Raiders of the North Sea

Today Kage and I played Raiders of the North Sea and it was an intense battle of Vikings. One thing that is absolutely amazing about this game is the differentiation between game plays. It’s a midweight worker placement euro game, and it does require some strategy, but that strategy is entirely dependent on the cards you find yourself with.

The game runs on points, but there are various ways to get points from raiding and taking Valkyries (careful- they kill one of your raiders) to general points for how severely you beat the crap out of the various places you’re raiding. Each card gives some sort of benefit depending on if you use it at the town hall or in your raiding party. Generally I’ve found an effective strategy is to try to use a mixture of as many good benefits from people in your party as you can get and if the person doesn’t offer a lot, use them at town hall if they give you a good return investment. This was our second play through but our first was pretty easygoing as well, and it wasn’t hard to figure out how to try to get points once you were in game.

Turns are relatively simple in that you have two actions- you place one of your meeples down, then you pick one up, doing whatever is at the place you picked. When you fight, however, you get a meeple from the place you fought, and it’s your entire turn. It’s relatively straightforward, and the game board says how many points you need to get certain amounts of points at each raiding location, as well as what it costs to raid there.

The components to this game are mostly standard meeple components with nice weighted fancy silver coins (They depict silver in the game, they are in fact stainless steel of some kind, but they look great). They’re gorgeous. The artwork for the raiders is really pretty and enjoyable to look at, and everything is legible.

Though we had vastly different strategies to win (mine involved taking a bunch of Valkyries and killing low level raiders to use a hero card that gave me defensive points for every two Valkyries I’d killed) at the end we were only one point apart. Games that end that close but have a lot of strategy are some of my favorites because they show that people don’t have to do the same things or think the same way to get ahead, and it means that there’s a fair chance for everyone. When there’s such a great back and forth of points it tends to make it more intense, which can be quite fun with the right group/people playing.

Kage’s Addendum: I have played several Viking themed games and this one is by far the best at getting the Viking theme across without involving tons of miniatures or dice chucking. The actions are mechanical, but express the theme well; you build your team of Vikings in the village, and send them out to raid the various locations on the map.

Playing two player is not much different than playing with more, though it stretches out the pacing, making some scoring mechanisms obsolete. In the two player games Amanda and I have played, we have both maxed out both the Valkyrie and armor tracks, making the scoring on them redundant, where with more players the game would likely finish before every player could do this.

It is also worthy of note that while we have ordered both of the expansions to this game, neither has arrived yet and therefore their components are not a part of this review, we may revisit this one once they arrive.

The Teal Dear

Game: Raiders of the North Sea
Designer: Shem Phillips
Price: $50
Players: 2-4
2 player Scaling: Good
Playtime: 60-90 minutes
Estimated Lifespan: 10+ games
Complexity: 3
Components: 4.5
Bang for Buck: 4.5
Value for Time: 5
Fun Factor: 5
Overall: 5