Inferno

I saved the most “hellish” fresh euro in the group for last: Inferno. Its theme is honest and pleasantly strange for a euro — we manage the souls of sinners and try to send them to the appropriate place of torment to collect points before Dante completes his journey through the ten levels of Hell. And while the premise is wonderfully odd, underneath it sits a very hard, tight euro backbone, the kind that reminded me of Feld and Wallace at their best.

At its core, the game has you organise the management and transfer of sinners, with every move mattering because points do not come for free. It is not one of those recent, overflowing games that drown you in options and goodies; here you have to count even your last obol, or Charon will milk your VPs without a second thought.

The interaction is noticeable, especially in scoring and around the middle-to-late stages, when the available spaces for transferring sinners start to close up. That is where the game gets properly combative, forcing you to watch not only your own plan but also who is about to block your route. There is also asymmetry through the Guardians of Hell: two of the six available guardians are used in each game, and they are not all equally to my taste.

My main complaint is the scaling: with three players, the game is noticeably worse than with four. The guardians can also greatly alter how a session feels — Minos nearly put us off, while the Medusa/Minotaur combination produced a respectable sort of complexity. Even so, Inferno remains an interesting and fairly original game, worth trying if you can handle a little infernal pressure. I am hoping for a hot July, in gaming terms; it is still too early to wish you happy swims.