Summary

This quick card game is for 2 to 4 players. The premise of the game is that each player is a goblin mechanic (because goblins are obviously mechanically inclined). Each player starts with the same amount of cards that are placed in a draw pile. These cards allow the player to create a Machine, basically a series of cards that cause actions which affect their own cards and the cards of other players. The purpose of these machines is to force other players to exhaust their draw pile before you. Once a player’s draw pile is depleted they lose the game. So the last player with cards in their draw pile wins.

I found it to be a fun and easy game to play, except you need to understand what cards are available in the game. I’ll go through the major rules of the game and the card types next.

Rules

Figure 1

First let’s look at how machines are produced, Figure 1 shows a sample of a machine. The horizontal cards make up a player’s Main Line, these are the main cards that are triggered during a players turn (below). Any card that is placed above or below a card on the main line is called a Plug. Finally cards (both main line and plug cards) are called Terminals if they are attached to only one Sockets. In Figure 1, every plug card is also a terminal card but if one of the main line cards at the end of the machine did not have a plug card attached that main line card would also be a terminal. These words are just categories that give a card’s orientation and are used throughout the rules (and on the cards themselves) to refer to those categories of cards.

Figure 2

Also sockets are how cards are connected together. There are five types of sockets, Figure 2, and the two sockets on each card must match in order to connect those two cards (the square peg does not go in the circular hole). There is a universal connector, where every connector can connect to it, but those are rare.

Cards

Cards have two things that players must worry about. The first was the sockets, players must make sure their cards fit together. Second, there are five types of cards and each have to be played differently. The five card types and placement rules are:

Power Core – Is the central component of a player’s machine, each player begins with this card. It works just like a Power Source card (below) and all the connectors are Universal. They have four socket locations.

Power Source – Is used to power contraptions and consumables. They have four socket locations which can be of a single socket type or two types.

Contraption – Are the main part of the machine and each cause some effect (such as drawing a card). Contraptions must be connected to a power source card but can be played as a mainline or plug card. They have four sockets with two socket types.

Upgrades – Generally double the effects of any contraption card they are attach too. They do not need to be attached to a power source and can be placed in the main line or as a plug card. Upgrades only have two sockets and they are different from one another.

Consumables – Are one shot cards, if they are activated then they are removed from play. They can only be placed as a plug on a power source. They have two sockets which are two different types.

Turn

At the start of the game players get an equal amount of cards that make up their draw pile. Every player also draws 7 cards to begin. If a card must be discarded, called scraped, it is place in a community scarped pile. Some cards allow players to take from the scrap pile. Other cards say to remove them from play, they cannot return to play during the game. Once players decide which player will go first the player turns commence.

The turns are fairly easy. First if a player has no cards in their hand they draw 7 cards. Next they can place one card from their hand onto their machine (following the card rules above). For every card they want to place after the first card they must discard another card. Once they are done placing cards the player then picks an opponent, which can be any player other than themselves.
Now that the player has an opponent the player’s machine is turned on, meaning they perform all of the actions that their machine’s cards say to do. Starting left and going to the right, the player performs each card on the main line and any plug cards that are attached to the card. At this stage a lot of drawing, discarding and trading of cards happen which is usually to the advantage of the player as they gain cards and the opponent loses cards.

After the machine’s cards have all been performed the player must have between 7 to 10 cards in their hand. They either draw or discard to get to one of these amounts (whichever is closer to the amount of cards in their hand). That player’s turn is over and the next player does the same thing. This keeps going until only one player is left with cards in their draw pile. This also means that players that run out of draw cards immediately are out of the game. If they run out of cards because of an opponent’s turn that opponent must immediately stop their turn too and perform the final step of having a hand of 7-10 cards.

Why is this game fun?

This has the same feeling as Munchkin except in reverse. Players are placed in an All-vs-All situation where each turn they must single out one player to attack (as opposed to Munchkin which does not force players to attack or hinder one another). How Infernal Contraption (IC) differs from Munchkin is how cards are placed in the game. In Munchkin players generally place cards in front of them when they get them (for instance an armor or class card). But in IC players need to determine which cards they want to put down, make sure they can connect to one another along the cards sockets, and must determine if they want to discard cards in order to place down a large amount of cards.

I looked at the card playing mechanic like dominos, each player has their own domino game they are playing where they try to connect the largest set of cards with the ones they are given. When placing cards players must make sure that they have enough power source cards to fuel all their contraption cards. They also need to worry about having power sources so they can use consumable cards with tend to have the wilder effects in the game. Plus once a card is placed it is stuck in that spot, there are very few cards that allow the player to rearrange or remove a card from a machine.

The other mechanic, attacking players, seems to be related to an opponent’s machine more than the player’s machine. What we found in the game is that if one player gets a good run of cards that can produce a machine that can decimate an opponent very quickly. Once someone has that power every other player starts to focus on that powerful player. But at the same time we also found that if a player cannot produce a big machine quickly they are left with a lot of cards in their draw pile in later turns. Thus if everyone is focusing on the powerful player the player with the smaller machine will have more cards to work with after the powerful player is gone (thus having a better chance of winning).

Strategy

What happens in a four player game is that two players will take on the role of the powerful players and the other two will be the weaker players. One strategy players may take is 1) the most powerful player should attack the 2nd powerful player because that opponent can do the most damage, 2) The 3rd powerful player should attack the 4th so that player does not have a lot of draw cards later. The 1nd and 3rd powerful players are hoping that they can knock out the player below before having to face the other. If that happened then the 1st player would have few draw cards but a big machine, while the third has a lot of draw cards but a smaller machine, then they can fight one another.

What seemed to happen in our game, however, is that during the first round of turns players would just pick an opponent at random and everyone lost a few cards here and there. However a few players did pull away in the next round of turns and built large machines. That’s when those players started to turn on one another and the weaker players ended up attack the powerful players too. In the end it was really a toss-up, three players were left two with large machines and few cards and one with a small machine a more cards. The smaller machine player ended up winning due to the fact that they had enough cards to survive another round of turns and the other players did not.
The real strategy seems to be how you manage your card placement during the middle rounds. At that point you need to place very powerful cards to help when attacking but not place so many that your draw pile becomes lower than everyone’s own pile.

We did find another strategy too, stacking the discard pile. A lot of cards have players take from the top of the discard pile. Thus, when players must discard they should first discard the cards they don’t other players to have so they are deeper in the stack. There is one card that allows a player to choose any card from the discard pile and then reshuffle but that’s rare.

How can this game be brought into a digital game?

This game reminded me of crafting in MMO games. You have to gather a bunch of ingredients, which some ingredients may need multiple ingredients themselves, in-order to build items that your character can use. Instead of ingredients IC uses components and connectors to create their machine but this could be expanded to create multiple items.

I see IC’s mechanics being used in two ways:

First, crafting in games could be set up in this way, allowing multiple types of components to snap together in order to make a wider variety of items. This has already been done in a lot of MMOs, Galaxies and Age of Conan are two. In those games an item can be made from varying levels of quality ingredients (i.e. a steal sword is stronger than a bronze one). Their also exists the “socketing” mechanic where an item can be given special upgrades by attaching socket objects to the main item.

Second, these mechanics could be the main means of attacking in battle. I’m thinking about replacing Bejeweled in Puzzle Quest with IC. Puzzle Quest is an RPG game where you go from town to town fighting monsters and gathering items and skills. The fighting portion is done by playing a puzzle game, very similar to Bejeweled, against a monster. A player gains items and skills so that they can do special tricks when they are playing against a monster.

In the same way IC could fill the puzzle spot. Instead of gaining items or skills the player gathers machine components. They can have pre-built machines to work with or have to build a new one for each battle. Each player would have a set number of components each round and who ever ran out first would lose. Also during battle players could steal components from the monster, and vise versa, and gain more components if they win. The point of the game would to gather a large amount of components and then figure out which ones work well together so you can battle better monster (similar to how Magic the Gathering players create card decks). I actually want to try and make this game now

I think the customize/build ability that is allowed in IC when building your machine is the fun mechanic that can translate to digital games. The attacking is sort of a by-product for what a player can do once they create something.

The full rules for IC can be found on the Boardgame Geeks IC page.