Inferno – A Journey Through Dante’s Hell in Board Game Form

Dante is making his way through Hell, lost souls are waiting to be sent to the correct circle, and we’re apparently competing to see who can make the best job of all this. Inferno takes its setting from the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with the nine circles of Hell forming a rather important part of both the board and what you’re doing on it.

It’s quite an unusual setting for a board game, but what interested us more was how the souls connect everything together. Moving one doesn’t just help it on its way through Hell. Where that soul stops determines what you can do next in the city, while other players can move the same souls later. That means the soul you so helpfully sent downwards may eventually become somebody else’s problem. Or opportunity, which is usually worse.

👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 45-120 minutes
📝 Designer: Fernando Eduardo Sánchez
🎨 Artwork: David Benzal & Cristian Casado Otazu

🏢 Publisher: Red Mojo Games (prototype copy provided)

📌 Note: This review is based on the prototype. For a look at the final version, check out our latest impressions here!

Gameplay Overview

Every turn starts by moving a soul. You can bring a new one across the river Styx from the cemetery into the first circle of Hell, or move one that’s already inside further towards its destination. Each soul has a colour corresponding to where it ultimately belongs, and getting it there can score you points.

Movement follows the chains connecting the spaces. Souls skip occupied spaces and stop at the first free one, and that final space shows a symbol that determines where you’ll take your next action in the city. So while getting souls where they need to go matters, you’re also looking at where they’ll stop along the way and what that lets you do afterwards.

The city is divided into four quarters, each containing two buildings. Once you’ve moved a soul, you visit the quarter matching the symbol where it stopped. You can send one of your family members to a building there and use its action. These actions let you do things such as build your tower, collect resources, invite guests or exchange Florins for Drachmes.

Instead of visiting a building, you can accuse a sinner in that quarter. This adds a new soul of the corresponding colour to the cemetery, sends your family members in that quarter back home and moves you along one of the sin tracks. Those tracks provide bonuses as you progress and can also contribute to your score.

Accusations are important for another reason: they move Dante further down through Hell. As he reaches different circles, players who have progressed furthest on the corresponding sin tracks can receive diplomas. Eventually Dante reaches the final circle, which brings the game towards its end.

There’s quite a bit feeding into the final score. Your position on the sin tracks matters, as do fraud cards, your tower, the guests you’ve collected, remaining Florins and family members who have made it back home. Guiding souls deeper into Hell can also be worth more, so you’re rarely working towards only one thing.

Artwork, Components, and Visual Design

Inferno is based on a fairly grim journey, and the artwork by David Benzal and Cristian Casado Otazu doesn’t exactly turn it into a pleasant holiday destination. The circles of Hell dominate the board, with Dante gradually travelling deeper as the game progresses. The city sits alongside it, so the two parts you’re constantly moving between are visually separated as well.

We played a prototype provided by Red Mojo Games, so it’s important to put an asterisk next to anything we say about production. Our copy wasn’t representative of everything intended for the finished game, and at the time the guardians were still represented by cardboard standees rather than the planned miniatures.

Even in prototype form, though, there was already plenty on the table. The custom meeples in particular caught our attention, and we liked seeing Dante’s journey represented physically rather than existing only as background story. The artwork also does a lot to connect the otherwise fairly mechanical city actions and tracks back to the setting.

Because this was a prototype, though, we wouldn’t read too much into smaller production details. Our games were much more useful for understanding how all those souls, city actions and sin tracks connect.

Our Experience

Our first games involved quite a bit of looking back and forth between Hell and the city. Moving a soul itself isn’t particularly difficult to understand, but where you leave it determines the action that follows. We initially focused mainly on getting souls towards their matching circles. It didn’t take long before we realised that simply pushing them as far down as possible wasn’t always what we wanted.

Sometimes stopping a soul higher up gave us access to an action we needed more. At other times, sending it deeper was worth doing even if the city action wasn’t ideal. That was where many of our turns ended up: not simply asking where a soul should go, but where we wanted it to stop right now. I mean, we’re helping lost souls reach their eternal punishment, so apparently even that requires some scheduling.

The other complication was that the souls don’t belong to anyone. We’d move one into a useful position and another player could continue moving it later. That made us increasingly aware of what we were leaving behind. Sending a soul further down could help us, but it could also put it within easy reach of somebody else who would happily finish the job. We had to look not only at what our move gave us immediately, but at what the board would look like afterwards.

That became harder when somebody took a space we’d been relying on. Because occupied spaces affect where souls stop, a change elsewhere on the board could alter the route we’d been considering. There were definitely turns where we had a plan, watched somebody else play, and then had to work through it again. At higher player counts that could also create some downtime, particularly when several useful spaces had changed before our turn came back around.

The guardians added another thing to account for. Two are randomly selected for each game, with characters such as Medusa, King Midas and Cerberus changing what can happen. Their abilities can affect souls, provide points or otherwise interfere with the usual situation on the board. We found they gave us different problems to deal with from one setup to another without changing the basic structure of a turn.

Our Thoughts

What we liked most about Inferno was the connection between moving souls and choosing actions. They’re not two separate parts of your turn. Where you move a soul decides where you can act next, so sometimes the action you want changes where you’re willing to leave that soul. At the same time, pushing souls deeper can bring its own benefits. We regularly found ourselves compromising between those two things rather than simply finding the move worth the most points.

There’s relatively little luck deciding what happens on an individual turn. New souls entering the cemetery are partly affected by player actions, with cards adding some uncertainty, but most of the time you’re reacting to decisions made around the table. That suited us, although it also means another player’s move can leave you reconsidering quite a bit. If you prefer taking your turn without having to recalculate after every change to the board, Inferno could feel slow at times.

I also like that helping a soul isn’t necessarily helping yourself. Nobody owns them, so moving one closer to its destination can leave the next player with an easier opportunity. Combined with the occupied spaces changing where souls stop, that gives you plenty to watch between turns. For us, that was more interesting than simply trying to move souls down through the circles as efficiently as possible.

The different ways of scoring give you several directions to pursue, perhaps enough that the first game can feel rather busy. Towers, guests, Florins, sin tracks, fraud cards and family members all matter in different ways. I don’t think Inferno is particularly difficult because of any single rule. It’s more that you need some time to understand how much attention you want to give each part. The guardians add some variation on top of that, while the double-sided board adjusts the available spaces for different player counts.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this is one I’d mainly put in front of more experienced players who don’t mind spending time working through the consequences of a move. The Dante setting gives all those circles, sins and descending souls a reason to be there, but underneath it is still a game about positioning, timing your actions and trying not to make life too easy for the next player. Going to Hell turned out to require rather more planning than expected.

📝 We played a prototype of Inferno provided by Red Mojo Games. Components and other aspects of the game may differ in the final version.