Raiders of the North Sea: Game Review

Nominated for the 2017 Kennerspiel des Jahres(game of the year), Raiders of the North Sea is a new board game from Garphill Games. Designed by Shem Phillips and Illustrated by Mihajlo Dimitrievski.

Here's a summary first so you can gauge interest.

You will like this game if you appreciate the following:

1. Fun, clever, and nice looking illustration
2. Clever mechanics that make for fast, fun, and easy gameplay
3. Worker placement and resource management
4. Comparable games: Pillars of the Earth, Energy Empire, or Steam Park

This game might not be for you if you're looking specifically for:

1. Battles: games like Kemet, Scythe, or Seafall
2. Higher level strategy worker placement: games like Concordia, Food Chain Magnate, Scythe
3. Cooperative games: games like Pandemic, Zombicide, or Eldritch Horror

Very funny Rocket, now out of the box.

On to the game. First of all; here is the description of the object of the game from the developers at Graphill:

"Raiders of the North Sea is set in the central years of the Viking Age. As Viking warriors, players seek to impress the Chieftain by raiding unsuspecting settlements. Players will need to assemble a crew, collect provisions and journey north to plunder gold, iron and livestock. There is glory to be found in battle, even at the hands of the Valkyrie. So gather your warriors, it’s raiding season! "

The players each control a few vikings from the same village that are competing for victory points. The most points at the end wins. To get these points you need to raid and plunder the sites across the water from the viking village, like outposts and fortresses. Your vikings are the cards in your hand, which you continuously play, discard, and draw throughout the game. For each player's turn, there are two options, work or raid. You work to get supplies and prepare to raid. Most turns you work, and when you feel you're ready to raid a site you raid. Each raiding site requires slightly different preparation, and each raiding site has different assortments of plunder- gold, iron, livestock, or valkyrie. You get victory points for raiding. The stronger your vikings cards, the tougher the raiding site, and the luckier your dice, the greater number of victory points you get for raiding.

Ok, let's get into the components.

The components are quality. The fold out board is standard quality, good artwork. There are thick tiles, nice big cards, wooden pieces, two dice, and metal coins(I'm a sucker for metal coins). The rulebook is nice and easy to follow.

These are some of the viking cards, each with two abilities. One can be used for raiding sites for plunder and victory points, the other can be used for activities in the viking village. Having two options per card is nice for flexible strategizing and fairness of card ability distribution.The artwork is clever and fun.

There are 71 cards, a few copies of each character. I didn't count the number of characters but there's probably 20 or so.

During the work turn, you place a worker in the location of the action you want to perform: draw cards, get silver, provisions, or gold, increase armor, or put viking cards into your raiding crew, etc. THEN, you take a worker off the board that someone else placed before and do the action at the location too! I like this mechanic because you can usually do the actions you want to do regardless of if someone else did it before you. You always have just one worker in front of you. So that makes it simple and less cutthroat. They're very fair for vikings.

The Armor Track is something you boost up that increases your strength when raiding so are more likely to score higher at tougher raid sites.

Each raiding site lists the provisions you need to raid and the strength number you need to be successful. Usually sites have two different numbers, you get less victory points for the lower and more for the higher. You add up the strength of the vikings you played to make your crew(during work turns), you add your armor points and valkyrie points, then you roll two dice and add those numbers as well. If you're successful you get the victory points and move your token up the victory track around the edge of the board. What is the Valkyrie track you may ask? Your token progresses up the Valkyrie Track when one of your crew dies in the glory of battle!

So, as I wrote earlier, it's a simple, fun, and engaging game. I like the artwork, theme, and craftmanship. It has some interesting mechanics as well. I played a three player game with two friends who had played before. It took us two hours, but if I had played before it might have shaved off 15-30min. Even though I'm more of a fan of cooperative games I enjoyed the game and didn't get bored throughout(even though I lost).

If you've got noobs, kids, or players that like light games I recommend Raiders of the North Sea.

One more feature I'd like to mention is that the box itself is suprisingly small. When the board is set up it doesn't look like a small game. Being able to pack into a small box makes it a nice game to take to a friend's place to play.

Ok, I hope you enjoyed the review. If so, please upvote, comment, or follow!

*we also played a four hour game of Zombicide; a game I'd also like to review, but that session was so brutal I just want to forget it.