Solium Infernum

Most strategy games treat diplomacy as a convenience or after thought. You build an army, attack, and if diplomacy exists at all, it's a side feature you can safely ignore. Solium Infernum flips that completely. Diplomacy is the battlefield, and your army is just an instrument you're only allowed to use once you've fabricated the right excuse. Satan's gone, the throne of Hell is empty, and you're one of several Archfiends trying to get elected by the Infernal Conclave. Whoever has the most Prestige at the end wins. What makes this work so well is that Prestige is simultaneously your victory condition and your currency for doing anything meaningful. Spending it to attack someone weakens your position in the race. Hoarding it paints a target on your back. The game produces this constant tension organically, with no artificial catch-up mechanics needed. You can't just declare war whenever you feel like it. You need to manufacture a diplomatic incident first. You insult someone in front of the Conclave, you demand tribute, you send emissaries. If the other player refuses your demand, you get to declare a vendetta, a limited war with a specific objective, a time limit and a Prestige wager. If they keep ceding to your demands, you can declare them weak and attack anyway. Every diplomatic tool has a counter, and every counter has a cost. It's an intricate dance where you're always weighing risk against reward, and the information you don't have matters as much as the information you do. Because that's the other thing Solium gets right: imperfect information. You don't know what relics your opponents chose. You don't know their secret schemes. You don't know how much tribute they've stockpiled. You see the Prestige scoreboard and the legions on the map, and you have to infer the rest. This turns every interaction into a poker game. When someone insults you, you need to figure out whether they actually want the vendetta or they're bluffing because they expect you to fold. The Bazaar is another clever system. Items show up and all players bid secretly. You don't know who's competing for the same artifact. Sometimes you overpay for something mediocre because you suspect your rival needs it more than you do. Sometimes you lowball and get lucky. It's one more layer where hidden information creates genuine tension. Each Archfiend plays in a fundamentally different way. This isn't a "+5% production" bonus situation. Belial lies and manipulates, Astaroth dominates militarily, Andromalius plays the vassal game and can steal the throne from under someone else's nose. The same rules produce qualitatively different matches depending on who's at the table. What surprised me most is the narrative arc each game produces. Because matches are short, dense and full of reversals, every game tells a story. You were losing, you provoked a vendetta against the leader, you stole his Place of Power on the last turn, you won by two Prestige. That kind of thing happens naturally, without any scripting. The game just creates the conditions for it and gets out of the way. The art deserves special mention. The map is draped in grays and blacks with splashes of red and gold, and the card art for legions, praetors and artifacts is genuinely striking. It commits to its hellish aesthetic fully and it pays off. If you're tired of strategy games where the strongest army wins by default and diplomacy is an afterthought, this is the antidote. Solium Infernum treats strategy as a game of intellect and observation, where your ability to read people matters more than your ability to stack units. It's not for everyone, and the learning curve is real. But once it clicks, nothing else quite scratches this itch.

I want to like this, but I just can't. The pacing is glacial. Tokens (currency) have to be manually selected from a pool, and there's usually no contest on which ones you want. So it just ends up being an annoying 8~10 second distraction to the start of every turn where you just pick the tokens with the biggest values. Having to manually pay upkeep for rituals and titans (mega units) also adds to the "dead time", when all I'm going to do is select "autopay" anyways. Which really adds up if you have three rituals and two titans that you need to pay each. And. Every. Turn. Also, the RNG heavy events sometimes say "♥♥♥♥ you specifically", and there's nothing you can do about it but watch as your best unit, with all your stuff equipped to it, immediately drops dead with nothing you can do to stop it. All because it picked the short straw on the random event.

Not fun. I don't play many board games, but I sure wouldn't play this more often than once. You take 10 turns trying to build a nice legion and--bam!--the heavenly crusade wipes it out, randomly. That's all this game is: random crap happening. And it all takes so long. You have 2 order slots, 3 on higher ranks, and everything takes an order to do: moving a legion, buying an item, equipping the item, even getting resources to be able to buy anything in the first place! I'm sure the developers put a lot of effort into this, but it's just not for me.

The only 4X game in my eyes that gets diplomacy and turn order right. The skill floor is kinda high, the skill ceiling even higher but damn it's fun.

Possibly the best multiplayer strategy game I have ever played and wonderful devs. Please buy and support the game!

I dont know what game these reviewers are playing but this is not it. You spend more than half your time doing nothing except wating for your legion to respawn and gather enough tribute to do anything.

This game is excellent, especially for asynchronous multiplayer.

Generally a great game... But it has a crippling bug I've run into multiple times that ruins a game irrecoverably: There's a "can't submit turn" bug that the devs have failed to fix even after many reports. If it occurs (and it has happened to me multiple times), your game is just toast -- there is nothing you can do but abandon it. This can happen in single or multi player games. It tells me that the devs probably have some terrible race-condition plagued mess around their end-turn logic, and either can't sort it out or can't be bothered to. It pains me, but this otherwise great game is essentially unplayable because you can't know, when starting a game, if you'll end up having to abandon it. I'm uninstalling and I will not be buying anything from this developer ever again.

Играем с друзьями время от времени. Живи, игра, не умирай пожалуйста Т_Т

Get a good group of friends that like board games and general sneakery and you're in for a hell of a time!