I got this delivered in October, and have played it a few times now. I quite love it! I will agree, it's closest to Stone Age, and the randomness of setup helps with replayability, but it's a fairly solid worker placement game. I'm hoping to try Champions of Midgard to compare, but from what you guys say, the feel is different - which is quite a good thing!
Excellent game! I've enjoyed playing it quite a bit! Good review/discussion guys. Shem will be happy. If you try the first of the North Sea games please make sure to use the mini expansion that came with the Raiders Kickstarter. The company usually listens carefully to player feedback.
This is one of my favorite games from last year. Works well with all number of players. Like Tom and Sam said, there are lots of options and paths to victory.
this game is part of a trilogy with the expansion called Runesaga, but that expansion requires all 3 main games. Raiders of the north sea is the second game. so First game is Shipwright of the north sea, second Raiders of the North Sea, and third game is Explorers of the Norths sea.
Great discussion but after having played Raiders (finally), I'd disagree that there shouldn't be a set-up phase as the actions in your first few rounds depends a lot on the cards you have. For example, if you have a gatekeeper (or two, as I had), you can focus on building your hand and using their discard abilities. If you have a jeweler/forager, etc. you can focus on acquiring supplies or money. Totally agree that a purely negative take that isn't a good design. Also that if there are take-that mechanics they should be either really prevalent or non-existent. Having just 2-3 come up during the session made them feel crueler somehow.
+TheManAmongAll I believe that's actually the board game vacuum Tom's using there. Coolest thing is that it will sort components by size, though it can't tell different cards of the same size apart, so it's not much use for putting away Legendary...
Still feels like a bit of a race with no exploration. You can win a couple of different ways, but in the end it's a race to get to the fortresses and have a decent last move. Love to see an option where you don't know any or just some of the plunder on a location. You might get 4 gold or 4 deaths. I guess you could deal out randomly from the bag when a location is attacked.
Simple and smooth game. It looks like there are more options for raiding than working! Just wish the iron and the grey worker were made in different material to tell from.
3:31 Tom mentions that you can only have one hero hired in your boat. That makes sense, I can’t find it in the official rulebook though. Can anyone clarify?
It's not in the rulebook, it's on the very few hero cards themselves they say "hero" under their name. It says on them specifically "you cannot hire more than 1 hero"
@ sam and tom, interesting thing the publisher/designer is doing with this and the other 3 viking games in this series, they're combining the 3 together to make 1 game with this boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/190798/north-sea-runesaga
Funny, you guys were so low key and mostly negative through the talking section, I was surprised when you both said you liked it quite a bit at the end. I get it though, the game isn't particularly revolutionary. Just a different feel and theme for a mid-weight worker placement with a twist, have been a lot of those recently. Looking forward to playing it though, wondering where it's going to fall in my spectrum.
Let's set the records straight for once about Vikings and horned helmets: There were several types of Vikings in the world. The most familiar ones are the Scandinavian (Denmark, Sweden and Norway) Vikings, and those fellows indeed did not have horns on their helmets. On the other hand, there were the lesser known Germanic Vikings (well, actually, all Vikings are Germanic, techinically, but I'm referring to the ones not from Scandinavia). These are more commonly known as Goths but are every bit as much Vikings as the more familiar ones and - to get to the point - some of them did wear horned helmets. So in essence, saying that Scandinavian Vikings did not wear horned helmets is correct, but saying that ALL Vikings did not is wrong.
Uhm what. The Goths weren't vikings. The Goths were Goths. And to be frank, they roamed in a different time area. Viking is a term used by historians for the Norse people in the time frame 793-1066. It is used for the Danes, Swedes, Norwegians and those from their different colonies and settlements all over. Viking is used in general even though most Norse people werent vikings, but farmers and such. It is a term. And no, the Goths were not vikings. And even the Goths didnt use horned helmets in battle. Horned helmets are impractical and the only horned helmets found in the North were from the bronze age and most likely used for ceremonial use.
I completely agree with Tom that arbitrary cardplay is a very bad take that mechanism. I like viciousness against other players when it's organic in the gameplay - when it forwards your own goals, and you can see the possibility coming. Just whacking someone with cards is lazy game design, in my opinion.
After playing it once, I must say it's overrated on BGG. It has low interaction, card variety is not that good, there is no tension as all the spots are available at all times. I prefer Stone Age with its random resource production (that you can mitigate with tools) just because it provides a thighter experience. The fact that you can block worker action spots to other players makes the first player first move very important, especially at 2 players. Another game I regret buying on a hype. I will be selling this and watching more reviews/playthroughs from now on.
The theme in this game is non-existent. I have found the game to be rather tiresome and the whole place/pick up a worker adds very little to the game that makes it not worth getting if you have a similar game. The grey and black workers are a huge design issue. Mistakes happen a lot with black and grey. The take that cards makes zero sense, the ones that kills another players unit is stupid. I also found the lack of variation of types of units in the draw deck an issue. The interaction in this game is accidental, there isn't a real sense of competing at all.
There is one big problem with non-modular boards: They will always get samey after some time (except for 'Chess' and 'Go'). Think about 'Power Gruid', "'Ticket to Ride', Smallworld', ''Concordia'... They all suffer from the same problem. In this game the colors of Vikings are the same and conditions to win the battle over random goods are the same, which is boooooring in 2018. Please.
Totally agree with you, modular boards are fantastic for keeping games fresh and fun. Failing a modular board I really appreciate it when companies print variant boards on the opposite side of the board, like Clank! Though Renegade got smarter with Clank! in Space and just produced a two-sided modular board, haha.
