Vikings Gone Wild Review

 

Oh, ho! Those Vikings! Always up to their old tricks. A bit of raiding here, a bit of pillaging there, brewing BEER and building giant, pig firing, mechanised attack walkers… actually, I think I missed that bit in the TV series.

A game with the name Vikings Gone Wild should be described with more exciting words than “deck building” and “tableau building”. They’re accurate for sure, but engender as much excitement as a game entitled Accountants Gone Wild. So let’s skip the polite introductions and like a Viking should jump straight to the sharp pointy bit: raiding and ridiculously powerful cards!

This is a game about smashing up your opponents’ buildings for “Victory Points”, the Norse word for “Glory”. Throwing down handfuls of attackers and gathering exponentially more points the more buildings you damage is a fine Viking thing to do! And so too is revealing that oh, actually that Tavern has a Sheep Cannon out back and now you can’t tell which part of the red smear was your Bone Crusher and which was unfortunate farmyard animal. Raining down woolly (or just conventional) death upon would be assailants will also garner the hated defender noble victory points. Yes, your warrior may be dead but fear not, for he is quaffing the finest mead in all of Valhalla and also wearing a delightful new woollen hat.

Victory Points are a wonderful thing to collect, in fact they’re so wonderful that the very Gods themselves will see fit to reward you their divine favours each time you cross the relevant spots on the Victory Point track. All of these Divine Favours are just wonderfully powerful cards like Thor. Fricking Thor him fricking self is just going to drop down into your lap. For free! What is this insane generosity!? In a euro game too!

But fighting isn’t the only way of earning the respect and awe of your peers, no! You shall also earn Victory Points by another traditional Viking activity: completing mission cards. These might be for building certain stuff in your village or a bonus for attacking or just spending one of your two resources, Gold and Beer, in some quantity. All can be snuck into some part of a master plan, always keeping you on your toes as you bounce delicately from objective to objective (the Vikings famously invented ballet, dontcha know).

Eventually of course someone will push through to a target number of Victory Points signalling the final round. Finish off your raiding and set sail for home, it’s time to hand out the awards for best builder or most defender or most pig-firing-nightmare-weapons or whichever global objectives are out that game. At last we’ll know which Viking went the most wild!

And it’s fantastic fun! The shear variety of ways to earn Victory Points gives you an huge array of options for how you play, the objective cards providing a guiding hand to gently prod you in one direction or another. The buildings, which I haven’t even got into yet, give you an engine to power your longships to victory. You can chase a grand assault earning tons of points, or cheapskate to victory over many turns, quietly completing objectives, snatching points from the odd defence each round. All are respected in the eyes of the God’s.

The interactivity that comes from the assault mechanics is great too. You lose nothing (bar maybe a beer or gold token from your stores) as the victim of an assault, allowing you to ignore defence entirely if you wish, and so paying attention to what players buy becomes a huge element of the game, and the opportunities for bluffing become evident. You never know what cards they have left over in their hand… is it only some beer, or is it an entire sorceress’ tower they are gently waving in my direction!? That player has tons of cannons you say… maybe I’ll attack someone else. Except maybe you’ll have no choice because each player can only be attacked a single time each round, letting you block off easy targets from aggressive players with a single Viking attack. Paying attention to these opportunities is a key part of the game.

Even though you want to pay attention to what players are buying, downtime does become a bit of an issue. Any draw abilities mean players have to totally recalculate their turns and the plethora of options means these calculations can take a while. Multiply this up by 4 players and you can see where I’m coming from. The great player interaction is also lost to an extent at 2 players when you no longer have any choice over who to attack. But these are minor quibbles.

The fact is I had a great time playing this game! All the cards are clear and simple to understand, yet still offer up opportunities for engine building within the buildings, high scoring turns for whatever strategy you pursue, and a challenge that changes slightly every game with the global objective cards. All the elements of Vikings Gone Wild intertwine so smoothly and so effectively that you can play differently every time and still come out on top. A really great game!

 

Rating: Go Wild!

 

Our review copy of Vikings Gone Wild was sent to us by the publisher Lucky Duck Games. All pictures are of the prototype version of the game (amazingly!). Vikings Gone Wild is on Kickstarter until 9th June 2016.