It's the final day of Steam Board Game fest, and I've been testing the many game demos that I scooped into my cart in search of genuine hits. Canvas Infernum is one of them, a chill tile-laying puzzle game that reminds me of the classic board game Carcassonne, only with artwork by Hieronymous Bosch. The gameplay is solid, if lacking in polish, and it has left me yearning for someone to start making Carcassonne expansions set in hell.
Canvas Infernum starts from a simple premise - you've got a stack of sixteen tiles, and you've got to turn them into a realm of eternal torment for the damned. Just like Carcassonne, those tiles have a patchwork of different terrain features on them, only instead of cities, fields, and roads, you're building mountains, lakes of lava, and fields of the damned. You'll gradually build up your own map of the underworld by placing new tiles so the different terrains on each of their edges match with their neighbors, like infernal dominoes.
Expanding your fields, lava lakes, and mountain ranges scores you points, and closing off an area is worth an even bigger bounty. If you ever run out of tiles your time is up, but there are several ways to get more. If you can connect your realm to one of the weird looking archdemons scattered around it, they'll grant you four tiles, or a "wild" tile, which transforms so it fits perfectly into any gap.
As you expanding your underworld you'll have a choice of "pacts" to sign, permanent abilities which reward you for building hell in a certain way. Very early on I signed a pact that gave me three extra tiles whenever I sealed off a field of the damned, which proved to be a very a reliable way to stay stocked up with tiles; later on, a pact that rewarded me with a wild tile whenever I placed a tile next to at least three neighbors made things almost too easy.
The art style does a lot of work. This is certainly a weird vision of hell, but it isn't upsetting. The damned souls, and their daemonic tormentors, are taken from the 1500s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by the Dutch master Hieronymous Bosch. It is incredibly chaotic, but - to modern sensibilities - whimsical rather than horrifying.
If you're intrigued by the art, Wikipedia has a colossal 871 megapixel reproduction of the painting. Yes, that is an insanely large file, and opening it has a good chance of crashing a laptop. But if you've got a lot of RAM and a strong internet connection, it is absolutely worth downloading it to see the simply absurd level of detail Bosch crammed into every inch of the artwork.
I spent a couple of hours with Canvas Infernum's demo - which is free on Steam - and I think it has potential. As it stands, the risk of running out of tiles isn't great, and I was never worried about failing - which in turn didn't give much motivation to try and chase a high score. Ramp up the difficulty, port it to handheld, maybe add in a daily challenge mode where you have one tile and a few set pacts, and this could make for a good score chasing puzzle game, like Triple Town or 2048. Whether that happens or not, it's gorgeous, and I think board game designers should look at it for inspiration.
Are you a fan of Hieronymous Bosch? Is there another board game you think would really benefit from being set in hell? Or did you discover something great in Steam Board Game Fest? I'd love to hear from you in the Wargamer Discord community. To keep up to date with all the best stories from Wargamer, make sure you're subscribed to the Wargamer weekly newsletter.