Inori.

Inori is the latest title from Space Cowboys, publishers of Splendor, Jaipur, and the underrated Botanik, along with last year’s Spellbook, a Phil Walker-Harding game that really missed the mark for me. Inori looks fantastic on the table – I saw it at Gen Con, and received a review copy from the publishers as well – but it was also disappointing in the actual play, in large part because of the worker-placement mechanic.

In Inori, players make offerings to spirits by placing their markers on the offering cards available in that round, starting with three in the first round and increasing by one in each round, while players also gain another worker in each round as the game progresses. Placing a token gives you some immediate reward, usually tokens of a certain color, and if all spaces on a card are filled at the end of a round, the card is scored, with points going to each player who placed workers on it. If it’s not filled, players receive no points and the card is flipped to its reverse side. There are also spaces on the big tree that can take workers, which the first player to use can then tag with a specific color for the remainder of the game. After four rounds, the game ends, with the player with the most points winning.

I’ll be up front: the mechanic where cards don’t score unless all spaces are filled sucks. It’s one of the worst mechanics I’ve seen in a game in a while, and I don’t say such things lightly. I love board games, period. A bad day at the tabletop is better than a day without the tabletop at all. I rarely say that something is outright bad, but I have played Inori many times and I think this mechanic is bad. As it works, you can place multiple meeples on the card to fill it to make sure it scores, but you only score once regardless of how many meeples you have on the card. That’s a design failure.

There is some randomness to the game as well, as some spaces allow the player to take a rune that gives you a random reward that can range from extra tokens to the power to move already-placed meeples on the board. The problem with that aspect of the game is that it is quite easy to get a rune that’s utterly useless. There’s just too wide of a variance between the high end of what a rune can be worth and the low (which is zero).

I’ll back up for a moment and get back to the rules. On each turn, you place a meeple on an open space on a card or on the big tree, and you take the reward shown on the space – usually one or two tokens of a specific color. Each round ends when all players have placed all of their meeples, after which all cards that are full, meaning there is at least one meeple on every space, are scored. Each player with one or more meeples on a filled card scores one point per token of the card’s color that they have in their supply – the number of meeples is immaterial. Then the card is removed and replaced with a card of a different color. If a card is unfilled, players with meeples on it receive no points, and the card is flipped.

The scoring at game-end revolves around the great tree – you score each level of the tree, where each level has a color that’s been assigned to it over the course of the game, and then points are awarded based on which players have the most tokens of each color. It is likely that at least one color will remain unassigned, and thus won’t have any value at game-end. Your final score will comprise the tree scoring from game end, the points from cards in each round, and any points you might have gained from placing meeples on cards during the game.

I played a half game at Gen Con at the demo table in the Asmodee booth and saw a ton of potential in Inori, but having played the full game, I was disappointed. It just doesn’t work – the card-scoring mechanism is all wrong, and it makes the game something of a random walk. I wanted to like Inori, given its publisher’s history and the way it looks on the table, but it’s a miss for me.