Inferno

Inferno has an admirably direct premise: you administer the souls of sinners and send them to their appointed torment while Dante travels through ten levels of Hell. Beneath that pleasantly odd surface sits a tight Euro structure, carrying traces of Feld and Wallace when both are operating at full strength.

The central task is moving sinners into the right places for points before Dante completes his journey. As the game enters its middle and final phases, the transfer spaces begin to close and scoring becomes considerably less polite. The interesting decision is when to secure a space for your own soul, and when to let an opponent discover that the safe route has disappeared.

The economy asks you to count every last obol, because Charon is not in the business of donating VP. The mechanisms combine with real originality, without the sprawling abundance found in games such as daitoshi and planta nubo; constraint here is the point, rather than merely a penalty.

There are two clear qualifications. At three, the game is noticeably poorer than it is at four, and the Guardians of Hell—two selected from six for each game—do not all produce the same sort of experience. Minos nearly put us off it, whereas Medusa and Minotaur together made for a much sounder knot to untangle.

With four players and a set of Guardians that does not sabotage the table, Inferno is a respectable, unusually tight Euro.