Hellton Palace: Two-player strategy board game from (hotel) hell
Deep in the underworld echo the stirrings of legendary creatures as they voyage towards… a relaxing holiday. As the premiere hôtelier in the region not far from the River Styx, the guests’ monstrous enthusiasm is your problem. Can you and your team of bellhops withstand the deific demands of your customers or will the very foundations of your sumptuous establishment crumble beneath you?
Welcome to Hellton Palace.
Created by games designer Jean-Baptiste Pigneur, this two-player game wraps its strategy-focused gameplay in a bold and clear graphic design by Lenaïg Bourgoin and visually bombastic artwork by comic book and concept artist Lorenzo Colangeli.
The simplicity and delightfulness of its presentation really does belie the hellish difficulty the game can ramp up to particularly when you win by outlasting your opponent.
Published by IELLO, a French company with over a hundred games including almost 25 in-house creations to their name, let’s open up the Hellton Palace box.
What’s in the box?
Set up your hell(ton) hotel
How to play Hellton Palace
Ending the game
Levelling up your gameplay
What’s in the box?
First, two Hotel boards await in the box, one coloured primarily in blues and the other in reds. These, along with all of the game components, show off the fun graphic style that makes the game so eye-catching (when playing it in a board game café, we had the table next to us ask for the game’s name).
Next is the staple bound rules booklet the size of a folded hotel board – its large format allows for a graphic layout that gives the text plenty of room making it easier to read. Also included are double sided Player’s Aids printed on laminated card. These feel durable which is essential for objects that need frequent handling.
The purple moulded box insert contains unique gaps for the two Bellhop pawns, 10 Bellhop tiles that are split into blues and reds and 36 Guest cards. The last two spaces in the box are for the cardboard tokens (once you’ve popped them from the punchboards) including 24 Pillars, 24 Coins, six Bells and 18 Irritation tokens.
Set up your hell(ton) hotel
Pick your Hotel board and the correspondingly coloured Bellhop pawns, tiles and Pillar tokens. The other tokens – Irritation and Coins – get placed between you and your opponent. Your Bellhop tokens will sit next to your board “break” side up.
At the bottom of your Hotel board, you’ll see a Lobby with three empty spaces on the counter; fill these spaces with three Bell tokens and put your Bellhop pawn next to them. Under the Lobby, arrange your Pillar tokens in three rows of four.
Finally, shuffle all 36 Guest cards and use 18 of them to create a three by six grid next to the Hotels, illustration side up. The rules suggest playing your first game with the 18 cards that are marked with an asterisk. We’d suggest following this advice until you master the “easier” Guest deck.
You’re now ready to manage your own hell hotel.
How to play Hellton Palace
Players take turns one by one until the end of the game. Each player has five steps to work through on their turn.
Step 1: Welcome New Guests
From the grid of 18 Guest cards, pick one to put on a Hotel’s door thus welcoming that terrifying guest into your establishment. The Guest’s position in the grid determines what Hotel floor they can be placed onto. For example, the top row of Guest cards can only be welcomed to your Hotel’s third floor (Rooms Seven to Nine). You choose which side up you want to place the double-sided Guest cards.
Step 2: Dismiss Bellhops
Flip your Bellhop tiles to the “break” side. On your very first turn, they should already start on their “break”. The Bellhop characters include the Handyman, Fake Clerk, Concierge, Fake Concierge and Supervisor. Page 11 of the rules booklet explains what each Bellhop does so keep that page open as you play.
Step 3: Hire Bellhops
Again, not applicable on your very first turn but later you’ll be able to hire as many Bellhops as you want. To hire a Bellhop, pay Coin tokens based on the number of coin icons featured under their illustration and flip them to the “on duty” side. Each Bellhop’s ability can only be used once per turn.
Step 4: Service Rooms
Time to offer your guests some hospitality. Starting from Room One and going sequentially to Room Nine, move your Bellhop pawn to check each room. Ignoring the empty rooms, pause when your Bellhop encounters a staying guest.
If you choose to serve the guest, do the actions demanded by the icons on their door hanger (bottom right of the card) in order, top icon first. Here, the Player’s Aid becomes indispensable as you’ll need it to understand the consequences of serving each guest. With the 18 asterisk cards, the consequences will be to either add Irritation tokens to other guests or to remove Pillar tokens. By serving a guest, you remove the Irritation token on them if they had one.
If you don’t serve the guest, they understandably become unhappy so you add an Irritation token to them. But what if they’re irritated already? Then, they throw a big tantrum. This tantrum removes a Bell token from the Lobby but calms the guest down afterwards thus removing the Irritation token on that guest (at no point can there be two Irritation tokens on a Guest card).
You continue making your choices room by room until finishing Room Nine at which point the Bellhop pawn returns to the Lobby.
Step 5: Collect Rent or Gain a Bell
You can either collect rent or gain one Bell token before ending your turn.
Rent can only be collected from Guest cards without Irritation tokens. On the Guest cards, you’ll see coin icons to show how much rent you can get from that guest. These Coins can then be used to pay for Bellhops on your next turn; Bellhop’s abilities can save your Hotel for a turn or can make your opponent’s establishment collapse quicker.
Ending the game
The player who can outlast their opponent is the winner. As more guests enter your hotel, the difficulty in stopping them from trashing the place increases. A player can lose if they have no more Bell tokens in the Lobby OR if the fourth Pillar token is removed from its group, destabilising the hotel’s foundations.
The first player to meet one of these unfortunate circumstances leaves their Bellhop pawn in front of the room that triggered the end-game.
The second player takes their turn next and wins the game if their hotel doesn’t collapse. However, should they also face collapse, they likewise leave their Bellhop pawn where they met the end-game conditions. The player with the Bellhop pawn in the highest number room wins. What if it’s a tie? Then, you both share the defeat.
Sense-check: The game starts off easy when you only have one guest to serve. That doesn’t mean you’re playing it wrong and should suddenly fill the hotel with other Guest cards (like we wrongly did on our first time playing). Each round, you take the time to choose the best possible Guest card and place it in the best possible room as each consequence to serving the guests creates unique interactions with other Guest cards.
Levelling up your gameplay
So, you’ve played through the 18 Guest cards with the asterisks and you’re an excellent hôtelier, now what? You can move on to the 18 Guests cards without the asterisks or mix up these decks. The “un-asterisked” Guests have their service effects listed at the end of the rules booklet rather than on the Player’s Aid.
These effects are more complex and dependent on what’s happening with your opponent’s Hotel board. Hands to the Hadestown wall but we’ve not yet played with the “un-asterisked” Guests. It already felt challenging to keep track of the complex interweaving of Guests’ effects on each other within our own Hotels never mind paying attention to the opponent’s nonsense too. But for those ready for a fun and visually stunning game of 4D hospitality chess, playing with the harder Guest deck will be a deliciously devious challenge.
