Dick Hunt
United States
Ovid
Michigan
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It seems to me that the biggest complaint people are making about this game is the length of time it takes to play it. The game is fun to play, but it takes much longer than the 90 minutes claimed for it here on the 'Geek.
For one thing, there is a lot of strategy involved, certainly more than immediately meets the eye. On every turn, you have to "re-set" your mental strategy, making sure your tokens are positioned so that you covering all the resources you need to collect and as many different dice rolls as you can. That alone takes everyone a couple of minutes per turn in every game I've played so far. In a recent game where I was struggling, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't collecting anything. I had all six tokens on the board, four of them in the 3/4 circles, and was covering all four resource colors. Then I finally saw the problem--I had four of my six tokens sitting on tiles that only collected on 5's and 10's. Sure, I'd get rich whenever 5's or 10's were rolled, but I was starving the rest of the time! Worse yet, a fifth token was on a 5/9 tile!
So you have to watch for stuff like that, making sure you position your tokens as well as you can by the time your turn ends. And because your opponents can shove your tokens around with demonic attacks or blue resources that let them move your guys around, you have to do this complete analysis of your position on every freakin' turn. Naturally, that slows the game down a great deal. Unfortunately, there's not much one can do about this problem without really screwing with the game's rules.
However, there is one idea I'd like to try that would speed the game up by maybe a good half hour (my group takes 3-4 hours to slog through this game every time we play; we like the game, but hate its length):
According to the rules, every player starts with three tokens on the board. Well, with three more tokens in reserve, what's your first order of business every time you play this game? It's getting those other three tokens on to the board so that they can start earning you more resources, right? It's the only early-game strategy that makes any sense: you need more resources, so you need to get your three off-board tokens on to the darned board. So you place your first three tokens in such a way that they'll soon be earning you yellow, blue, and red resources--the ones that will buy you a new token to place on the board.
My idea is this: since this early-game strategy is so obvious, and so universal, why not skip it by starting the game with all six tokens already on the board for everybody? That would get the game rolling a lot more quickly, and it would do so by skipping the game's most obvious strategy.
Don't believe me? Try it the next time you play. Have everyone but you start out with three tokens on yellow, red, and blue spaces. Meanwhile, you start collecting some other combination--say, green, red, and yellow for moving into the board's inner circles faster. Trust me, you'll soon find yourself getting killed. While you might have a token or two in the 3/4 circle ahead of everyone else, they'll be smoking you in resource production because they've all got six tokens on the board while you're still trying to accomplish everything with just three.
So if you're used to three and four hour game times with Dante's Inferno, and you want to shorten that by half an hour or more, as well as making this fun but overly long game more popular with your group of gamers, try this idea. Start the game with everybody's six tokens already on the board and just see how much faster the game plays. Yes, you'll have more tokens to analyze postioning for, but let's face it, you always end up with that problem anyway because the first thing you do now is try to get all six tokens on to the board.
Of course, another large gain in speed results because you no longer have to worry about getting three guys on to the board. So instead of scrambling to collect yellow-blue-red to get them there, you're collecting all the other combinations of colors that let you do things that ought to be more important in the first place, like getting the resources that let you go after that Lucifer guy in the middle of the board!
Just because you're in hell, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be having fun!
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Dick Hunt
United States
Ovid
Michigan
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Yes, yes, I know--how can six people start the game with six tokens on a board that only has 28 spaces that give you resources?
Okay, so maybe this idea doesn't work perfectly. It would work well in a 3- or 4-player game, but the board gets too crowded with 5 or 6 players. Unless you're willing to place tokens in the corners, or allow placement in the 2nd circle, or some other accommodation, it will be impossible to let everyone start the game with six tokens on the board.
Personally, I say you should let everyone start one or two tokens (as few as you can get away with) in the 2nd circle instead of the 1st. That would accommodate my brilliant plan for game speed without unbalancing anything.
Man, I'm good! 
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