Base price: $XX.
3 – 4 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter! (Will update link when Kickstarter is live.)
Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Inflation! was provided by New Mill Industries. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
It’s gonna be trick-taking for the next two weeks! We love a theme, and trick-taking is going to be … it for a while. Think of it as trick-taking or treat, and the last week of October is going to be treat. Or trick or treat. Or just spooky games. Who knows! We haven’t even gotten there yet because I’ve been behind the eight ball for like, an entire month! Who could have suspected that having no free weekends and getting sick would cut into my review prep time? Me. I suspected that. But regardless, we’ve got some cool new games to check out coming soon from New Mill and other places. First up is Inflation! Let’s dive in.
In Inflation!, your goal is to have the biggest number. You want it so badly. Every round you’ll make an even bigger number in the hopes of having the biggest number around. Careful, though; your opponents also crave the largest number and will try to make their own numbers bigger than yours! Pretty rude, if you think about it. But in this weird little trick-taking game, the biggest number wins! Can you pump up your total?
Contents
Setup
As is the case for a lot of trick-taking games, setup for Inflation is relatively light. Shuffle the cards up:
Deal each player twelve. Then, set the black and white buttons in the center:
Players will use those later. You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
Inflation! is a trick-taking game of increasingly large numbers! You’ll have to keep making the biggest number to win, but be careful! You need to try and only win as many tricks as you initially bid.
To start a round, every player looks at their hand and decides how many tricks they believe they can win. Beginning with the start player, each player makes their bid and takes the corresponding number of black buttons. The white ones will come along later.
Once the trick-taking begins, each player plays a card from their hand in turn order. Note that you have to “follow suit”, if you can, though here that means playing the same number if you have it in your hand as the number that was played first. The highest number played wins! If multiple players play the highest number, the player who played the highest number last wins the trick. The winner of the trick takes a white button and places it on one of their empty black buttons if they have any remaining (otherwise just set it nearby).
The interesting thing is the next trick. The winner of the trick becomes the lead player for the next trick. When playing a new card, rather than covering the card played previously, play it to the left of the previous card, effectively adding a digit. If you played 10 in the first round and 6 in the second round, your new number is 60, for instance! Keep playing until all players have played twelve tricks.
Once all players have played twelve tricks, the round ends! Tally up players’ scores:
- If a player correctly won as many tricks as they bid, they earn 2 points per trick won.
- If a player did not, they earn 1 point per trick won.
- If a player wins the most tricks and did not hit their bid exactly, they earn 0.
The player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
Overall, I’m not entirely bothered by Inflation at either player count. While I always bristle a bit at games with a narrow player count (3-4 players, here), I’d rather it play well at a tight player count than play decently at an unfocused player count. And that’s largely the case, here. As player count shifts, there can be some uncertainty about bids, granted, and I do prefer the higher player count so that more cards are pulled out of the deck (so you have a better idea of what’s available), but honestly, I still enjoy the game quite a bit at three players. I wouldn’t say I have a strong player count preference with this one, as a result; I think the 3-4 range is very appropriate.
Strategy
- Careful with 10s! A 10 will usually win you the current trick but it will effectively become a 0 in the next trick, so you run the risk of getting a quick win and then having a junk digit in your number. If I have a bunch of 10s, I usually try to alternate them or throw them off when I can’t play the led number.
- A 10 might not even win you the trick. It’s the highest card, yes, but whoever plays the highest card latest wins, so leading with a 10 too early might be a surefire way to lose the trick.
- You can see what everyone’s played by design; use that. Break out your higher-value cards once you’ve seen a bunch of 10s already played, or if you have very few, maybe play them early in the hopes of drawing out everyone’s highest numbers.
- Winning tricks is good, but keep an eye on your bid. Don’t just win tricks for winning tricks’ sake; you’ll end up with 0 points. Try to meet your bid as best as you can. If you do, you’ll get double points and usually run off with the game.
- You’ll need to know when you want to win and when you want to lose. You can get trapped in a loop of winning tricks if you hold on to too many high numbers for too long, which leads to a 0. Try throwing your high numbers when another player plays a 10 so you can just lose and try to stay on track with your bid.
- Keep in mind what the space of available numbers is; it can help you with your bid. Sure, you might have three 10s, but in a three-player game that’s actually less than a third of the 10s available out there. Similarly, there’s only one 1, but it’s so low-value that I’m not sure that even helps.
- Even if you have a phenomenally bad hand, bidding something like 1 isn’t going to win you the game. You might have gotten a bad draw, but making an extremely low bid is a bad choice. Other players might try to screw you to limit your points and even if you hit your bid other players who miss theirs should be able to still outscore you. Sometimes you need to be purely ambitious.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Making progressively large numbers is silly and fun. Like having 12-digit numbers at the end of the game is pretty patently ridiculous, and I kind of love it. There’s something fundamentally unserious.
- Plays pretty quickly, which I like. It’s only a 20-minute play! That’s pretty good.
- Very portable! This is another relatively small-box game. If you just take the cards, it’s even easier to transport places, which I really appreciate.
- I like trick-taking games with variable numbers of each card type a lot. I think it plays nicely with expectations and makes you have to think a bit more as you’re counting. Here, the higher numbers are the most common, so you also run the risk of getting beaten out by a player who simply played the same card later. It’s interesting!
- The lack of suits or trump cards does make the game easier to learn. The whole “play the highest number” thing makes the game super easy to learn. Very quick teach. It’s still hard to internalize the strategy because of the bidding component, granted, but the core game is pretty fast.
- I appreciate that you really only need like the first three digits, at some point, to determine who won the trick. You don’t necessarily need to compare the whole number; as soon as you get to a different digit, the higher one wins. This usually means you only need the first three digits of a number to check to see which number wins, even with twelve digits (since there are different numbers of cards). I appreciate how that ends up working out.
- I also like that the white buttons neatly stack inside of the black buttons to track your bid vs. how many tricks you’ve won. It’s a nice and clean trick; I enjoy it.
Mehs
- I do wish the cards looked a bit more exciting. They’re not bad; they’re just kind of colorful numbers. Something zany would have very much appealed to me.
- Your first game, someone is likely to misunderstand how 10s work. Keep an eye out. They just add a 10 to the front of the number and then get their first digit covered next round. First round 10, second round 70 or something like that. At no point should players have wildly different digits in their numbers.
Cons
- I’m going to make the same mild complaint about Charms, but trick-taking games are hard enough for new players without bidding. Bidding is one of the more advanced techniques for trick-taking games since it requires some understanding of the game to have a guess for how much you should bid. Since players bid before the game starts, this can lead to mildly uninteresting bids in the first couple games as players learn the ropes. That’s just bidding in trick-taking. It can also make some players nervous, so I usually just tell new players if you’re not sure, divide evenly.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I think Inflation! is great! Of the two crowdfunding shortly, I think it’s the more approachable, but I appreciate how silly and zany it gets as you make these unreasonably high numbers and try to hit your bid. There’s some really cool strategy you can start using to determine how many tricks you actually think you can win in a given game, and it can pay off pretty well (or pretty disastrously). Both are fun. I do think that bidding trick-taking games are just inherently harder for new players to learn, but them’s the breaks, sometimes. It’s worth it to learn this one, though. Quick, straightforward, and you get to make an almost-comically large number. High portability, huge numbers, and quick play all are good ways to worm a trick-taking game directly into my heart, and Inflation! has done just that. Next week I’ll be talking a bit more about Charms, which is a bit more complex, so look forward to that. If you’re looking for a fun introductory trick-taking game, you want something nice and portable, or you just really love humongous numbers, I’d definitely recommend Inflation! It’s a lot of fun.
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