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The sentence above is not one you'll often see in a published game, but you will find it in the rules for The Bloody Inn, a Nicolas Robert design which features stark artwork from Weberson Santiago that Belgian publisher Pearl Games plans to debut at Spiel 2015. The setting of the game comes from events that date to 1831, a murder trial in the department of Ardèche in southeastern France related to events at L'Auberge de Peyrebeille (The Inn of Peyrebeille). A summary from Wikipedia:
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The owners of the inn, Pierre and Marie Martin, and their employee Jean Rochette were arrested in 1831 after a customer, Jean-Antoine Enjolras, was found dead by a nearby river, his skull smashed in. They were later charged with his murder. During the subsequent trial, numerous witnesses testified to other crimes committed by the accused, including up to fifty murders at the inn, and to aggravating circumstances of rape and cannibalism. There were rumors that the owners used to serve their intended victims meals containing cooked body parts of previous victims. The accused were only convicted of the murder of Enjolras, and were sentenced to death. They were executed by guillotine in front of the inn, with a crowd of 30,000 on-lookers.
In The Bloody Inn, players represent innkeepers who are not quite that unsavory, but who are willing to do more than fit a cot with clean sheets in order to earn money. Over the two seasons of the game, players see numerous guests pass through their shared inn, with some of them exiting the door to visit once again, some of them not being so lucky, and some of them being co-opted to take part in your nefarious affairs.:strip_icc()/pic2649765.jpg)
Guests come in six types — merchants, artisans, nobles, religious, police and peasants — with each type having their own color and each guest having a rank from 0 to 3, with all peasants being 0. Many guests have specialties related to their backgrounds: the merchants, for example, handle money well, so they're willing to help you bribe other guests, while the artisans can assist in building annexes to store the guests who "decide" to stay for a while.
Each player starts with two peasants in hand, and each round starts with guests arriving at the inn, with each open room — some controlled by players and some simply open — receiving one guest. Players then each take two actions, one at a time, with the actions being as follows:
• Bribe a traveler, whether guest or peasant, placing that card in your hand for later use
• Build an annex, using a guest in hand to represent an annex behind the inn (i.e. placing that card on the table)
• Bludgeon a traveler, whether guest or peasant, flipping the card face down
• Bury a corpse in an annex, at which time their wallet mysteriously ends up in your possession — or split between you and the owner of the annex
• Launder money, since there's a 40 franc limit to the amount of cash you want to keep on hand at any one time
For each of the first four actions, you must discard cards in hand in order to carry them out, with you discarding as many cards as the rank (0-3) of the target in question. Want to bribe a 0-rank baron? You can sweet-talk such a gullible fool on your own? A 3-rank prince, on the other hand, will need a few more mouths to convince him that he's doing the right thing. When the specialty of a guest matches your action — bribe/build/bludgeon/bury — that guest returns to your hand at the end of your turn.
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Prepublication copy shown at Gen Con 2015 during a press event
After each player has taken two actions, if any police officers are still checked into a room, everyone with unburied corpses must pay 10 francs per corpse as hush money, then discard the corpses, thereby preventing their purses from being collected. If you have any guests in rooms that you manage, you collect a rental fee from them in the morning and send them on their way, perhaps to see them again on their way home. Finally, you pay wages for those in your employ (i.e. for cards in hand).
The higher a guest's rank, the more money that individual carries, but the more effort it requires to do anything with that person. Not every guest can assist you with building an annex, but those that do each provide a special power for that building, say, additional money for guests of the same type who manage to escape alive after two seasons or the ability to bribe, bludgeon or bury as many travelers as you can afford to in a single action.
Once all of the guests — what remains of them, that is — have passed through your inn a second time, you tally the funds from the annexes and add them to your checks and francs in hand to see which innkeeper runs the most profitable outfit.
As for the rumors of cannibalism, well, perhaps we'll see a The Bloody Inn: Sweetmeats annex in the future...
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