I just picked this up in the last couple of weeks after seeing loads of people talking about it on Instagram, I’d been seeing it for a few years on and off and the artwork of the box always caught my eye.
Again took my time reading the rules and watching a couple of playthroughs on YouTube until I felt confident about trying it out.
The Bloody Inn
France 1831: In a remote corner of Ardèche, the little village of Peyrebeille sees numerous travelers pass through. A family of greedy rural farmers is determined to make its fortune and has devised a diabolical stratagem to achieve this goal: Invest in an inn so they can rob traveling guests, getting rich without arousing the suspicions of the police! Whether or not their plan will work out, one thing is certain: Not every guest will leave this inn alive.
The Bloody Inn is a card game in which you play one member of a family of greedy, murderous innkeepers. At the start of each round, cards are placed face up to fill the inn with guests. Each card carries a cost representing how many cards a player must discard from her hand in order to take an action related to that card. Certain guests have an affinity for particular actions, so those cards return to a player’s hand after being discarded. Cards also show how much money, in francs, each guest possesses. A round has two phases in which players take one action each, in turn order. Players choose one of the following actions:
- bribe a guest into becoming an accomplice (take a card from the inn to their hand)
- build an annex (move a card from their hand to their player area; it now represents a structure under which a victim may be buried)
- kill a guest (move a card from the inn to their player area, awaiting burial)
- bury a victim (place an unburied victim card under an annex card and take the money from the victim’s pockets)
- launder money (players may only have a certain amount of cash on hand; excess must be converted to 10F checks by the local notary)
At the end of the round, if any room of the inn contains one of the police, then they conduct an investigation; if a player has any unburied victims, then he must pay 10F per victim to the local gravedigger to hurredly — and quietly — bury the bodies! Lastly in the round, any cards (accomplices) in each player’s hand must be paid 1F each. After the guest deck has been depleted the second time, players take a final round, then tally their francs. The player with the most money wins!
In the box you get:
- 78 Guest cards (70 travelers and 8 peasants)
- 4 Player aid cards
- An Inn gameboard
- 1 First Player card
- 30 10F (10-franc) Check tiles
- 32 Key / Room Service tokens in the four player colors
- 4 white Key tokens
- 4 wooden discs in the four player colors
- 1 rulebook
Had such a fun time going through the cards getting to know them as the art work is so distinctive and really helps the feel of the game.
The other thing I like about this game solo is how quick it was to setup and get going, this will really encourage me to play it often.
Once setup the solo game is quite easy though with the four actions you can take and the different abilities on the guest cards there is a lot of nuance to each move.
I decided to do a lot of bribing and annex building to begin with so I had lots of places for the bodies later on (and some end of game cash combos), always making sure I bribed or killed the cops, always handy to keep them on your side.
I did get one bit wrong at the start as I watched a video that showed collecting the gold from the Room Service token equal to the guests gold value not their rank, caught this quite early on as I thought I was making way too much cash and that this was way too easy. Once I’d sorted it out though it was that bit more of a balancing act but still kept on top of everything and in the end had a respectable win.
Definitely one that will see the game table soon and regularly, possibly with some of the twists and variants I’ve been reading about on BGG to make it that bit harder or to even add a solo campaign mode.
