Inori is a game in which the players act as village chiefs who are making offerings to the spirits underneath the Great Tree in their village. At least, that’s what the rulebook says. Inori is really a set collection game using worker placement that borders on abstract strategy with great artwork and presentation that has no real discernible theme once you get past that one paragraph in the rule book.
But those spirits sure look like little Pokemon, and that’s probably one of the biggest draws of the game. That, and the awesome insert that you see when you open up this game.
If you open this box and you’re not at least a little intrigued, I don’t know what to tell you.
Gameplay
Players will use workers to gather resources and score for various sets that they’ve collected throughout the game.
Like all worker placement games, you want to send a worker to a specific spot to do an associated job. However, in Inori, you might send a worker to a space on a wind spirit board to collect rocks, or sun. Or maybe you send them to the tree to collect fire. Or you give up a water to get two eggs. Wait, is this really a worker placement game? Or is this an abstract game that is trying really hard to be a worker placement game? I tend to think it’s the latter.
Using cards to determine the various collection locations and scoring possibilities is a solid way to ensure that the flow of the game is going to be different each time. These cards will score optimally when they fill, so you must work to maximize your own scoring while also making it attractive for your opponents to choose the actions on that card as well so as to ensure that spots are filled.
There are also some permanent worker placement spots on the Great Tree printed on the board that impact end of game scoring – to use these spots, players must give up one of their resources to place the corresponding color on the board, and at the end of the game, resources matching that color will score points based on how high up the tree that resource is.
So giving up a fire resource may help fire score higher, but you’ll need to do extra work to reclaim what you gave up.
This creates an interesting push-and-pull between what you’re giving up and what you hope to gain, and working closely with your opponents to ensure that you’re scoring just slightly more than them when points are determined.
Art & Design
The art and design of Inori require a special section.
The board has a very minimalist look – it looks good without providing much pop of its own. The cards really come alive. Each is illustrated with a bright little spirit playing against a colorful backdrop of their chosen color, each representing an element. The cards are mostly two-sided, so if you score the wind spirit, it will be replaced by another wind spirit, while if you don’t score that card, it will be replaced by a competing spirit.
Each element also gets small wooden tokens to represent itself. There are different numbers of these tokens in the box, making some elements more rare and desirable than others. This isn’t communicated well by the game, however, so it’s a little difficult to tell which elements you need to watch out for.
Each player’s workers are uniquely designed meeples. Their colors are not great – wood, black, white and grey, but the characters are functional and stand out against the otherwise garish state of the board.
Perhaps most disappointingly, the eggs, representing some special one-time actions, are simply small cardboard tokens. Given the premium nature of everything else in the game, these feel like an unwelcome afterthought, and they often play like it too. This has consistently been the action that someone only takes when it’s the only viable option, not because it’s a technically good move, but because it’s just not the worst move.
Final Thoughts
There are workers here, and a story...sort of. There really is not a ton of thematic connections between what you’re doing with those workers, however, so I have difficulty with the labeling. At the end of the day, I consider Inori to be one of the only abstract strategy games that I enjoy.
It’s fairly quick, with the box suggesting 40 minutes and most of our group’s plays clocking in around 30 minutes. It has excellent art and production value, and simple rules.
It generally feels good to play, and has a harmonious feel to the actions. You can’t be the runaway victor for a single resource – if you are, you’ll rarely get the opportunity to score it.
But at the end of the day, the book can claim all it wants that there’s a story here. Or some rationale behind the actions you’re taking. There isn’t. You have workers, but they’re less of workers and more like a mechanical means to an end. But the mechanics are pretty fun.
