Rob and murder your inn’s guests to make money… but don’t forget to hide the bodies
If there’s one thing that attracts me to a new game it’s a distinctive theme. Based on the true story of L’Auberge rouge (The Red Inn), where in 1831 the inn’s owners were guillotined for multiple murders, not to mention other dark deeds, The Bloody Inn is a great game that mixes dark humour with European gothic.
Definitely not the same old themes here then! Players are family members competing to make the most francs by hosting guests at the inn – though it’s far more profitable to just murder the guests and bury them somewhere in the yard. And you will have to bury them, because leaving bodies around is a sure way to get nabbed by any police that show up at the inn, though you can always bribe the local gravedigger to get rid of the evidence at the last minute.
There’s a lot going on here for a card game, but thankfully the cards fulfill multiple roles. You’ll discard cards to pay for accomplices, all of which have particular specialisations – bribing other characters, murdering guests, building annexes to bury the corpses under, and burying the corpses. But you’ll have to keep paying them to keep using them (though a couple of peasants will work for free, they’re discarded at the end of each round). To juggle this bunch of actions efficiently you’ll need to plan ahead, because you only get a stingy two actions per round. And this is where the real challenge kicks, in, because getting the cards to help you do those actions cheaply and actually doing the actions, is a tricky balancing act. On top of that, there are only so many francs you can accumulate before you’ll have to pass a turn and launder some of it into 10-franc cheques.
The Bloody Inn is one of those games where you always forget the rules each time you play it, so this rules summary should prove very handy for picking it up again quickly. But it’s always an entertaining game and its dark theme is played completely for laughs, like a 1970s comedy horror film. It’s all enhanced even further by the addition of The Carnies expansion which adds three modules to the game, including a bunch of disreputable folk from a travelling carnival.
