Inori

Inori’s theme is, with apologies to the publishers, instantly forgettable. Something about offerings to a Sacred Tree, Spirits, Altars, a Noble Quest to be the Great Guardian. The only thing you need to keep in mind is the great guardianship: it means winning.

The game is played over six rounds and in the first round three random cards are placed on the board representing, essentially, a place where you can place your offerings. Each player begins with a number of offerings in hand – it varies depending on the number of players – and the nub of each round is that players take turns placing them out on these cards, that in turn give players rewards.

What rewards? Well, the game’s point-scoring opportunities are all tied up in six different favor tokens, and the majority of the spaces simply gift you one or two of a particular colour. Other spaces give you the opportunity to score a single colour – which makes sense if you have a few of them – score the number of colours you have, or perhaps score the colour you have most of, and so on. They’re all easily understood, and give you ways to shuffle your score marker up the track. Note however that some of the more rewarding spaces also have a cost: usually, paying favor tokens of a specific colour in order to claim it. However! The cards provide another, important, route to points as well: at the end of the round any card that is fully populated (ie there are no empty spaces left) will score a certain colour favor token for every player who has offerings on it. Then the offerings return to the player and new cards come out: in addition, as you continue through rounds 4, 5 and 6, an extra card is added, and players claim extra offering pieces to use in subsequent rounds.

On top of this basic offering > reward rhythm of the game, is the Sacred Tree. This is also on the board and players can place offerings there to gain rewards. Critically, the first person to do this in each space on the ‘tree’ also gets to place a colour marker there, and these will define the end-game scoring value of all your accrued tokens during the game! Let’s say for example you notice I am gathering quite a few of the blue ‘water’ tokens. If blue is still available, you can take a low-value action on the sacred tree and place the blue altar tile there, making sure I don’t place blue right at the top of the tree instead. After the sixth round standard scoring, all players reference the tree to determine the final value of their tokens – and the player with most points of all is the winner.