We are the bad guys now. We run a small inn in a remote village, and we murder guests to take their money. Running an evil enterprise is no easy feat though. Sometimes policemen stop by to stay a night, and if we have dead bodies unburied, they will sniff them out and arrest us. So sometimes we need to work together to clean up the mess. For any such joint efforts we’d split the loot. Normally we mind our own crimes. In the end, there is only one winner - the richest murderer.

Every night we welcome some guests. Possibly some will not leave in one piece by morning. The cards in the game are the guests. They have different values and suits. There is a certain process to our criminal enterprise. First, you need to have cards in hand. In the game this is called bribing. Some cards can be bribed for free. Cards numbered from 1 to 3 require spending the same number of cards. So this is why you need cards in hand. Most actions in the game need you to spend cards. Next, you kill. Depending on the card value of your victim, you need to spend a corresponding number of cards. You don’t get the money immediately though. You can only take money when you bury the corpse. Burying a corpse is an action, which means you need to spend cards, again depending on the value of the corpse. You also need a place to bury it. You need to have built an annex to the inn so that you create space for burial. How do you build an annex? You need to have bribed a guest, and then you need to perform a build action. This means you need to spend cards again. Everything requires cards. It is a challenge to get enough cards to use, and they get used up so fast!

Thankfully there are peasants in the village who work for peanuts. In gameplay terms they are free to bribe. As long as you see some of them drinking at the pub, you can go recruit them. One important thing to note is you pay wages every two rounds. Having accomplices under your employment is expensive.

Characters in the game have various skills (i.e. suits). If you use them for tasks they are good at, you don’t lose them. They return to your hand. This means you will save on recruitment (ahem bribery) efforts. When they return to your hand, it also means when pay day comes again, you do have to pay them. Else they will quit. Job satisfaction does not mean they will work for you for free. It’s not easy running a business.

Managing this whole operation is not easy. You will be busy bribing people (taking cards), killing people, building annexes and burying corpses. Every two turns you have to worry about paying wages. When you have a dead body (or dead bodies), you will have much anxiety because you don’t know when a policeman will show up at the inn. If this happens and you can’t manage to bury your corpses in time, you will be forced to engage the village undertaker to get rid of the bodies. You need to pay him, and you won’t be able to take money from the corpses. This basically means you will have wasted a lot of effort and also you will be losing money. This is why sometimes it is important to collaborate with your fellow criminals. You can bury your corpses in other’s annexes. If you do this, you split the loot with them. You have to do the burying yourself. They can’t do it for you. So this is something you need to plan for using your own limited actions. When you decide to bury a corpse in someone else’s annex, they cannot refuse. I guess this is some sort of unwritten code among outlaws. If you want to, you can keep busy building annexes and welcoming others to use them. You will take half the profit. Maybe that’s a valid business model.

On the guest cards you will find all sorts of special abilities. Most of them are activated if you build that card as your annex. I had a card which allowed me to pay $1 less at every wage cycle. Money is points, so this card which I built very early effectively gave me many points.

The board tracks your cash in hand. This is yet another challenging aspect of the game. Since there is a limit of 40, if you want to score more than that, you need to perform an action to convert cash to cheques. A cheque is equivalent to $10. You can convert the other way round too if you are low on cash, but this is an action, and actions are precious in The Bloody Inn. You have pay day after every two actions, and that’s you paying your accomplices and not you receiving pay.

I played the game online. I think the game will work much better as a physical game, because of the collaborations and negotiations. To do well you will most likely need to collaborate with others at the right time. You want to cut deals because this will help you. There is always a sense of danger and urgency in the game. It is nerve-wracking to have a corpse (or corpses) in your living room. If you get caught by the police, you are going to lose money and also waste much effort. There are ways to get around that. You can bribe the policeman. This also means you will start paying him wages. Bribing him would have cost you cards too. Or you can kill the policeman. This too will cost you cards, and now you will have an additional corpse in your living room. You might be going into a downward spiral. If yet another policeman shows up, you might have to kill him too. This is a stressful game!

Although you sometimes want to collaborate with your opponents, ultimately you are still competitors. There are ways you can sabotage your opponents. You can recruit all the cheap peasants when they need manpower, at the cost of you paying the peasants’ wages. You can bury a cheap corpse in their annex, using up their space, and possibly forcing them to surrender their high value corpse to the undertaker.

The tactic I used was bribing lots of policemen to become my hitmen. They were good at killing, and whenever they killed, they returned to my hand. I could do a lot of killing. After they killed, I used peasants to bury the bodies and not the policemen. I kept them for future murders. I built an annex in the early game, but I later relied on those built by others. I specialised in assassination.

The Bloody Inn offers an interesting experience. There is tension and high player interaction. There is collaboration mixed in with the ruthless competition. The setting is a little violent, but it’s nice to play the bad guys sometimes. It is challenging and fun to run an evil enterprise.