InisReview

Before the monasteries wrote Ireland down, the past lived in people's throats. The filid - poet-scholars who moved between clans carried it there, sitting just below kings at every fire worth sitting at. What they remembered, lived. The rest didn't. History and myth shared the same breath, and few saw any reason to separate them.

They spoke of invasions. Peoples washing over the island one after another, conquering, settling, and fading into the same soil that had taken those before them. Whether the Tuatha Dé Danann were gods, human or something the language didn't have a word for yet, the chroniclers couldn't agree. The island had been fought over since before it had a name, and power had passed through so many hands that the land itself seemed indifferent to who was standing on it.

A chieftain's authority lived and died in the eyes of the people renewing it - season by season, feast by feast, poem by poem. Clans intermingled the way rivers do before the sea, losing their edges and carrying traces of everything they had moved through. Allegiances shifted constantly, rarely announced and often recognised only after they had already changed.

This is the world Inis - the Irish word for "island" - sets its pieces into. A game for 2 to 4 players, it combines area control, card drafting, negotiation and tactical conflict as players compete to become the next High King of Ireland by achieving one of several victory conditions.

Sitting somewhere between a medieval manuscript, stained glass and a psychedelic folk album cover, the art wears its theme well. The illustrations are by Jim Fitzpatrick, best known for creating the black-and-red Che Guevara graphic - yes, that one. They're great, though some are more striking than others, and the colour palette can sometimes be a bit muddled. The box art is a good example of this, with its blues, greens and reds competing for attention. The tile art is also decent, if a little muted. The problem, perhaps, is that in an age where how photogenic a game looks on Instagram can shift more units than how good it actually plays, the bar for board game art is just so damn high.

During your first game of Inis, your instincts will betray you.

The brain trained on Risk, conquest and on the satisfying logic of holding the line and owning territory, will send you to war. You'll plant your clans, draw your borders in your mind, and begin the business of annihilation - Because that's what winning looks like; you crush, you take and you hold.

But then you look up and realise your opponent has been somewhere else entirely. Moving lightly. Sharing territories rather than seizing them. Leaving traces of themselves behind - no great armies or fortified positions, just presence, accumulating quietly in all the places you weren't looking. They didn't take your land, they never even wanted it. Instead, they've been collecting something you forgot to count.

Whether you asked for the lesson or not, Inis teaches you that the world it inhabits ran on different mathematics. That exhausting everything you have to own one piece of ground completely is just a very expensive way to lose.

And battles reflect that restraint. They feel less like war and more like a squabble between neighbours who still have to see each other at the market. Moving your clans into occupied territory triggers combat, and it goes something like this:

— Alright mate. Sorry about this - I'm going to have to kill you.

— No worries mate, I'll lose a card. You?

— Yeah, go on, I'll lose a card too. Sorry about that. Actually, just the one death is all I'm really after if I'm honest.

— Oh right, fair enough. I'll die then shall I?

— If you don't mind mate, yeah, then I'll be on my way

— *dies*

— Cheers mate, lovely part of the valley this, isn't it. The views are tremendous.

— Aren't they just. Take care then - ta-ta!

Nobody's trying to annihilate anyone, and sometimes one death is all you came for. Clans die only when their owner decides a life is worth less than a card, and both sides can keep feeding action cards into the fight until one of them has had enough and retreats with their dignity mostly intact.

There are three ways to become High King of Ireland. Either spread yourself across six territories, be present where six sanctuaries stand, or be chief of a territory where an opponent has gathered six or more clans of their own - crowned, in other words, by someone else's ambition. You can also earn deeds, each of which counts towards any of these victories.

Each round, the action cards are drafted before anyone has moved. You pass cards to your neighbour, they pass cards to you, and by the time the drafting is over the deck has been thoroughly mixed between everyone at the table. What you give, you'll probably face before the round is over. Nothing belongs to anyone for long, and the game's most consequential decisions happen before a single clan has set foot anywhere.

The drafting is the heart of it. Everything else is seasoning around that core. There are advantages that flow to whoever holds chieftaincy of a territory, then there's Epic Tale cards whose effects vary wildly enough that you're just as likely to draw something irrelevant as something powerful. For that reason, I never sought out Epic Tales, which is a shame because they add flavour. If they were grouped by intent - territorial expansion, clan movement, combat and so on - and you could draw towards a plan rather than hoping the card happened to fit one. Then I suspect I'd chase them more often.

The game almost feels like a different game depending on the player count.

At two, Inis ditches its politics for something sharper. You can know your opponent's hand almost as well as your own because if you don't have it, they do. At least you think they do - one card is discarded blind at the start of each round, and that single unknown carries the weight of uncertainty for everything that follows. Everything else is exposed. It's a knife fight in a phone booth, and you handed them the knives.

This tightness creates a constant stress. Every move carries the awareness of what it opens up for your opponent. Every decision feels like a concession somewhere else, and none of the options are comfortable. The pressure never lifts and it's exhausting. Part of what makes Inis so good at two is also what keeps it perpetually on the verge of not being enjoyable.

And yet the game never lets you go. However lost a position seems, there's always a thread to pull. Comebacks emerge from situations that looked hopeless moments ago, often surprising both players. But I've never seen a two player game where a player just stumbles into victory. The smarter player prevails, usually by a thread, and losing carries the particular sting of knowing it was your fault.

This is why a quarter of voters on BoardGameGeek don't recommend Inis at two. For me though, it's the only way I like to play. At higher counts, the edges soften. The skills shift towards a kind of Celtic populism where you need to persuade the tribe that the enemy is over there while you consolidate everything over here. You no longer know exactly what everyone holds, making outcomes feel a little less earned and a little more contingent. The leader becomes the table's problem, and a win can feel like a verdict that nobody appealed in time rather than a victory.

But what makes Inis exceptional at any count is that its depth far exceeds the simplicity of its rules. A single round opens up multiple, radically different paths forward, and yet you can hold the entire game in your head at once. Many deep games are paralysing because they bury you in so many possibilities. Inis gives you plenty, but never more than you can can handle.

Still, it exhausts me - not through complexity, but through consequence. Every decision carries weight, and the weight never lifts. You could play with more players to take the edge off and win by consensus while everyone was looking the other way. But that version of the game loses something the filid would have recognised: that what's handed to you means nothing. Personally, I'd rather lose a crown by a single mistake than win one by acclamation.