Pearl Games | The Bloody Inn | Board Game | Ages 14+ | 1 to 4 Players | 30 to 60 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

Each player earns 1F for each room of his color (i.e. each door with a Key token of his color) occupied by a Guest card. Annexes offer a little bit of engine building in the game, allowing you to not only store the corpses up to the rank of the annex, but also cheapens matching actions or offers other powers. You can only store ad many corpses as the rank of the annex, so there’s a balance between planning ahead and not running out of cash or accomplices to get things done. Running an inn can be a lucrative business. If you know how to handle your guests you can make a killing. In the Bloody Inn players are greedy members of a poor farming family. Having invested in an inn, they undertake to make their fortune robbing and murdering guests but it's a lot of work, too much for one person. You’ll need accomplices. Fortunately, everyone has their price. Travellers of various professions can be bribed to help you accomplice your unsavory activities.

Each player places a Key token of his color on an unclaimed room of his choice (the position of the room makes no difference, so just choose a room close to you). When you kill a Guest of the inn, you put him in front of you Dead-side-up. It pains you, but what can you do? This is the life you have chosen! Keep in mind that you have a code of honor: You only steal money from a Guest when you bury him! Each player earns 1 coin for each room of the inn in their colour that is still occupied by a guest. All guests in rooms are then discarded to the exit pile. Building an annex is carried out using one of the accomplices in your hand and grants you the ability of the text in the bottom section of the guest card. The image above shows an example of a hand of accomplices we might have. Then, you reclaim any cards you played that have an aptitude for the chosen action; you lose the other cards.

While it might be hard to identify with your role in the game, The Bloody Inn isn’t gruesome. The murderous actions are tongue in cheek and are not glorified. The unflattering stereotyped presentation of characters extends this handling of the theme to reinforce the waggish humour and light heartedness. The artwork is excellent and befits the combination of humour and sombre context. The Bloody Inn is a card game in which you play one member of a family of greedy, murderous innkeepers. Even still, I found The Bloody Inn to be an enjoyable game that has already made its way to our tables a few times. If you are a fan of engine building or hand management games, I can easily recommend this one. It feels fresh and I don’t have much else in my game library like it.

Of course, you can’t do this by yourself and any business empire requires a little bit of expansion before things really get rolling. Players can enlist the help of other guests and locals as accomplices in what can only be described as a multi-level murdering scheme. You can choose not to do any of the above actions on your turn. In this case, you are allowed, but not required, to meet the crooked village notary to launder money. You can then either: If you can't dispose of the bodies you can't claim the ill-gotten gains. And corpses left lying around risk discovery. You never know when law enforcement might visit. If you have unburied bodies when they do you're in trouble. You'll have to recruit the help of an unscrupulous undertaker to bail you out. Unfortunately, they don't come cheap and handling corpses this way will eat into your profits. You'll also be unable to claim the rewards.Phase 3: End of Round – If there are any corpses in play and police still in the inn, each player must pay the grave-digger 10 francs to dispose of their corpses. Play on the table as many Guest cards from your hand as the rank of the Traveler you just chose (e.g. 0 cards for a rank-0 Traveler; 3 cards for a rank-3 Traveler). The Bloody Inn is played over a series of rounds where each player gets two actions. The actions include: bribing people, building annexes, killing travelers, or burying corpses. All this is done with the goal of stealing the most money from the victims.

The main thing that drew me to The Bloody Inn, other than the unique theme, was the outstanding artwork. The dark and creative style really drew me in and felt like it fit the theme of the game perfectly. Each card is colorfully illustrated with a picture of the guest, and also contains any relevant game information. Module 1: The Carnies — The carnies are a new type of guest. This module can be played with or without the event cards. Before the start of the game, decide whether you want to include the event cards. At the end of the round (phase 3), before the police investigation step, if at least one carnie occupies a room of the inn (or a trailer), you must resolve the event card this round. One final thing to note. There is a fifth action that the rulebook states you can leave out when you are new to the game and I definitely agree. It is to ‘Launder money’ and basically means you have to spend precious actions every now and then to manage your money or you risk losing some when you reach a certain amount. Feel free to include it in your games when you feel ready. Hotshot or Grave Mistake? The main board is the ‘bloody’ inn itself, with each player having a stake (pun sort-of intended) in a room, each. At the start of each round (night), guest cards enter the rooms. These cards have a cost attributed to them, for taking a variety of different actions. You’ll need to juggle your hand management skills if you want to become a bloodthirsty landlord!If i were to instead decide to Kill the Count, he is rank 2 so i still need to play two cards. Let’s say I played the same two cards from my hand as in the image above, neither of which have the kill symbol (a gun), so both will be discarded to the exit pile. When a guest is killed, you flip the card to its ‘dead’ side and place it on the table in front of you. There is no limit to the amount of dead guests you can have in front of you. If you find the murder hotel theme attractive, and enjoy the points shuffle of paying for cards with cards, The Bloody Inn is a fine and light addition to your after dinner games pile

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 hurriedly — and quietly — bury the bodies! Which leads us to the actual murdering. Killing a guest works in the same way as bribing a guest except that the target is flipped over to reveal a casket and placed in your play area rather than going into your hand. It’s the first step to robbing guests of their coin. The Carnies contains 52 new cards spread across three separate modules that can be used in any combination. Except for the following modifications, the base game rules remain unchanged:

Game Play

If you can’t dispose of the bodies you can’t claim the ill-gotten gains. And corpses left lying around risk discovery. You never know when law enforcement might visit. If you have unburied bodies when they do you’re in trouble. You’ll have to recruit the help of an unscrupulous undertaker to bail you out. Unfortunately, they don’t come cheap and handling corpses this way will eat into your profits. You’ll also be unable to claim the rewards. Select the Traveler you want to kill from the inn (in a room of your choice or in the bistro; it's possible to kill the Peasants).