Raids Review

“Ooo some pigs! Let’s have a Raids here lads! Hove too!”

The ship creaked as it turned towards the coastline. Good natured banter from the crew was doing a fine job of drowning out the panicked screams of the villagers down by the beach.

“Uh-oh! Captain, that’s Bjarne Ironfists sail!”

Bugger, thought Olav Copperbottom. Ironfist was always stealing his Raids. “Maybe they’ll move past.”

But Ironfist’s longboat only got closer and sure enough, there soon came the well known splash of one his crewman being chucked in the sea – the traditional Viking challenge.

“Nothing for it. Chuck Harold and Leif in. I need those pigs.”

“Wait a -” Leif’s protest was lost as the rest of the crew bundled him over the side. A long pause. Copperbottom even started to hope Ironfist might be sufficiently intimidated and move on. But suddenly three more upset looking Vikings were dropping over the edge of their ship.

“Damnit!” Copperbottom didn’t have 4 Vikings to throw over. “Set the sails and move on. I heard there was a Runestone around the next cove.”

Players: 2-4
Time: 40 mins
Ages: 10+
Designer: Matthew Dunstan, Brett J. Gilbert
Artist: Biboun
Publisher: IELLO

Raids is Tokaido for Vikings. That is, it takes one of the hobby’s most peaceful and enlightened board games, and adds a whole boatload of aggressive bearded men to proceedings. And that’s just the ones included in the box!

Vikings On Board

Each of you will have a long boat made up of many sections able to carry all manner of things but at the start all you’ll have are shields and a few Vikings who cling to those shields like limpets. This boat of yours is about to go on a journey! 4 journeys, in fact, and it will soon be filled with far more pleasant, or at least less odious things, than your Viking horde.

Here is the great sea and all the lands that border it, filled to bursting with their main produce: cardboard tiles. You will all be following the orange route past these tiles, stopping now and then to pick one up. It all sounds so very peaceful. Indeed, like the aforementioned Tokaido, the player currently furthest back on the track goes first, travelling as far as they like along the path. However, going against all your instincts as a Euro game player, you don’t get to pick up that reward yet! Oh no. You must sit there, nervously sharpening your vikings and watching the sea, in case one of your damn friends decides to take an interest.

Bid Rage

The thing that makes Raids a viking game, aside from the pretty artwork, longboat player boards, and laser cut wooden viking meeples (by Odin’s beard they are lovely aren’t they?) is the fighting! Departing from the Tokaido model faster than you can strip off a kimono, Raids lets you not only slide into the same spot as another player, but boot them clear out of it. But not for free.

When deciding you really want the tile your friend had parked themselves beside, you sail up, and discard one of your Vikings. The assault has begun. Or the raid? I suppose it’s probably the raid. That now slightly frustrated player can accept defeat and immediately move on to another spot, or punch back, throwing two of their Vikings overboard. This puts the pressure back on the aggressor. They now need to chuck 3 more Vikings away if they want to stick around, which is extremely expensive! I’ve never seen a defender fight back with 4 Vikings after that though. At the start of your next turn (remember, that’s when you are the last player on the track) you finally get to pick up the tile you’ve been intently staring at all round.

This is the thrilling core to Raids that brings the game to screaming, plundering life. Firstly it becomes far more interactive. Secondly, having 1 or, worse, no Vikings is horrifyingly frustrating as you are easy prey for a well armed boat. At least until they’ve spent all their troops. But the clever part is you don’t just have to use this to steal a thing you really want, but to force opponents to spend more resources keeping a thing that they really want! At worst you get an extra thing, and everything is at least worth having. And if you’re constantly under attack? Move slowly and force those aggressive players to bleed Vikings for every tile they take! Victory by attrition is still victory!

When pursued properly, aggressively – that is – like a Viking, Raids becomes a fascinating puzzle of managing your viking economy. Ensuring you have enough to defend yourself, and picking when and where to spend them. The game’s one weakness then, is that this is player driven, and a group of over-cautious players who peacefully pass on spots where their opponents have staked claim will be missing out on the part of Raids that makes it great: the raiding!

Raiding in the North Sea

The viking economy ties perfectly back into the spatial movement part of the game through villages and monsters. Regularly spaced around the board are villages which give each player moving past a fresh faced Viking, but several of the tiles throughout the game are monsters which, being all monstrous, will kill a viking as you go past. Unless you fight them, in which case you need to spend as many vikings as its value to kill it and earn all the glory such a bold move entails. Other spots give you bigger rewards for being the first to move past.

All of these factor into your decision of where to go, who to attack, and why. Causing an opponent to waste Vikings just before they were going to fight a monster is funny. Deciding just to attack people to use up your vikings before you’d have to lose them to a monster anyway is also funny! The entire system is great and full of interesting decisions without getting overwhelming. And the punishment for being booted out of a spot is just moving forward which is far from the most painful outcome in board gaming.

Oh my goodness, how have I not mentioned the ship upgrades yet!? Most of the tiles you pick up need to fit somewhere on your ship. These upgrades earn you more vikings (sails) help you fight monsters (axes) or score you points (hammers and goods). But they all take up spaces, slotting into your ship in a hugely satisfying bit of component design, but worse, will reduce your shields thereby limiting how many vikings you can carry! Oh no! Goods especially never have any shields and are only worth points if you manage to take a port tile later in the game. Expect these port tiles to be heavily contested!

Raids is one of those games that just gets cleverer each time you play. The way you pick up tiles at the start of your turn instead of the moment you arrive (because you need to allow other players to kick you off) takes everyone a few turns to get used to but otherwise the game is a breeze to learn and flows quickly. But you might not realise just how cunning, and evily funny, it is until you start playing aggressively.

It even plays pretty well at 2, where a whole different interaction becomes more important: the player at the back must always move at least as far as the 2nd to last player. This means if a gap opens up between you, you can’t just hoover up every tile, they get discarded. Suddenly moving a bit further to force your opponent to discard a bunch of tiles they wanted is a brilliantly viable strategy.

It’s all these surprisingly interactive uses for the game’s core rules that really impresses me about Raids. This being an Iello game, the ludicrously high production value is also very impressive. But let’s at least maintain the veneer of respecting games for their mechanics first, hey? It looks like Euro fair, with its point scoring and set collection elements, and it is, but the wonderful fighting system lifts it into a thematically interactive and entertaining squabble that is going to add to the appeal for viking lovers the world over. Raids is well worth pillaging yourself a copy.

Rating: Raid-ical

Our copy of Raids was provided for review by Coiledspring Games.