Dick Hunt
United States
Ovid
Michigan
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What is the theme of this game and how is it integrated into the game? What sort of gaming mechanisms does the game use?
In Dante's Inferno, you're wandering through Hell, rescuing sinners, and eventually fighting Lucifer, whose defeat wins you the game. If that theme doesn't grab you, well, just consider all the cheesy jokes your group will get to crack as you play. "This is one hell of a game!" Get used to it. I've got plenty of them.
While Dante's Inferno doesn't look much like Settlers Of Catan, it has a lot of that game's feel. You roll dice, collect resources, and then spend them in order to do the things you need to do in order to win the race to duel Lucifer. There are no victory points in Dante's Inferno, however; it's strictly a footrace. First player to get to the innermost circle of Hell and beat Lucifer in a duel wins the game. Can you say, "Get the leader," boys and girls?
As in Settlers of Catan, you roll two dice for resource production, the resources in this case being various sins--Lust, Gluttony, Violence, and Hypocrisy. The sins are represented by colors. You get Lust on the yellow game tiles, Gluttony on the blue ones, Violence on the red ones, and Hypocrisy on the green ones. Each colored tile on the board has two numbers on it. If your token is standing on a tile when either of its numbers comes up on the dice, you get that resource. Listening to a group play, this game must sound very weird from the next room. "Woo Hoo! A six! Gimme some Lust!" Trading resources is also allowed, but it's more fun when you say stuff like "Hey, Joe, I've got Gluttony for your Violence." Or maybe "ya know, I need more hypocrisy in my life…"
So you roll dice, collect resources, and then spend them to race to the center circle of Hell. As gaming themes go, this one just might be my favorite of all time. Something about crawling over the crushed bodies of my opponents in order to win a race to the Devil appeals to me. However, in practice, things can get a little awkward. Because of the race nature of the game, you'll often spend just as much energy trying to slow your opponents as you will trying to beat them to Lucifer; in fact, messing with your opponents is every bit as much fun as actually trying to win the race! That certainly helps capture the theme and feel of Dante's Inferno, but it really adds to the length of the game, too. If players get bogged down too much with the game's interplay, they'll eventually find themselves wondering why the hell the game takes so darned long to play. (Giggle! He said "hell" again!)
As for integrating the theme into the game, Twilight Creations did a wonderful job of it. The components themselves do an excellent job of that. Something tells me that they didn't intend the game's length to make one think of hell, so I won't give them too much credit for that part.
How many can play this game? How long does a game usually take?
The game is designed for 3-6 players, but I've only tried it with either six or four. The board is crowded with tokens when you have six people playing, but that didn't seem to bother us too much except for the time factor. Games with fewer players are significantly shorter because with fewer people, there are fewer turns full of analysis paralysis ("where do I want my tokens to be?") to sit through. Positioning your tokens to your advantage is also a lot easier when competition for space isn't so heated by extra players, there are fewer enemies shoving demons at you, etc. With six players, our downtime between turns was unacceptably high because there are many strategic decisions to make with that many opponents to watch. I wouldn't recommend this game for five or six players, but it can be a hell of a good time for three or four.
One possible way to speed the game up might be to let players start the game with all (rather than half) their tokens on the board. That would get everyone into earning resources more quickly, shaving off the game's first half hour where you spend all your time with your first three tokens trying to earn the resources it takes to bring your other three tokens on to the board. Other than that, the paralysis by analysis factor is simply one you'll have to learn to live with.
How good are the game's components?
Mixed reviews here. This is a "build the board as you go" game, so the board comes in pieces. They are truly beautiful tiles, artfully produced and nothing less than wonderful to see. The only thing nicer than the game tiles are the miniature figures used to represent player tokens, Lucifer, and his demons. The plastic figures in this game are the coolest I've ever seen. They're amazingly detailed and just a delight to see and use. But the game is based on Dante's vision of Hell, which had nine circles. The rulebook even gives you a bit of background on the literary work, although knowledge of that work won't help or hinder you in any way while playing this game. So how the hell can you play a game based on the nine circles of hell on a square freakin' board? Artistically speaking, the fact that the board for this game isn't circular is practically unforgivable. I'm sure that will be even more annoying to anyone who is familiar with the literary work upon which this game is based. Of course, designing and producing a modular, circular game board would probably be expensive as hell, but come on! This is supposed to be Dante's Inferno!
Okay, it took me a while, but I finally got past the square board (well, sort of--grumble, grumble). However, there was one other beef with the game's components: unfortunately, each player is supposed to track his resources on a little board provided for that purpose. These boards are pretty, and show the resource costs one must pay in order to take the various actions one can perform during the game, but they're poorly designed and far too sensitive to table bumping problems. The design problem is the serpentine way the numbers on them are arranged. When you're tracking numbers with a marker, you naturally want to go from left to right, the same way you normally read text. On these boards, however, the numbers snake up and down as well; the top row has the odd numbers and the bottom row has even numbers. So instead of nice straight lines like you'd normally expect, you're moving your score marker in a confusing zigzag fashion that might be stylish but it's not very practical. Players often forget this, simply moving a marker from left to right, accidentally (one hopes) giving themselves two resources when they've only earned one. Five minutes into my first game, someone tossed the dice across the table to someone else, scattering tokens and markers all over the place. Talk about the sin of Violence! So step one for anyone who wants to play Dante's Inferno is to buy some Pente stones or poker chips to use as resource tokens. Unlike Settlers Of Catan, everyone's collection of resources is open information, so it doesn't matter if everyone can easily see what you've collected. That makes the glass stones used to play Pente an excellent substitute for resources in this game; colored plastic beads also work well, and are cheap to buy.
So if you can get past playing the circles of hell on a square board, and you can dig up some poker chips or pente stones, you can have a hell of a good time with this game. All you have to do now is get past some poorly written rules. That can be tough to do in this game, because the stuff that's in the rulebook is fairly well written. It's the stuff they left out that causes the headaches. None of it was earth shattering, but it's the sort of stuff that your group needs to agree upon before each questionable situation arises. The questions my group had make a lengthy list, so I'll post them elsewhere rather than as part of this review. Suffice it to say that we didn't have any fights over any missing rules, but had we applied them in different ways than we did, we might have been playing an altogether different game!
Is the game suitable as a "gateway game" for non-gamers (Settlers Of Catan generally being considered the classic gateway game)?
Nope. It simply takes too long. My personal guarantee: if you teach this game to your non-gamer friends, I promise that they'll bog down so much in the fun of sticking it to their opponents that no one will reach the innermost circle of hell in under three hours of play. I don't consider that a very good way to introduce non-gamers to our little hobby.
Where does the game fall on this scale of difficulty to learn:
1 (play with smaller kids): Candy Land, Checkers, Tic-Tac-Toe
2 (play with bigger kids): Monopoly, Sorry, Risk
3 (easy rules, but often much deeper in strategy): Backgammon, Chess, Go
4 (you "get" the rules by the time you've played it once): Carcassonne, Modern Art, Bohnanza, Robo Rally
5 (takes a couple of games to get the rules down): Settlers Of Catan, Citadels, Medici, San Juan, Vinci
6 (deeper rules and strategy require several games to play well): El Grande, Goa, Traders Of Genoa, Princes Of Florence
7 (fairly heavy on rules and even more so on strategy): History Of The World, Puerto Rico, Wallenstein
8 (actual study and practice required, but worth it): Twilight Imperium (3rd Edition), Civilization, R.A.F.
9 (quit your second job, you don't have time for it!): Die Macher, Carrier
10 (divorce the spouse, forget the kids!): Advanced Squad Leader
This game was a tough one for me to rate, mostly because of some awkwardly written (read: missing) rules. Obviously, a game with poorly written rules is much harder to learn than it should be. On the scale above, I'd call this game a 5 that should have been a 4.
Of course, this is a subjective scale based mostly on my own gaming experiences, so use it accordingly. If you would rank these games in a vastly different order than I've listed them above, you probably shouldn't use this scale at all. There are a few games listed here that I've never played; their ratings are based on comments I've read by other BoardGameGeeks.
What is the game's balance between skill and luck? Is a good memory (for items or cards played, bought, or used) a big advantage? Does the game require opponents of similar skill levels in order to be fun?
The balance of skill and luck in Dante's Inferno is much better than you might think. Although dice rolls determine resource production, you're never as completely frozen out as you sometimes can be during a game of Settlers Of Catan. In Dante's Inferno, you've got up to half a dozen tokens out there on the board earning you resources, so it's easy to cover every possible roll of the dice. Unlike Settlers, you rarely go through a series of several turns in a row where you get no resources.
The skill factor here is much heavier than the luck factor. You have demons to avoid, pieces to move, and in a twist I particularly love about this game, opponent's pieces to move. It's not just the headlong dash for Lucifer that you'd expect. My wife won the first game we ever played not because she was the first to get to Lucifer's house, but because she had the resources that let her re-roll one die during combat. Had she simply trusted everything to the luck of the dice, Lucifer would have sent her packing quickly. However, her smart collection of resources before taking him on won her the game. It also gave me a rare opportunity to get away with an old joke--"Of course she can beat up the devil! She's his sister!"
There is no serious memory factor in Dante's Inferno, and players of differing skill levels can easily compete if the new guy catches on soon enough to the wisdom of covering lots of different dice roll numbers with his tokens. Of course, there are dumb things a newbie could do that would cost him the game, but no more so than in most games. Differing skill levels are not a problem here.
Does the game have much player interaction?
Actually, the overly excessive amount of player interaction in Dante's Inferno could be its biggest problem. Players are supposed to be racing to the middle of the board, but they usually have a lot more fun hindering each other in a lot of different ways--they sic demons on each other, they flip tiles over so that foes can't cross them, and they can even move opponent's pieces in order to slow them down. Like the chariot race scene in Ben Hur, you're not just trying to win the race; you're heavily into whipping the other drivers as well. Naturally, this slows the game down. Of course, a simple "who gets there first" design would have been dull to play, but the price you pay for being able to hinder each other's progress is lots of added gaming time. While I enjoy playing this game, it does tend to serve as a reminder of why I like victory point games more than "race to the finish" type games. This game is fun to play in spite of any negative vibes I might be giving you in this review. It's just not quickly finished because they've rather made playing it far more fun than winning it. In fact, since it is possible to win the game on one lucky dice roll, Dante's Inferno might leave you feeling a little flat when the game is done. "I applied all this brilliant strategy and planning for that?"
Does the game have good replay value?
Modular board equals good replay value in my opinion, so yes, I give Dante's Inferno very high marks for replay value.
What's the strategic heart of this game?
It's a straightforward racing game, so the strategic heart is straightforward, too. Do what helps you get there first, whether that's advancing your own pieces in some way or hindering the leader so you can have a chance to catch up. As in a game of Settlers Of Catan, you want to position your pieces so that you're covering lots of different dice rolls while at the same time earning as many different resource types as you can.
Every turn requires you to re-evaluate your position on the board. Not only will losing fights with demons shove your tokens out of the spaces in which you want them to be, but your heartless opponents can actually pay for the right to move your tokens around. So you fight the demons, then roll the dice for your resources, and then spend the rest of your turn trying to get your tokens back to where you wanted them to be. If you have any change left over after all that, you can have fun spending it to torment your opponents, shoving their pieces all over the place.
Don't park your tokens next to the corner spaces. That may seem counterintuitive because you have to advance from one circle of hell to the next at the corner tiles, which makes it tempting to hang around the corners of the board. However, in order to advance to the next circle of hell, you have to collect the resources you must pay to do it. The problem is that being on a corner tile will earn you no resources--the corner tiles don't produce resources at all. So if you try to park your tokens on the resource-earning tiles next to the corner tiles, your opponents will spend their resources to move your token on to the corner tile. Then your turn comes, you roll the dice….and you earn jack squat for resources, because all of your tokens have been shoved on to the non-producing corner tiles. So don't park anywhere near those corner tiles! You don't want to touch a corner tile until it's time to make a headlong rush for the next circle!
If you start the game as the rules state, with only three tokens on the board, you should place those tokens in such a way that they'll quickly earn red, blue, and yellow resources. Those are the three resources you must spend (1 of each) in order to place a new token on to the board. Until you get all six of your tokens on the board, don't even bother trying to produce green resources. Green is the one resource that doesn't help bring new tokens on to the board, and you'll be able to produce plenty of "greenies" once you get all your tokens on to the board. This strategy will be really obvious to you if you're the only player who has caught on to it--you'll soon see yourself out-producing your opponents by an embarrassing amount, making you their whipping boy until they get caught up. But you're in hell anyway, so bring on the whips!
Once everyone in your group catches on to this strategy, it will be practically invisible and therefore a waste of everyone's gaming time. At that point, I'd recommend trying the "everybody's on board" starting setup that I suggested above. Otherwise, the first half hour of every game you play will consist of everyone at the table following the exact same strategy--buying their off-board tokens on to the board just as fast as they can.
Don't get me wrong; Dante's Inferno is truly a lot of fun to play. But between the murky spots in the rules and the universal startup strategy, the game takes significantly longer to learn and play than it should. Work these problems through, however, and you'll probably have a hell of a time with this game!
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Brad "What do you mean "Double Skulls" again?!" Redfield
United Kingdom
Under a DVD Collection, Scarborough
North Yorkshire
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Be honest, you only wrote this review because you like saying "one hell of a time!" and it's variations don't you?!
 
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