Hellton Palace

About this board game

Hellton Palace is a two-player hotel-management board game with an approximately 45-minute playing time, set in the underworld near the Styx and the Elysian Fields.

Both players manage a hotel that is destined to collapse. Your aim is not to achieve a perfect reputation or welcome the most guests: it is to lose last. Unsatisfied customers can damage your reputation, while an overly enthusiastic legendary creature or god can break the pillars supporting your building.

Each turn follows a sequence of hospitality and hotel management decisions:

• Welcome a guest into an available room in the matching row.
• Dismiss bellhops by flipping their tiles to their break side.
• Hire new bellhops by paying their cost with your money.
• Move your Bellhop pawn from room 1 toward room 9, skipping empty rooms. When it reaches an occupied room, decide whether to serve the guest.
• Collect coins from satisfied guests, or from guests without irritation tokens, or choose to regain a Bell token.

Serving a guest removes their irritation token and satisfies them, allowing you to apply the effects shown on their door hanger. If you choose not to serve, you place an Irritation token on that guest unless one is already present. When irritation is already present, it is removed with a Bell token, removing all irritation tokens while costing one Bell token.

In Hellton Palace, every decision can bring your hotel closer to disaster. The game ends when a player has no Bell tokens left or when one of their columns has no pillar tokens remaining. Manage your bellhops, balance guest demands, and try to outlast your opponent.