I respect this game more than I love it. It might be the greatest multiplayer competitive turn based strategy video game of all time?

A remake of a 2009 cult classic that I remember hearing about but never playing. The theme is, um, tortured, but basically you play one of various demons attempting to win a civil war in hell. But I do mean "civil" war here, one does not simply start marching armies on the other demons, there is decorum involved. One makes demands on other players, who may or may not reject them, which leads to duels, vendettas, alliances, and betrayals, etc.

I played the tutorial and immediately deduced that this would be a miserable game to play against AI, but get yourself 4-6 people willing to commit to an async-game and now you have yourself a stew going.

At first glance, you would be forgiven for just thinking this is a straight up board game. Or at least you would immediately assume that someone has made a board game adaptation by now. Once you play it a bit longer, though, you start to see little bits of glue between systems that are all just on the side of "this would be a pain in the ass to do in person" in the kind of way that a game could maybe get away with one or two of that kind of mechanic but not all at once. It feels like what your favourite boardgame looked like in the first round of playtesting before the designer decided they had to trim the fat, and instead decided, "Well I guess it will have to be a video game then."

One example I'm thinking of is the currency mechanics in the game. There are basically four different currencies used to purchase almost everything in the game, in some combination. (Don't ask me what the canonical flavour text is, but I call them: ghosts, blood, flames, and shadow.) You collect chits worth 1-3 units of a given currency, and spend them on whatever. Say you want to buy an army: that might cost 3 blood and 8 shadow or something.

Boardgamey catch number one: you don't get change if you have to overspend. Boardgamey catch number two: you can only spend 8 chits total at a time. Boardgamey catch number three: you have a limit to how many chits (not value) you can hold at a time. The twist: you can use an action to "consolidate" your currency, merging (up to 8) chits into a single chit, unlocking the ability to spend more money at a time and so "afford" the more expensive items, but also putting all your eggs in a smaller basket because there are definitely many ways to lose chits to both RNG or to other players. I try to imagine doing this in person, piling up a bunch of chits on top of a meta-chit or whatever, then sliding them all around a table, and it's like if I was a game designer, sure I guess you could do this but probably maybe think of a different approach.

Not to mention the vast amount of hidden and partially hidden information. That guy over there didn't move any of their armies this turn. I wonder what they actually did? Were they the one that purchased that artifact? Someone did, but you don't know who. Or maybe you do know who - maybe you leveled the stat that lets you see more of this sort of thing. Or maybe you cast the spell that revealed someone's inventory, so you know they have it now at least. But then time passes and maybe things have changed, until you scry them again.

You are trying to accumulate the most prestige by the end of the game, thereby being elected the new lord of hell. There is player elimination, though, which is a bummer. An alternate path to victory is to just beat everyone up. But there is also a somewhat spiteful "vassalage" system whereby, if someone is picking on you to the point of elimination, you can throw your lot in with another player. Your reward at the end of the game is, well, I guess you could think of it as second place. You can also seize the throne itself by force, which is a third way to win if you succeed. And of course, maybe you picked the secret starting item that says that if you correctly predict who the winner ends up being, you win instead. That's a real pisser.

The game is chock full of those great board game dilemmas. You start with two actions per turn, and immediately feel the need to do three things. You need to buy an army to defend your territory and you need to buy a praetor to fight your duels and you definitely can't afford both. You need to cast three rituals but only have capacity for two, and you need to level the stat that gets you more capacity but you also need to level the stat that gives you more actions.

Everything you want to do always takes a turn or two more than you want it to. Want to start a war with your neighbour? Make a demand, hope they reject it, giving you grounds for vendetta. But making the demand takes a turn. The rejection takes a turn. Declaring the vendetta takes a turn. And then finally you can do something about it.

It's kind of torturous in a way I can't help but admire.

I pride myself in being a patient man; it's one of my go-to job interview type "what are your strengths?" type questions. But there are aspects of my life where I am very impatient, and actual decision making is one of them. That's probably bad. (In the job interview, I spin it as being "decisive".)

With strategy games, the way this manifests is I play things intuitively. If I need to sit there and work my brain through the game tree and consider every single option available to me... ain't nobody got time for that. If I can get an intuition for what good moves are and bad moves are, I can do OK. The most dominant I've ever felt at a board game was winning a couple of convention "speed" tourneys played under a chess clock (Puerto Rico and Brass). I can also do alright if the search space is so vast that it would be folly to even try to optimize it. Solium Infernum isn't quite there.

I play in a group of real-life friends, and we play on 24 hour async turn timers. The turn probably rolls around twice a day on average. I play at the pace I would play if I was doing this around a table somewhere that I had to go home at the end of the evening. In and out in like 5 minutes most times. I do OK for myself, but I definitely get outplayed by people that are logging in and crunching the game before queuing up their orders. So I end up in situations where I am on cruise control with a dominant lead secured and then I didn't notice that this one unit now has an item which lets them jump ravines, and also the world map wraps, and also they just suicided another unit against the throne which triggers them to be open-season to everyone, but also means therefore that they can now attack everybody without needing to wait to work though four turns of diplomacy, and then you sit there and stare at the screen, finally spending 30 minutes working out every single path down the game tree to confirm that yes, this other unit will kill your base next turn and you definitely have no possible counter-move to avoid this now because it is just too late, and you were the tallest poppy with five turns left and now you are out of the game.

I hate it. I'm doing alright in the game I'm in now though.

Three Stars.

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Solium Infernum (2024) is the:

• 11th greatest Video Game of all time.
• 16th greatest Thing of all time.