This has long been one of my favorite games. I had given my only copy away to a friend as a wedding gift and was finally recently able to replace it (thank you Privateer Press for re-releasing this gem!).
Infernal Contraption is a 2-4 player game in which “Bodgers”, gremlin-like little critters, create a “Contraption” to destroy another Bodger’s Contraption. The players have an equally distributed pile of cards that they use to create their machine; the goal of the game is to keep your pile while whittling away at the other players’ piles. The moment a player’s pile is depleted, they are removed from the game.
The cards are divided into five different (colored) categories: power supply, contraption, upgrade, consumable, and sabotage. The power supply cards provide power to the contraption cards (which must always be powered to operate). The contraption cards are basically what your machine “does” to the other players’ machine or to your machine and/or pile. The upgrades affect your contraption cards (i.e. doublers or protection). Consumables are one shot cards which are usually quite powerful negative affects for other players or positive to you. The sabotage is played onto another player’s machine and adversely affects their machine.
Game play starts with a player building/adding onto their machine from their hand (drawn from their “parts pile”). Once they finish modifying their machine (or choosing not to), the player “activates” the machine targeting another player’s machine. They run their machine from left to right and top to bottom, each “contraption” does its effect until the end of the machine is reached (or a player’s pile is depleted…it is possible to nix yourself) after which the player draws back up to 7 cards into their hand if necessary and then play moves on to the next player.
That’s the game in a nutshell without giving card details away. The game can be played anywhere from about 30 minutes and up into the 2 or even 3 hour range depending on how many players you have and how experienced the players are with their cards/strategy.