This game is very interactive, and in fact the whole point of the game is interactivity between the players. If you enjoy laying the smackdown on your friends and getting to laugh about it, then Infernal Contraption might be the game for you.

The game contains 124 cards, and there is space in the box for the expansion called Infernal Contraption 2: Sabotage, which has another 48 cards. You shuffle the cards and divide them equally between each player, so you are effectively drawing from a collective deck, making the re-playability very good.

You start with one card in front of you called the Power Core, which is the engine that fuels your contraption. Each player is a goblin, also called a Bodger, who is building a contraption, with which you try and destroy your opponents’ contraptions. The cards are effectively a resource, because you use the cards to build your contraption, and damage that you cause reduces the size of your opponent’s deck.

During your turn you get to add one card to your contraption for free, and then discard one card from your hand for each other card that you add to your contraption. At the end of your turn you activate the contraption and attack another player. The trick is that each card that you add to your contraption has the ability steal cards from your opponent and remove cards from his deck. If a player draws the last card from his deck he is eliminated.

And so you may have realised the inherent conflict within Infernal Contraption. In order to build your contraption and defeat your opponents you have to play cards and reduce the size of your deck (also called the parts pile), but if you continue to build your contraption so it is bigger and more infernal, you are making it more likely that your deck will run empty causing you to lose.

The cards all have two to four lines of text in small print, so there is a lot of reading to do while you try and work out what cards are most useful to you, so the only drawback is that the game can get quite slow at times. It definitely helps if players are tuned in to the game, and like the theme of goblins making crazy machines, and enjoy the mental gymnastics of combining the various cards in their contraption to deliver crushing attacks against their opponents.

Although the player limit is only four, it is because of the limit in power core cards, so you can easily proxy a different card for a power core card for more players, or even combine two games into one really big deck. We used the base game and expansion in an eight player game with a smaller hand size once. It works, but there is less overall strategy because you get through to the bottom of your deck a lot quicker and your ability to affect the game is more limited.

We have found that adding the expansion as you would expect lengthens the game somewhat, and it can outlive its welcome. Having added the 48 cards in the expansion I then removed about 50 cards, which allowed me to tailor the composition of the deck. The most important part of the expansion is the ‘sabotage’ cards, which you place in your opponent’s contraption in order to destroy parts of their contraption, so a smaller deck size increases the appearance of these sabotage cards.

The artwork is excellent; it is bright and colourful with a cartoony comic book style. The pictures all fit the name of the cards, so they generally involve goblins being doused in motor oil, zapped by lasers, squashed by machinery, crushed by rocks or falling into a wood chipper. Infernal Contraption oozes with theme, and is a suitably confrontational card game, lots of fun with plenty of decision making.