul to determines what action you can do upstairs. After that, it's the usual Euro thing of one action triggers another and you can string together good sequences if you make the opportunity. Took me a while to work out how to be well-prepared for taking those action-string opportunities in this one, but it gradually started to fall into place. By the time I had got my head round it, Matthew was long-gone in the lead and trounced us all - but I'd hopefully give him a better run for his money next time.
It feels like I'm saying this is a fairly standard Eurogame. And mechanically, I think it really is - a lot of familiar mechanics. But it was very enjoyable, even when I wasn't doing very well, and I have to attribute that to the theme. Because, especially when I'm not doing well, it's a great consolation to think that my otherwise futile pursuit is actually shoving someone down from the genocide level to the popes level, or getting someone burned at the stake, or whatever. A natural vent for the frustration of losing the game. Hopefully it's still satisfying if you're winning.
And there you go: take a standard Feldy Euro, set it in Hell, and you're cooking on gas, and everything else. Great fun. Expansion due soon apparently. I'll be heading down there.