The Bloody Inn Review – Dodging Cops and Burying Bodies

The Bloody Inn is the most macabre board game I’ve ever played! It’s an engine (murder machine) building board game, where you recreate the hotel from Les Miserables. Although, here it’s you can be even more despicable, as murdering your guests is often a good strategy. As long as you don’t get caught.

Starting each round, new guests arrive at the inn, where they lodge themselves in different rooms. Some you own and others are owned by other players. Then, everyone takes turns performing two actions:

• Bribing guests to become your accomplice, adding their card to your hand
• Building your accomplice an annex to stay in the hotel, and accessing their ability
• Murdering a guest staying in the hotel
• Or burying a body underneath an annex

To use these actions, you must discard several guest cards from your hand, equal to the card’s rank. For example, bribing a rank 3 traveller requires you to discard 3 cards from your hand.

Further to this, each guest has a speciality that aligns with the actions. Some guests are expert marksmen, so they’re proficient at shooting people, others are better at burying people, and so forth. When you use a guest for the skill they’re proficient at, they stay in your hand at the end of your turn. Otherwise, they leave your hand, and the hotel never to return.

Once everyone’s taken their actions, if there’s a cop in the hotel, they uncover any unburied bodies. Forcing players to take heavy financial penalties. Then the remaining guests leave paying the players some money. Meanwhile, you must pay one franc per accomplice left in your hand.

After you go through the guest deck twice, it’s game over and the richest scoundrel wins!

Simple mechanics, killer decisions

The Bloody Inn, like Jump Drive, has one of my favourite mechanics in all of board gaming.

Paying for cards, with other cards. It’s a mechanic that is so effective at creating fun but tough decisions as whenever you want something, you must give something up of equal value. That’s just simple alchemy.

Yet while you’re playing, you’re constantly weighing the scales of getting something right now versus the opportunity of using those cards later.

Outside of the tantalising card powers which only activate when annexed, The Bloody Inn plays with this mechanic in two unique ways.

The first of which is paying your accomplices a salary at the end of the round. This puts pressure on you to ensure a card is worth keeping. Because spending round after round on cards you’re not using can devastate your final score. Additionally, it forces you to think about what you’re going to be doing next turn, and if you’re going to have the money for it.

Secondly, is the guest speciality. Whereby, when you play a guest card suited to the task at hand, they return to you like a murderous, conniving boomerang. To have a strong hand, you need to play cards that will come back, but then if they come back they’ll cost you money. So figuring out what to play is a multi-layered decision-making process that is fantastic to mull over.

Now, since you’re more likely to win if you take notes from Norman Bates. As murdering people is a great way to earn money, you’ll need to create a recurring way to kill and bury people. Creating a factory line of homicide, and getting it going takes a lot of time and foresight. This leads to perhaps the only weakness within the game…

Outliving its stay of execution

Throughout the game, you build an engine. One that builds annexes, kills people and buries them under the hotel. However, even at your engine’s peak, putting someone into this meat grinder still takes two or three turns.

This multi-step process, while fun, is plodding in its speed. In a world of instant gratification, and games that move quickly, this slowness drains a lot of excitement from the game.

Compared to something like Jump Drive, where every turn your engine explodes to life and gives you endless rewards. The Bloody Inn often frustrates you with how little you can do each turn.

However, if the plodding pace isn’t an issue, then you’re in for a treat. There aren’t too many games that let you be the bad guy. Combined with the wonderfully grimy artwork, and the need to hide your dirty work from the cops, you’ll have a great time. Although you might have trouble sleeping afterwards.