First Impressions of Indulgence

Restoration Games is a new publisher with a fascinating pitch: taking old and classic games and refreshing them for the modern market with new development work to take advantage of innovations in game design. They also refresh the art and graphic design, as you’d expect. Indulgence is one of their first wave of products, and you can’t miss the production values. Giant plastic gems, think chunky coins, an actual toy ring for the naughty sinner, should there be one. It’s almost worth going for it just to make the other players kneel before you and kiss the ring…! Not that I did that. Honest.

Indulgence is your basic trick taking game. A random hand of cards, four suits, numbered 1-9, always match the suit unless you can’t. Highest matching suit played takes the trick then leads. All very familiar. But each round of Indulgence sees the current lord choosing a special scoring rule. Perhaps for every green card you collect you must pay the Lord one coin. Or if a player takes both the first and final tricks, they must pay some other punitive fine. Either way, coins will flow towards the Lord (or Lady!) and everyone else will be trying their best to survive.

However, the really interesting part of Indulgence is the sinner mechanic, if you will. See you don’t have to play by the Lord’s rules. Instead, if you think you have the right cards for the job you can choose to sin and commit to doing the opposite of the chosen edict. So collecting every green card in the round. Or winning both the first and final tricks. Succeed and you earn a ton of money from all the players, but fail and you’ll pay an even bigger price to the Lady/Lord you’ve just snubbed. It’s a fun, risky decision that encourages you to be bold! To help out you get the ring, which can be used to boost one card to value 10, basically a win this trick favor. But it unites the entire tabletop against you. It’s such a fun dynamic!

However, it really felt like the game suffered from a lack of variability in the edicts. You have a couple of uniques, and then I think 3 suit specific powers that are just repeated for each of the suits. That’s a fake kind of variability: There is no mechanical difference between the suits. That was a little disappointing and it was already feeling a little samey by the end of that first game, in which we played through every edict. I liked the core of Indulgence quite a lot, but if you’re going to make a trick taking game with variable powers or round rules, go all the way and really make things interesting.